Business Plan Executive Summary – The Most Important Part!
When you are preparing a business plan you want to be sure to write the Business Plan Executive Summary last. Once you have all the details of your business plan worked out you will be better able to write the summary.
The business plan executive summary should never be longer than four pages long (preferably two pages), even if you have a lot of experience to list. Remember you can add extra experience information in that section of the plan. As long as you list the most pertinent experience in the summary it will be fine.
Why is the Business Plan Executive Summary the Most Important Part of the Business Plan?
The business plan executive summary is the very first part of the business plan that is seen and therefore it is also the most important part. This is the part of your plan that gives a very concise overview of the whole plan. It also gives a history of your company, or the business background of the owners of the start up company.
This is where you tell the reader where your company is right now and where it is that you want to take it. Because it is the very first part that the reader sees it must grab their attention and spike their interest. If it doesn’t they will not even bother with reading the rest of your plan. This is especially true of potential outside investors, banks and other lenders.
The most important reason that this part has to really sell the reader on reading your entire plan is because this is where you give the reader the first idea of why you are so sure that your business idea will be a great success. This is one of the most important lessons when learning how to write a business plan!
After you give the Mission Statement the remainder of the Business Plan Executive Summary should be in brief, one line statements. Using bullets here would be ideal. They will help to remind you that you are making a list of the highlights of what is in the plan. The details will be shown in-depth in the proper section of the business plan itself.
Your Business Plan Executive Summary should contain the following:
- The Mission Statement – This should be short, just a couple of sentences or at the most a short paragraph. I should just concisely give the reader a clear understanding of what your business is about.
- Give the date the business started
- List the names of the founders or the principals behind the start-up business and what functions the currently handle
- Give the precise number of employees that your company has
- Describe your facilities and include specific plants you feel serve important functions
- Give the location of your main office and all of the subsidiaries or branches
- Briefly list the products you make or the services you provide
- List all of your banking relationships and give pertinent information about any current investors that you have
Give a short summary of how the company has grown and include any financial or market highlights that might interest the reader. (If your company doubled in size in a 12 month period give a description of why that happened; if your company led the industry in a certain kind of service, be sure to briefly describe that)
Business Plans for Start Ups and New Small Businesses:
If you are a very young company or if you are just starting a business you will not have a company history or much in the way of information in the areas listed above. In this case you will want to focus on your personal background and experience, as well as, that of the key persons in your business.
You will want to describe the challenges you saw in your target market that helped you to decide to start this particular kind of business. You will want to include why the business experience you have will enable you to make significant progress in this particular part of the market. Explain, briefly what it is that your company is doing better or differently that is solving challenges no one else is addressing. You need to quickly convince the reader of how much your service or product is needed and give a brief description of your company’s future plans.
You will want to make sure that you have a table of contents following immediately after the Business Plan Executive Summary so that the reader can quickly locate the sections of your plan that they are most interested in looking at. Have the titles in that table of contents be very broad and avoid giving detailed descriptions of the section in this table.
Should I Use a Business Plan Writer?
Many entrepreneurs or small business owners are tempted to use a business plan template instead of the services of professional business plan writers. If you are creating a business plan for use with outside business investors or outside business lenders, this plan needs to be professionally written by an experienced business plan writer.
Your Business Mentor Ray recommends the use of outside writers and consulting with a small business lawyer. This is to make sure your business plan structure is appropriate for your purposes and well researched and written. The Small Business Administration has many pages of information on this topic at SBA.gov.
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