DALE Vince is not the most conventional of football chairmen. Not for him the flashy suits of the archetypical club board boss.

But the t-shirt, jeans and rucksack on the outside belie a business brain as sharp as a razor that has built him a green business empire and now taken Forest Green Rovers from a football club in trouble among non-league also-rans into a professional Football League club that Vince wants to go places.

Six weeks ago, 18,801 fans were at Wembley to watch Forest Green beat Tranmere Rovers 3-1 and, with it, gain promotion to League Two.

And, in another five weeks, they will step out into that professional world for the first time when Barnet are the visitors to the New Lawn.

That is bound to be Vince’s proudest sporting day but, in his typically green way, the chairman insists the club, under manager Mark Cooper and with a core of the squad who brought them up from the National League, will stick to their ethics on the pitch and are ‘ready’ for the step upwards.

Since the National League play-off final victory, The New Lawn has been ‘busy’ if not crazy with preparations for the first league match.

Vince said: “Every close season is busy. It is a bit counter-intuitive. If you are not close to football, you may think it is a couple of months off. But it is the time to make all the changes around the ground that you may need to make.

“So we are changing the training ground, for example, and we need to sort out facilities at the (training) ground to offer some sort of physio space and there are some league requirements bolted onto that for drug testing and that kind of thing.

“We are going to make some changes at the stadium. We are turning the West Stand into an away stand. We want to add some seats to it. We have dug the pitch up – we do that every close season – so it is a busy time for making all the changes you are going to make.

“Being promoted means changes like a CCTV system and a police control room. Those are the big two ones for League Two.”

Vince insists it has not been a long slog to get Forest Green to their new level of football after years of backing them to the hilt.

The multi-millionaire entrepreneur, awarded an OBE in 2004 for his services to the environment, said: “No, it has been good fun. I would not call it a slog. We have learnt a lot, changed a lot, we have adapted. It has been a challenge but it has been like a test for us as well. It has been like a training regime.

“It has knocked all the edges off where we needed them to be knocked off and we have learnt stuff and improved what we are doing.

“We are much more league-ready now than we would have been two or three seasons ago. Had we fluked it two or three seasons ago, we would have had a bigger job now so I look at it that way.”

Merely surviving in League Two is not on the agenda either. Vince added: “It has taken us so long (to get into the Football League) but, in the process, we have learnt and grown and strengthened and become a much more capable club.

“So now we find ourselves in League Two. We are more ready for it than last year or the year before or the year before that. If it had taken us another year, we would have been more ready again but it hasn’t.”

He is just as ethical when it comes to the issue of players who want to leave the club.

The chairman added: “We probably ended the season with 11 players on the books that we wanted to keep and we have a small group that are contracted but want to leave anyway so we are trying to find them homes.

“I would say we are retaining about 11 from Wembley, signed five more already and will sign a small number more.

“I think Mark is looking for a squad of about 20 (Cooper has said it is 22) which makes sense. We are not far off that but it is not a wholesale change.

“We are in a good place. Mark plays a great style of football, obviously the players who are with us know that style of play and he has been recruiting people who fit very much into that mould.”

The ambition is big. With a new stadium next to the M5 due to have its fate decided by Stroud District Council’s planning committee in the autumn, an approval for that venue will mean Vince can aim to take Forest Green to the division just below the Premiership.

“I am restricting my ambition to the Championship. That is enough to focus on. We will see what happens when we get there. By that time, everything has changed.

“The Championship is a realistic ambition given our catchment if we are able to move to the junction 13 stadium and looking at budgets in the Championship and the budgets we could sustain.

“It has taken a lot to get into this league but now that we are here, we are financially much better off. The difference between being in the Football League and being in non-league is just enormous in terms of revenue. So we have kind of made it now and we have the chance to compete in League Two which is fantastic.

“We believe the journey into League One will not be as hard as the journey into League Two. It won’t be such a big jump and, obviously, there are more opportunities. Three automatic spots instead of one. You only have to be third best in one season and you are away.”

So when the fans of Barnet arrive at ‘The Little Club On The Hill’, the Forest Green chairman will take his seat in the stand and have ‘fun’.

He said: “It is going to be a very exciting season.” Indeed, it has every chance of being so.

* In part two next week, Dale Vince on his long-term future with FGR and a fascinating insight into his love of football