Write Your Business Plan

Get Your Plan in Place and Your Business off the Ground

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• Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781599185576
• eBook ISBN: 9781613083017
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

More than 15 years ago, the staff at Entrepreneur Media introduced bestseller Start Your Own Business. Since its release, Start Your Own Business has sold more than 300,000 copies and has been called "the best startup book of all time.” At it again, the staff at Entrepreneur delivers a new dose of fundamental startup how-to, backed by 33+ years at the forefront of small business. Write Your Business Plan takes aspiring entrepreneurs past one of the hardest steps of startup second to committing to their business goal — defining how to achieve it. Each chapter is devoted to analyzing, explaining, and presenting practical instruction on developing a business plan relevant to today’s marketplace and lending landscapes. Appropriate for both existing companies and brand-new startups, this guide is divided into three sections: Before Writing Your Business Plan, Writing Your Business Plan, and Enhancing Your Business Plan. Starting with basic FAQs, experts then lead readers into evaluating their venture, identifying what type of plan they need, and getting their plan on paper and polished for their intended audience. Coached by a diverse group of experts and successful business owners, readers gain an in-depth understanding of what’s essential to any plan, what’s appropriate for their industry, and what they can do to ensure success.

SECTION

II

Writing Your Business Plan

CHAPTER

6

Executive Summaries Sell Ideas

The first part of your plan that anybody will see, after the title page and table of contents, is the executive summary. This could be considered an expanded table of contents (in prose form) because it’s more than an introduction to the rest of the plan. It’s supposed to be a brief look at the key elements of the whole plan—and it’s critical.

The actual executive summary should be only a page or two. In it you may include your mission and vision statements, a brief sketch of your plans and goals, a quick look at your company and its organization, an outline of your strategy, and highlights of your financial status and needs. If you’ve ever read a CliffsNotes version of a classic novel, you get the idea. Your executive summary is the CliffsNotes of your business plan.

Labor over your summary. Polish it. Refine it. Ask friends and colleagues to take a look at it, and then take their suggestions to heart. If your plan isn’t getting the response you want when you put it to work, suspect a flaw in the summary. If you get a chance to look at another plan that was used to raise a pile of cash, give special scrutiny to the executive summary.

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fact or fiction

Because the executive summary comes first in your plan, you may think you should write it first as well. Actually, you should write it last, after you’ve spent considerable time mulling over every other part of your plan. Only then will you truly be able to produce a summary of all that is there. Returning to the CliffsNotes analogy, it’s impossible to summarize a book until the book is written.

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The summary is the most important part of your whole plan. Even if a plan is relatively short, it’s difficult for most people to keep that much information in their minds at once. It’s much easier to get your arms around the amount of information—just one or two pages—in an executive summary. Your plan is going to be judged on what you include in the summary and on how well you present it.

A good rule of thumb for writing an effective and efficient business plan is to avoid repeating information. Brief is better and clearer, and needless repetition may annoy some readers and confuse others. Take extra care when writing your summary. You’ll be glad you did.

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>> Super Summary

Jimmy Treybig, the founder of Tandem Computers and later a venture capitalist in Austin, Texas, says the executive summary is the most important part of the plans he reviews. “What I want is 20 sentences that tell me why someone who gives them money is going to get rich,” says the veteran businessman.

Treybig’s 20 sentences should contain information on how the business will address the market, the product idea, the competitive advantage, the amount of money that is needed, who is on the team, and how it will all come together. Most important of all, he says, the executive summary should convey urgency. Treybig wants to be told, “It’s going to explode, and I’d better invest now or I’m going to miss out.”

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Ultimately, you want the executive summary to be as strong as possible because it is also the first thing people read in your plan, and we all know the power of a strong first impression. This is where you want to wow people and make them think. This is like the coming attractions, or trailers, at the movie theater. You want that trailer to be enticing and bring the audience members back to see the film. Likewise, you want your readers to want to read your plan.

Purposes of the Executive Summary

The executive summary has to perform a host of jobs. First and foremost, it should grab the reader’s attention. It has to briefly hit the high points of your plan. It should point readers with questions requiring detailed responses to the full-length sections of your plan where they can get answers. It should ease the task of anybody whose job it is to read it, and it should make that task enjoyable by presenting an interesting and compelling account of your company.

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plan pointer

Five minutes. This is how long an average reader will spend with your plan. If you can’t convey the basics of your business in that time, your plan is in trouble. So make sure your summary, at least, can be read in that time and that it’s as comprehensive as possible within that constraint. If you are using a deck, limit yourself to one slide and one minute of comments.

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The first question any investor has is, “How much?” followed closely by, “When will I recoup my investment?” Perceived risk and exit strategies are supportive information, and these in turn are supported by the quality of the management team and the proposed strategies.

It doesn’t much matter whether you are presenting the plan to a family member, friend, banker, or sophisticated investors such as investment bankers or venture capitalists. They all need the same informa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Section I: Before Writing Your Plan
• Section II: Writing Your Business Plan
• Section III: Enhancing Your Business Plan
• Section IV: Appendices
• Glossary
• Index