Whether you’ve put together a business plan or an investment proposal, you’re going to need an executive summary to preface your report. The summary should include the major details of your report, but it’s important not to bore the reader with minutia. Save the analysis, charts, numbers and glowing reviews for the report itself. This is the time to grab your reader’s attention and let them know what it is you do and why they should read the rest of your business plan or proposal.

The executive summary is also an important way for you, as the entrepreneur, to determine which aspects of your company have the clearest selling points, and which aspects may require a bit more explanation. Akira Hirai, founder and CEO of Phoenix-based Cayenne Consulting, a firm that helps entrepreneurs develop business plans and financial forecasts, says that the process of distilling the essence of your business down to a page forces you to think hard, decide what’s important, and discard things that aren’t essential to the story line. “By doing this,” he says, “you develop a better vision of what your business is all about, and you become better at telling your story.”

How to Write an Executive Summary: Why Write It?

Investors, lenders, executives, managers and CEOs are busy. Always. That means that the executive summary is an essential gateway for your business plan to get read. Think about it this way: if you had an endless list of things to do, and someone handed you an 80-page document and said “read this! you’d probably first want to know why.

“The most important reason to include an executive summary is that in many cases, it is the only thing the reader will read,” says Pablo Bonjour, founder & CEO of Katy, Texas-based SMG Business Plans, a company that offers entrepreneurs assistance in writing business plans. According to Bonjour, investors will read the executive summary to decide if they will even bother reading the rest of the business plan. It’s rare for an investor or lender to read an entire business plan, at least in the initial stages of analysis and consideration for funding, so having a strong executive summary is key.

When you’re writing your business plan, your goal is to get your foot in the door and face-time with the investor. “Assuming that your business is a good fit for the investor, a strong executive summary will get you invited in for a meeting,” Hirai says. “A poor executive summary will leave you standing in the cold.”

Dig Deeper: How to Write a Great Business Plan

How to Write an Executive Summary: The First Paragraph

Just like a movie might begin with a fight scene or a magazine article opens with a funny anecdote, you’ll need a strong hook for your executive summary.

“The most important part of an executive summary is the first paragraph that clearly explains what the company does,” according to Dave Lavinsky, president of Growthink, a Los Angeles-based company that helps entrepreneurs develop business plans and raise capital. “Most business plans start with a story that tries to create excitement, and this doesn’t always work.”

One way to think about it, says Hirai, is that your executive summary needs an executive summary. The first paragraph needs to compel the reader to read the rest of the summary. Perhaps you have a compelling “Aha!” moment, so you might start with that. If you’ve identified a problem in the marketplace that isn’t being adequately serviced, you might start with that, too.

Dig Deeper: Business Executive Summary Template

How to Write an Executive Summary: The Nuts and Bolts

There is no set structure for an executive summary, but there are guidelines you must follow to ensure your business plan or investment proposal gets the attention it deserves. First, think about your core strengths. Use bullet points to present your ideas, and make sure you always use concise language.

“You need to match your story to your audience, your business, and your desired outcomes,” says Hirai. “If you have an exceptional management team, you might start with that.”

Ask yourself what’s unique and exciting about your company. After you’ve explained what your company does, it’s time to sell why you believe you’re uniquely qualified to succeed.

Lavinksy recommends addressing these questions when putting together your executive summary:

•Do you have a unique partnership?

•Do you already have customers and traction?

•Do you have patents or technology?

•Is your marketing plan special in a certain way?

Depending on your audience, you can also try a more rigid approach to the executive summary. After the first paragraph, Bonjour recommends one effective structure is to summarize each section of the executive summary in the same order that is presented within the full business plan. To make the structure as relevant as possible for the reader, who is typically an investor or a lender, he suggests considering these categories:

•A Company Description Summary

•The Problem

•Your Solution

•Why Now

The “Why Now” category is one of the most important questions to answer, because it makes your executive summary timely. The last thing you want is to leave the reader feeling like there’s plenty of time to act. Chances are, if there isn’t any urgency to your executive summary, your business plan won’t get read.

After describing the elements above, the executive summary should also have a brief financial summary. For your financials, Bonjour suggests including the valuation of the deal, so that the reader knows right away what the risks are, and what the returns can be.

Dig Deeper: Executive Summary as a Guiding Light

How to Write an Executive Summary: Strictly Professional Or Humorous? What’s the Tone?

This depends on who your readers are. Do your research. If you’re presenting an investor with a business plan, make sure the language of the executive summary caters to their backgrounds. For example, if you know your investor has a degree in chemical engineering, your language might be different than an executive summary presented to an investor who studied philosophy.

In other words, “use language that will resonate with your target audience,” says Hirai. Don’t be afraid to change your executive summary when you present it to different investors. Consider creating different versions for each audience, he says, but make sure that it’s always kept professional, crisp, and free of any embarrassing errors. Another good tip he recommends is to use personal pronouns (e.g. “we” and “our”) over general nouns (e.g. “the company”). Your reader will feel a stronger personal connection with you, your brand, and your idea if you can relate to them in the first person.

Don’t forget to be confident, either. If the writer does not clearly believe in this company, says Bonjour, why should the reader believe in it? Put yourself in your reader’s shoes and ask yourself why you would want to invest in a company. “Think about it like a job interview or asking a girl out on a date,” he says. “If you are not confident and don’t act like you want it, chances are you won’t get anywhere.”

Dig Deeper: ToneCheck: An E-mail App That Edits Your Tone

How to Write an Executive Summary: The Length

Remember, every executive summary is – and should be – unique. Depending on the size of the business plan or investment proposal you’re sending, the executive summary will vary. However, the general consensus is to have an executive summary between one and four pages.

Think logically. A two-page summary can be printed on the front and back of a single page, which can feel like a professional brochure. And, if you can’t tell the essence of your story in a page or two, says Hirai, then you probably haven’t thought things through well enough.

Echoing this thought, Bonjour asserts “you can cheat a bit by using smaller fonts, widening your margins, shrinking images and tables, but ultimately you need to summarize everything contained within the executive summary. After all, it is called a ‘summary’ for a reason.”

Dig Deeper: How to Refine Your Business Idea

How to Write an Executive Summary: What To Avoid

“Why most business entrepreneurs get executive summaries wrong, is they believe the goal of the executive summary is to get the investors to give them a check,” says Lavinsky. “The goal of the executive summary is to get the investor to read the business plan or to meet with you.”

With that in mind, clear your vocabularies of any superlatives, clich

SaveOnResorts.com
1,055.3% Three-Year Growth
Revenue: $3.7 Million
Employees: 30
CEO: Kevin Schneider
Founded: 2004
Overall RANK: No. 289
San Diego saveonresorts.com

It has always been a challenge to get people to sit down for a sales presentation about time-shares. Kevin Schneider heard about the problem when he was hired to build a website that would generate leads for a new resort hotel near San Diego.

ClearAccess
3,460.3% Three-Year Growth
Revenue: $5.7 Million
Employees: 30
Founder: Ken Hood
Founded: 2005
Overall RANK: No. 66
Vancouver, Wash. clearaccess.com

Ken Hood spent seven years in Silicon Valley and held high-level management positions at companies including 3Com. A trend became increasingly apparent to him: The number of consumer electronics in the average home that required an Internet connection was growing, but direct support from service providers wasn’t keeping up. So, in 2005, he set out on his own and started ClearAccess to assist broadband service providers, including telcos and cable operators, with customer and device management. ClearAccess gives the provider a control panel on which it can see all the devices connected to a customer’s gateway. That makes it easier to identify where the problem is occurring and offer remote support.

ClearAccess – Silicon Valley – 3Com – Consumer electronics – Service provider

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America’s Fastest-Growing Telecom Company | Inc. 5000 Companies

Vendormate
7,108.1% Three-Year Growth
Revenue: $10.7 Million
Employees: 58
CEO: Andy Monin
Founded: 2005
Overall RANK: No. 25
Atlanta vendormate.com

In December 1999, Andy Monin set out with his wife on a 460-mile drive from Atlanta to Cincinnati to celebrate the holidays with family. To pass time, the couple crafted a list of life goals—100 of them. A family with four children. Check. A beagle named Beau. Half-check (the family named him Boo). And for Andy, the successful launch and sale of two businesses. A few months later, Monin co-founded his first business, whose software helps companies audit phone bills and uncover errors. In 2003, an investor bought out Monin, and in 2005, he was on to his next start-up, launching Vendormate out of his attic. The company makes software that performs due diligence on, and registers, vendors for hospitals and other health care facilities. With 1,000 hospitals under contract, Monin now has his sights set on the financial services industry. That second sale may not be far off.

United States – Business – Atlanta – Health care – Cincinnati

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America’s Fastest-Growing Software Company | Inc. 5000 Companies

LifeLock
11,474.3% Three-Year Growth
Revenue: $131.4 Million
Employees: 482
CEO: Todd Davis
Founded: 2005
Overall RANK: No. 8
Tempe, Ariz. lifelock.com

Since its inception in 2005, LifeLock has guaranteed its customers that it will spend up to $1 million to resolve any instances of identity theft. But the company didn’t take off until CEO Todd Davis dreamed up an even bolder advertising message: He gave out his Social Security number to demonstrate just how confident he was in his company’s services. The pitch was so zany that one television host wouldn’t allow him to mention it during an interview. It also resulted in a Federal Trade Commission complaint, which LifeLock settled with a payment of $12 million. But LifeLock adjusted its service and kept growing. “The unintended consequences were that it made us even better,” Davis says. Today, LifeLock has more than 1.7 million customers; fewer than 1,500 of them have had to invoke the guarantee.

LifeLock – Federal Trade Commission – Identity theft – Social Security number – United States

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America’s Fastest-Growing Security Company | Inc. 5000 Companies

ModCloth
17,191% Three-Year Growth
Revenue: $15.6 Million
Employees: 100
CEO: Eric Koger
Founded: 2002
Overall RANK: No. 2
Pittsburgh modcloth.com

Just before starting college in 2002, Eric Koger convinced his girlfriend, Susan Gregg, to set up a site to sell her collection of vintage clothes. That site, ModCloth, now draws close to two million visitors a month and recently landed $19.8 million in funding from Accel Partners. Koger, who designed websites in high school, initially provided tech support for ModCloth, while Gregg handled sales. In 2005, they decided to turn their hobby into a full-fledged business by selling items from independent designers, and, in 2006, after graduating from Carnegie Mellon, they married. Koger now leads ModCloth’s operations and technology strategy, including the development of online contests that gauge the demand for new products, while his wife (now Susan Gregg Koger) remains the company’s creative muse. “We have a left-brain, right-brain kind of deal,” he says.

Business – Accel Partners – Modcloth – Carnegie Mellon University – Technical support

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America’s Fastest-Growing Retailer | Inc. 5000 Companies

Direct Exteriors
2,723.8% Three-Year Growth
Revenue: $5.5 Million
Employees: 32
President: Mike McAlpin
Founded: 2003
Overall RANK: No. 91
Maple Grove, Minn. directexteriors.net

Construction com

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Platinum Realty
2,011.1% Three-Year Growth
Revenue: $2.5 Million
Employees: 4
CEO: Scott DeNeve
Founded: 2005
Overall RANK: No. 129
Overland Park, Kan. platinumrealtykc.com

Scott DeNeve was just 24 years old and had been working as a real estate agent for all of two years when he had his I-can’t-possibly-work-for-someone-else moment. He founded Platinum Realty during the housing bubble, but he was wise enough to avoid the high living he saw in his competitors. For the company’s first year and a half, DeNeve and his 20 agents crammed into a rented office that was just 110 square feet. He stressed the importance of working backward in order to stay debt free—the primary focus would be on profit, and more spacious digs would come later. DeNeve’s approach worked (meanwhile, a number of competitors didn’t survive the downturn), and his days in cramped quarters are now a thing of the past. Today, Platinum Realty has three offices and is the largest independent real estate company in Kansas City, with 242 agents.

United States – Real estate broker – Real estate – Kansas City – Business

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America’s Fastest-Growing Real Estate Company | Inc. 5000 Companies

Blurb
4,829.6% Three-Year Growth
Revenue: $45 Million
Employees: 68
CEO: Eileen Gittins
Founded: 2005
Overall RANK: No. 47
San Francisco blurb.com

In 2003, having led two tech companies to acquisitions, Eileen Gittins was doing some consulting and pursuing what she calls a self-assignment, which was to photograph entrepreneurs from the Internet boom. She wanted to turn her photos into a book to give to her subjects, but couldn’t find a press that would print only 40 copies at a reasonable rate. So Gittins decided to build one: an Internet-powered, geographically distributed press that would turn digital photo albums and blogs into beautiful books. It took a year to find investors willing to buy in. “We were putting digital assets back into analog,” she says. “To most people, it looked like I had two heads.” Once Blurb’s service launched in 2006, however, the company quickly grew, and it became profitable after two years. Last year, the company published 350,000 titles.

Publishing – San Francisco – Blurb – Eileen Gittins – United States

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America’s Fastest-Growing Media Company | Inc. 5000 Companies

InterGroup International
1,285.2% Three-Year Growth
Revenue: $3.2 Million
Employees: 25
CEO: Neil Gloger
Founded: 2005
Overall RANK: No. 239
Warren, Ohio intergroupinternational.com

In December 2007, a fire broke out at one of InterGroup International’s warehouses. The facility was filled with plastic scraps; InterGroup buys plastic from vendors, recycles it, and then sells the product to compounders. It took three days and an environmental contractor to put out the flames. The damage was catastrophic: The 40,000-square-foot building, and every single plastic product inside, was destroyed. InterGroup, however, was not. “I’m proud to say that during that experience, we didn’t miss one pickup,” says founder and CEO Neil Gloger. “We had to reroute deliveries, but we didn’t turn a single truck away. I told my employees, ‘Now, we’re just going to have to work a little harder.’ Once that decision was made, it supercharged our growth and made us even more focused and determined.”

Plastic – Business – Ohio – United States – Polymers

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America’s Fastest-Growing Manufacturing Company | Inc. 5000 Companies