Assuming your business has competition every business does! Are you competing on price, quality, or something else? Briefly describe what makes your business different here. For a startup, it might be a brief description of aspirations, such as a sales forecast goal for the next year or three years from now.
I often recommend a simple highlights chart, a bar chart with sales and gross margin for the next three years. This is especially important for startup companies.
Investors want to know who is behind the business idea and why you and your team are the right people to build the business. It also may be valuable to highlight any gaps in your team and how you intend to fill them.
If you have potential partners or candidates in mind, briefly mention them and expand on their qualifications within your full business plan. If you are using your business plan to raise money for your business, your executive summary should highlight how much money you are looking for. Investors will want to know this upfront and not have to dig through a business plan to find this detail.
You may also want to discuss future milestones that your business hopes to achieve. This is particularly important for businesses within a highly saturated or complex industry, such as medical device manufacturers and drug companies, for example.
They need to explain where they are in the process of getting regulatory approvals and what steps remain. Read on for tips on writing an executive summary for each of those scenarios. Before you develop your executive summary for seeking investment, understand how it fits into your business plan. The executive summary can be the first section of your business plan, or you might be developing a stand-alone executive summary that you plan on handing out without the rest of the plan. My views on this are taken from eight years as an active member in an angel investment group, and more than 10 actual angel investments, plus membership in the Angel Capital Association.
A well-prepared executive summary is useful for angel investment platforms like Gust, AngelList, and others to gauge interest in candidates. Of the group I work with, for example, three-fourths of us will read every executive summary submitted to us. All of us will read summaries for plans that pique group interest, and half of us will look at the rest of the plan only if we are still interested after reading the summary.
Let the investors know about any previous startup experience or specializations from the start because this makes a huge difference. Spending to build inventory for existing orders, for example, is way less risky than spending to develop a product that is in design and prototyping. Valuation, in this context, is controversial. Valuation is what you say your company is worth, a number that determines how much ownership you give away for investment. Too many founders think investors just want them to be successful, when in fact that means very little without an eventual exit.
You want to make your prospective investor want to keep reading; convince them to invest in your startup. But do understand that the persuasion is in the facts, not in the wording. What keeps them interested is the content of the summary, not the tone. Facts that prove traction, potential market, or startup experience are infinitely more powerful than mere assertions of excellence.
If you say that your startup is disruptive, or game-changing, or the next Facebook or whatever, you lose. Instead, show that with facts and let the investors say it, not you. To get bankers to read on, the executive summary has to cover the six main points suggested in the beginning of this article, plus a few selected other points that highlight stability, assets on the balance sheet, and financial history, showing that the loan is not risky.
So what works for the executive summary for bankers is quite different from what works for the summary for investors. Where investors want to see management team startup experience, bankers want to see the personal net worth of business owners. Once your online survey is performed, there is work to be done in terms of packaging your findings to leadership in a way that easily communicates the need for a new strategy.
The most straightforward way to do this is to create a business plan that includes all of your research, findings, and suggestions. This business plan naturally requires an executive summary. Crafting the executive summary of your business plan after writing every other part of the report is the best practice. This ensures that you can build out a summary that represents the remainder of the plan as accurately as possible.
Even while crafting an objective presentation of your research findings and the proposed direction that your business, never forget that you want to inspire excitement in your audience!
At the end of your executive summary, your audience — whether they be an investor, banker, advisor, or executive — should be eager to read on. Your executive summary should be thorough, but it should not reveal everything. Your audience should be encouraged by the summary to read the remainder of your report if they want the full story. With a clearly defined structure, an executive summary can be a standalone piece.
Without one, however, it would need the support of the entire report to make an impact. Strive for the former, not the latter. A tightly informative introduction, body, and conclusion should allow someone with no prior knowledge of your business or industry to read your executive summary and understand the key findings from your research, and the primary elements of your business plan.
Your executive summary should be directly aligned with the rest of your larger business plan. While writing your executive summary, read through your business plan and take the most vital information from each section. Numbers, facts, and goals in your business plan should be consistent with your executive summary. Your executive summary should highlight the best features of your business plan. Support the claims you make in your executive summary and the business plan with research, and cite this research via footnotes in your business plan.
One of the most essential aspects of an executive summary is succinctness. You should condense your summary as much as possible, with the goal of getting all of the vital information onto one page. The more succinct you are, the clearer your message will be, and the more confidence your readers will have in your plan.
What, if any, results do you expect? This is the section to include any relevant financial information, project risks, or potential benefits. You should also relate this project back to your company goals or OKRs. How does this work map to your company objectives? Early customer feedback sessions indicate that cheaper options will not impact the value or prestige of the luxury brand, though this is a risk that should be factored in during design.
In order to mitigate that risk, the product marketing team will begin working on their go-to-market strategy six months before the launch.
What, if anything, should they take away from your executive summary? Cheaper and varied offerings not only allow us to break into a new market—it will also expand our brand in a positive way.
For more information, read our go-to-market strategy and customer feedback documentation. As you get started, use the four-part template provided in this article as a guide. Then, as you continue to hone your executive summary writing skills, here are a few common pitfalls to avoid:. Your executive summary is a document that anyone, from project contributors to executive stakeholders, should be able to read and understand.
Where you can, explain the jargon, or skip it all together. Your executive summary is just that—a summary. If you find yourself getting into the details of specific tasks, due dates, and attachments, try taking a step back and asking yourself if that information really belongs in your executive summary. Some details are important—you want your summary to be actionable and engaging. But keep in mind that the wealth of information in your project will be captured in your work management tool , not your executive summary.
Is there any context your stakeholders need in order to understand the summary? If so, weave it into your executive summary, or consider linking out to it as additional information.
Your executive summary is a living document, and if you miss a typo you can always go back in and fix it. But it never hurts to proofread or send to a colleague for a fresh set of eyes. Executive summaries are a great way to get everyone up to date and on the same page about your project. If you have a lot of project stakeholders who need quick insight into what the project is solving and why it matters, an executive summary is the perfect way to give them the information they need.
For more tips about how to connect high-level strategy and plans to daily execution, read our article about strategic planning. Resources Project planning How to write an executive summary, with What is an executive summary? Try project planning in Asana Imagine it this way: if your high-level stakeholders were to only read your executive summary, would they have all of the information they need to succeed?
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