An executive summary plays a crucial role in providing readers with an overview of the company and the reasons to collaborate with it. Executive summary decides whether the reader will continue their reading or not. Thus if the summary is not impressive, the reader might not take it forward. So a business planner should spend considerable time writing a good executive summary for the plan because if the summary itself appears to be unexciting, most readers will not get beyond the first page of the executive summary. Thus an executive summary should appear quite impressive and content-rich to prudent readers. And for this, the summary should strictly include three main factors: business overview, success factors, and financial plan.
- • A business overview should inform readers about what type of business you are in? It should be kept short and precise. Further, the overview should clearly and concisely state what your company does.
- • Success factors of the company is another important content of a good executive summary. A company’s success factors simply state why a particular company is qualified to succeed in the long run. Obviously, if a company does not have such unique success factors, it will fail shortly. Therefore it’s very important for every business to figure out its unique success factor, i.e. identify whether there is any uniqueness in your product or services, whether you have any exclusive distribution partnership or patent allowing only you to offer a certain product or if there is any uniqueness about the management team etc. Thus there may be many reasons for organisations to be stand out as unique in the market. A business planner should spend a good time identifying these reasons and incorporate them into the business plan.
- • Financial plan, in this section of the executive summary, one should provide readers with an overview of the expected financial performance of the company over the next five years by including details like revenue, direct expenses, gross profit, other expenses, EBITDA and net income projections for the next five years.