As a small company, can we avoid registering for VAT?

Hello,

My partner set up a renovation company and although still small and growing, we are hardly making any money (only just enough to support ourselves, but not yet enough to pay income tax on the turnover which will be due soon and is stressing us). However, as we now have two people working for us, we are going to go over the VAT registration threshold in a couple of months. This is pretty scary. Are there reasonable and legitimate ways we can avoid this? For example, we have one main client at the moment who wants us to do lots of projects over the next few months. Could we ask him to set up a bank account and we then administrate the account or ask him to do payments, so he/we pay for the materials and two workers from his account, ie. we are then just providing the service of organising everything and doing our work in return for our own wages, without all the costs of the others' wages and materials going through our account. Let me know, thanks!