Michael Brown was officially unveiled as permanent manager on Wednesday afternoon, and he is looking forward to a positive summer as the club prepare for League Two.
Brown had been in a caretaker role since the end of December, following the resignation of Bruno Ribeiro.
On finally having the chance to build his own squad, he said: "I am looking forward to it and I am excited by the challenge for sure.
"I think I was excited when I first took over but there was an uncertainly as to how long I'd be here, planning for maybe one or two weeks, but now we have to plan long term.
"I've always looked at and spoken to the academy, that's something I've got a huge interest in. We want to try and improve the whole football club."
With the Valiants having already blooded a number of talented young players, Brown is impressed by the quality within the academy.
He said: "They have done well coming into the team, maybe slightly early and we have had to play them at the end in such big games, but they will have learnt from that and hopefully come stronger next season.
"We have signed some more development players, but the good thing is that we have got some there. Our job is to work with them and hopefully we can get a couple doing well like we had this season."
Brown is under no illusions that it won't be plain sailing in League Two and he admits that it will be a "difficult league" to compete in.
He said: "You look at Portsmouth, a side who people said would walk it last season and they didn't. It's a tough league, we know that and it's going to be a big challenge.
"Ideally we would have had a core of five or six senior pros that you know are going to help you, but we haven't got that. We have one or two so we have got to really start from scratch."