J. Anthony Allen explains the executive summary as a one-to-two-page pitch for investors. Write it last, after completing the rest of your plan, and include your company description, target market, revenue model, competition, management team, and financial snapshot.
Okay, so I am now looking at the same template that I just gave you in the previous section. So open this up and we are going to fill out this whole thing. So this looks like a whole bunch of blank pages except for these couple tables. But that's okay. We're going to get all the way through this by the end of this class. So first, let's go through each section of it and just kind of talk in general about what's going to happen so that you know what's coming as you work on each section. It's very important. So first, let's talk about the executive summary. Well, actually, first, before we do that, let's fill in some of this stuff. So you're going to put your company name here, put the date. This is just a title page. Fill in this stuff. Right. You can put a logo here if you want, if you have one. Doesn't really matter. Table of contents. We'll come back and do that once we're all done. If you're using Word, it can generate that for you in many cases. Okay, so executive summary. Here's the deal with executive summary. This is like going to be a short way to say everything in this. I think we talked about executive summary a minute ago, where we basically want someone who's an investor to or a potential investor to be able to read this one page and then decide if this is their cup of tea. Okay, so this should be one page, maybe two pages at most. No more than two pages. Now, pro tip to write this. We're going to come back to it and do it last, because once we go through all this other stuff, you're going to see, you're going to get a much better picture of what should go in your executive summary. So if you start with the executive summary, you might be able to do that, but it's kind of tricky to do it that way. It's much easier to do your executive summary last. A couple things that should be in the executive summary. Obviously, just a one or two sentence kind of elevator speech about the company. An elevator speech is, you know, kind of referencing that old thing where you end up in an elevator with someone who's really powerful and they say, what is your company? And you've got about 30 seconds to explain to them what your company is as you go up the elevator or down the elevator, whatever. So like one or two sentences, what is your company all about? That's kind of the first and most important thing in this. Probably an entire document. Then you want to elaborate on that a little bit more. So we're going to talk about, you know, description of what we do, what we sell, what are the goals of the business target market, how we're going to make money, who is our competition, who is your management team? You want to this, that's your room to name drop stuff right there. You say, I have, you know, these five geniuses on my team and they're awesome. And then the last thing is a summary of your financial situation for the business. Like we have raised X amount of dollars or we have not raised anything yet, but we are ready to go or we are already up and running or however you want to say that. So all of those little elements we're going to figure out in the business plan. So it'll be much easier to put a summary of them into the executive summary as the last step. Right. So don't worry about just diving into the executive summary because you need it to be accurate with everything else that you're saying later. So much easier to do this last. So that being said, let's go on and talk about the next section, the company overview.
