EFFECTIVE BUSINESS AND STRATEGIC PLANNING IS critical to your company's long-term success and its ability to raise capital and sustain growth. Bankers, accountants, consultants and academics have written volumes about business-growth plans. Yet, it seems the more information there is, the more confused businesspeople become. Ultimately, there is no single formula. A business-growth plan should tell a story, make an argument and conservatively predict the future. All companies have different stories to tell, different arguments to make and different futures to predict; thus their strategies for growth--and yours--will also differ.

Business-growth planning is the process of ...