How to Prepare an Executive Summary for a Business Plan

Instructions

• 1

  Go through all the details that are included in your business plan. The executive summary would be the extract of these details. A business plan executive summary should be brief and to the point. Avoid providing facts and figures in the executive summary. Instead just bring up the tactics that you plan to use and the results that would be derived from using those tactics.
• 2

  Organize the rest of your document before you begin writing the executive summary. People often make the mistake of writing the summary first and then going on writing about the details of the whole document. Instead, write the entire document first, followed by the executive summary. This would help you derive the information for the summary via the business plan.
• 3

  Review the business plan trying to find the gist of the idea. Read thoroughly to understand the core components of the business plan and process them in such a manner that you can describe the entire document briefly. The executive summary should not consist of more than one page. Therefore, avoid any unnecessary details. Don’t go on explaining how to do it, instead just describe what you’ll do to get what you want.
• 4

  Business proposal represents potential untapped opportunities and those opportunities are often created due to a problem. Address the problem in your proposal along with impact it’s having on our society.
• 5

  Present the solution for the ‘Big Problem’ that you’ve mentioned. This solution should be feasible enough for the potential customers and lucrative enough to attract investors. Moreover, you should also be able to secure your interest while mentioning the problem and giving its solution.
• 6

  Highlight the major financial figures that your proposal includes. Don’t go around explaining the details or the whole financial analysis of your business plan. Just briefly describe the major figures in the executive summary.
• 7

  Make the executive summary sound attractive to potential sponsors whom you would want to invest in your business proposal. Investors don’t bother much on going into the details at the beginning. What they would be interested in knowing is; what you want to do? What’s the profitability? How you will do it? These three questions should be best described in not more than two lines. For which, you will need to come up with a striking statement based upon the information of your business plan.