The Handbook of Financing Growth: Strategies, Capital Structure, and M&A Transactions, Second Edition

CHAPTER 2

Planning and Alignment (Begin with the End in Mind)

While this book is not specifically focused on how to analyze a company or how to develop a company strategy, we are providing an overview as it relates to the financing process and to prompt your thinking as you consider the corporate financial plan of your (or your client’s) business. Given the increased scrutiny by financing sources and overall tightness of the financial markets, we have elected to dig deeper in this second edition into the strategic and business plans a company must develop and present in order to attract the right capital resources.

The need to have company stakeholders act together has never been more important as you compete for capital in today’s market. There are many ways to approach planning and alignment of stakeholders; what is important is that you find a process or set of tools that work for your organization and use them. While we will discuss a process and techniques used by some of the authors of this handbook, there are others like those found in Verne Harnish’s book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits that are valuable and proven too. We will introduce and share a process we use called the Growth Strategy Navigator^TMd (GSN) (more information available at www.GrowthStrategyNavigator.com), which has been honed over the past 20 years and implemented with companies ranging from start-ups to multinational enterprises with more than half a billion dollars in annual revenues. This process ...