An executive summary of a business plan is a concise, high-level overview of the entire document. It is crafted specifically for busy executives, potential investors, or other key stakeholders who may not have time to read the full plan.
What Are The Objectives Of An Executive Summary?
- Captures Attention: An executive summary makes the investors take notice of your business. Thus, it’s necessary to make your summary engaging and readable.
- Sets an impression to the investors: The executive summary tells the stakeholders a lot about you and your company. It sets a tone and impression for the whole document so it’s advisable to spend some time writing it.
- Highlight Key Points: An executive summary should catch all key points from a business plan and present it concisely (we will see their details later.)
The 3 C’s of Writing a Comprehensive Executive Summary
These 3 C’s of writing a compelling executive summary are as follows.
- Completion
As we discussed in our introduction, an executive summary should be complete. It is complete if it has all the components of your business plan/proposal. Depending upon the scenario and type of proposal, the executive summary may have any or all of these elements mentioned below, to be termed as complete:
- The business problem and suggested solution: Provide important facts and figures to show the gap in the market to the stakeholders. Let them understand the significance of your suggested solution.
- The implementation techniques for the solution: This portion of your summary will mention the tools and techniques (resources) that you need to complete your suggested solution. Highlight key materials, procurement methods, and manpower needed for each activity. Keep this portion as crystal clear as possible for increasing investment opportunities.
- Suitable Conclusion: quickly conclude all your points and give a suitable final thought for your business plan. Also, highlight any future work that can be done to elevate the quality of your proposed solution. Mention an appropriate CTA (call to action) for the stakeholders and involved parties for a clear line of action.
- Concise
An executive summary should be complete and also concise. This sounds very tricky because it probably is. To write concisely for your executive summary, you can consider the following things:
- Write in active voice: This helps convey the information as is. Meaning, that passive voice can be confusing. It leaves room for misinterpretation or miscommunication of information. Thus, always be to the point and nothing else.
- Write with clarity of ideas: It’s better to write the business plan first and then come to writing the executive summary. This will give you the clarity and extent of ideas regarding your business. It will also give you an organized structure for your summary and a smooth flow of ideas.
- Look to connect with the stakeholders: To do so, you can write in a clear tone. Look to carry one point in each sentence to make your writing easier to understand and to the point. Explain any acronyms/key terms that you feel are necessary to cater to the knowledge level of each stakeholder.
If you are still facing trouble concisely writing your executive summary then you can use a summarizer AI tool. Just paste the portion of the text you want to summarize for your executive summary, and the free tool will do the job for you in just a few clicks.
Let us take an example to make you understand what we mean:
- Correct
The executive summary should have correct data/information, formatting, and tone. Correctness brings another C into the play i.e. Credibility.
What we mean is that you should research and find accurate facts and figures regarding your proposed solution.
Don’t get your quotations from unreliable resources. Always pick facts from research journals, peer-reviewed articles, or high-domain authority web pages. This will keep your information authentic and reliable for the stakeholders to invest in your business.
The third C also means to write in the correct tone. Don’t give your personal opinions or judgments in the executive summary. Lead the stakeholders to your pain points naturally by convincing them with reliable facts and not through an appeal to their emotions.
Although an emotional agenda can drive a business plan, it is generally best avoided to keep things professionally sincere.
Lastly, we recommend you consider proper formatting in your executive summary. We mean to box key concepts or terms that are vital to understanding your given recommendation. You can also use bullets or lists to cover all the main components of your executive summary.
Final Thoughts
It is important to write an executive summary to convey the business plan effectively to executives and key stakeholders. The executive summary can act as a standalone business document, which speaks volumes about its significance and the high requirements for the quality of its content.
That’s it for the post. We hope you enjoyed our content!
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