Business Plan Executive Summary

Your business plan executive summary stands alone as an effective summary of your business plan. An effective executive summary will allow the reader to read it in a few minutes and quickly understand the nature of your business.

When writing your executive summary, focus on the key points and issues that are most crucial to the success of your business. The executive summary provides a foundation for your plan and must capture the reader's attention and make the reader want to read more of the plan.

A good executive summary will:

• Clearly outline the basic concept of your business.
  
• Demonstrate that your business concept makes sense and the business has been thoroughly planned.
  
• Show that a market clearly exists for your product or service and you have developed competitive advantages.
  
• Indicate that the business will be run by competent management.
  
• Specify realistic financial projections and a potential for profit.
  
• Use concise language that the reader can review and understand in no more than five minutes.

Assume that you will need to write several drafts of your executive summary; don't expect your first draft to perfectly capture everything you want to say in the best way possible.

Some experts dispute whether it is best to write an executive summary before you've written your business plan or after you've written the business plan. The benefit of writing it before you write the business plan is that it can provide a great starting point for writing your plan. The benefit of writing the executive summary after writing your business plan is that you will have a firmer understanding of the nature of your business after you have written your plan. Your executive summary represents the synopsis of all of your planning and research and can be written only after the business has been analyzed in depth.

You may want to consider writing your business plan executive summary before you write your business plan to give yourself a basis for the rest of the plan, and then rewrite the executive summary after you've written the business plan. You'll see how the ways in which you think about your business have become more sophisticated as you compare subsequent drafts to the first draft of your summary and you'll write a far better executive summary if you require yourself to write more than one draft.

Additional Resources
Business plan outline with links to further information about each section
The Successful Business Plan by Rhonda Abrams book review