DURHAM will begin to rebuild from the foot of division two next season with a new business plan and a re-modelled side.

They are looking for an overseas player as they are confident their own £1.3m salary cap gives them sufficient leeway to recruit.

As well as starting 48 points adrift, the salary cap puts them at a considerable disadvantage with their rivals. But since inadvertently exceeding the general cap of £1.8m four years ago, Durham had slashed their wage bill below the new maximum.

It has been reported that the ECB would impose a cap, but chief executive David Harker said: “They have approved the figure we came up with ourselves in producing a financial plan we felt we could work with. Within that budget we have the capacity to recruit and that includes looking overseas.”

Harker feels that the financial restructuring, with a large slice of the £8m debt written off, has removed the urgent need for working capital and created an opportunity to define the club's vision and purpose.

“We are going through a process of redefining our business plan,” he said. “As part of this we have taken up an offer of help from Oliver Wyman, one of the world’s leading management consulting firms.

“We want to canvas initially a selected group of key stakeholders, including cricketing bodies and sponsors, with a view to building consensus around our objectives and how these can best be delivered. The overall goal is to make cricket matter more to more people in the North-East.”

Harker has been in regular contact with Ian Botham, who takes over as chairman next month on his return from commentating duties in India.

In the meantime long-standing board member Richard Bottomley is acting chairman and the one surviving original director, Bob Jackson, continues to serve.

The rest of the board agreed to stand down, with some incurring financial losses, although the intention is to repay their loans if and when all other debts have been cleared.

Halifax-born Bottomley is a former senior partner with KPMG in Newcastle and is a past president of the North East Chamber of Commerce.

Harker is confident that Botham will be much more than a figurehead, saying: “He has been hands-on in some things already.

“When he agreed to come on board it would have seemed odd to take up the chairmanship then jump straight on a plane, so he was happy to leave the running of the club to the three of us.

“It was 100 per cent our idea, not the ECB's, to take advantage of the offer from Oliver Wyman.

“They have an office in London and have volunteered their services to carry out the interviews to facilitate the strategic planning project.”

Just over half of the ECB's £3.8m bail-out was associated with the removal of Test status, including the write-off of the staging fee for last May's Sri Lanka Test at Riverside.

While Durham County Council agreed to covert their £4m loans to shares, the Local Enterprise Partnership are still considering what can be done about their loan of just under £1m.

As things turned out, Durham had been over-reliant in their financial planning on the building of a hotel, which would generate conference and banqueting business.

They have been close a couple of times in recent years to going ahead, but the fact that it hasn't happened put them at a big disadvantage with rivals like Old Trafford and Hampshire's Ageas Bowl.

“It was difficult to see how we could make this business break even without a hotel,” said Harker. “Now we have gone through this other solution it is no longer essential, but it's something we would still like to happen.

“It's mainly to do with North-East land values. We had agreed terms early last summer, but then the agents couldn't make the numbers stack up. Had it been in the South-East it would have been done.

“I don't like to complain about the disadvantages of being in the North-East because there are a lot of good things about the region. But when it comes to cold economics stuff happens in London and the South-East, then catches on in Manchester and Leeds and we might catch the last ripple.”