3 Ways To Ruin Your Executive Summary

There are a lot of ways to improve your executive summary, and opinions differ all across the board, but there are a few surefire ways to RUIN your Executive Summary.

Start with your Mission Statement - This sounds like a reasonable way to start, but often times mission statements are all the same. You want to create value, or serve your client with excellence, or build high quality products. Honestly, this is boring. Your potential investor wants to know what problem you are solving. Maybe you have developed software that is 50% more effective at protecting a computer from viruses than the leading anti-virus software. Start with something like this, "Each year X million computers are infected with malicious viruses causing X amount of dollars lost in data and time." Everyone can identify with this problem and now that you have an interested audience tell them how your product can solve this problem.

Write in Paragraph Format - Since the standard rule of thumb for an executive summary is 1 to 2 pages, entrepreneurs are often tempted to squeeze as much information into those two pages as they can. This leads to using a paragraph format instead of including bulleted lists, tables, and graphs. Again you need to remember what the purpose of your Executive Summary is. It should not be used to include every important detail of your business plan, rather it should excite and entice the reader to continue to read your business plan. If your Executive Summary is formatted in a difficult to read paragraph style, regardless of your content a reader may not be interested in reading more. So use lists, tables, and graphs to illustrate your main points.

Use the 1% Rule - So often I read business plans that say, "if I could only capture 1% of this $3 Billion market I would have an extremely successful business." Don't get me wrong, investors like large and growing markets, but if you can't show them how you will capture that 1% of the market, then that statement is meaningless. Build your revenue estimates from the ground up not a top down approach like the example above.

By: ExecutivePlan

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Hey! My name is Adam Hoeksema. I am the Client Services Manager at a technology based small business incubator. If you are working on an executive summary for your business plan, make sure to go to my website at www.theexecutiveplan.com and download my special report on how to write a powerful executive summary.