How potential buyers think your company will perform once they own it will determine their valuation.

Your strategic plan is the single best tool for explaining to potential buyers that your company has achieved its current performance due to thoughtful, calculated, well planned and implemented strategies. Your current strategic plan will show potential buyers that the same quality of analysis and thought provides them with a blueprint they can implement that maximizes the likelihood of continued success for your business.

If you don’t provide potential buyers a strategic plan that is clear and coherent, there will be an assumption that luck or you personally are wholly or largely responsible for what your company has achieved and what it might do in the future. Luck and your executive capabilities will be perceived as risk to your company’s future quality of earnings or growth potential under the ownership of a potential buyer.

Many companies small and large, do not have prior or current strategic plans that are clear, coherent and actionable.

All the thinking and information might be in your head, but if it is not written clearly and coherently, other people will not be able to understand it. If this describes your company, putting a plan together will pay off when you move to sell.

If your company does not have a quality strategic plan, it is important to hire an investment banker who will generate one for you. Having your “story” told in a way that potential buyers can understand, and which will stand up to the extreme scrutiny of due diligence, is critical to the process of allowing potential buyers an opportunity to understand why maximum value should be paid for your company.

If you don’t have a quality strategic plan, or an investment banker who can explain your business’s historical and going forward business strategy you can still sell your company. You simply will not get maximum value.