Gillingham’s new strategy has seen the club drop the promotion talk.

The Gills have a two-year plan which they hope will bring rewards and keeping their new boss Gareth Ainsworth in place for the entirety is key to the new project.

Gillingham’s American chairman Brad Galinson hasn’t hidden his desire for promotion from the bottom tier of the EFL and frustration that they’re still there. Three managers have paid the price for being unable to deliver on the club’s high expectations since the takeover.

There’s a new approach now in place, however, and managing director Joe Comper has explained why they’re now focusing on how to achieve their aim rather than talking up their targets.

He said: “In January, we almost hit pause. We've been round and round in circles, hiring multiple managers, as we know.

“We decided to outline a vision for the club, what we want our team to look like, and identify all the people that are going to suit that vision when the time comes.

“We spent a bit of time, myself, Andy Hessenthaler (head of recruitment), Ronnie Jepson (recruitment), working with (owners) Brad and Shannon and some of the first team staff as we set about what our vision is, what we want the team to look like, what's the identity?

“I was on the phone to Brad and he said, ‘Are Gareth and Dobbo available?’ ‘No, they're at Shrewsbury now, it's complicated’, but he said, ‘How does that work? Can we talk to them?’ I said, ‘Well we need to get permission’.

“It's wasn’t an easy appointment, there were far easier options for us, but we think it's the appointment that fits our vision, both character-wise and style of play-wise, and that helps us to believe that as we go on this journey for our two-year plan, we will be able to build something.

“It won't be smooth. If you look at the journey these guys went on at Wycombe, it wasn't a straight line from League Two to Championship, ultimately it went from there to there. These guys are steady, consistent, determined, it's not an easy thing to be in the same place for that length of time (spending over a decade at Wycombe) and continue to move it forward. That's what we want to achieve here, we're really pleased to have these guys because we think they're going to do it for us.

“There's places we want to be, that's obvious, but there's no set ‘this must happen within two years’. We've obsessed over that end result too much and actually we've gone backwards on the pitch.

“We've got to grow this thing and I think I think people will see it, they'll feel it. I think you can feel whether something is being successful.

“These guys haven't been told you've got to do that in year one and you've got to do that in year two, that's not what it is about.

“We want to build and if we do that and we do it right we'll end up getting where we need to be.”

Comper insists there is still the pressure to succeed, not just on the manager.

He said: “Myself and Andy Hessenthaler talk regularly. We've learned our lessons.

“We've restructured how we do recruitment and we now need to start moving this club forward.

“We know that the pressure still remains. I just think we need to be honest and realistic with the supporters.

“I think they're sick of hearing us talk a big game and not deliver. We know that.

“(Let’s) stop the talk that we're going to do all of these great things when we can't actually guarantee it. That's one of the learnings that we've taken.

“There's been so much talk about promotion and we've spent probably a couple of years obsessing over the end result without actually obsessing over the process to get there.

“We're not talking about an end result, we're not talking about what that's going to look like, we're talking about what are we going to do in two years and if we hit these milestones, hit these goals, achieve these things,

“We're not obsessing over the end result, we're going to obsess over the process that we go to get there.”