Talk:Executive Summary

It is normally recommended that the Executive Summary is written last as it is a natural evolution from the process of completing your Business Plan. It is very unlikely that you will know the exact structure and content of your Business Plan before the exercise has been attempted. The structure that makes up a Business Plan normally crystalises thinking and is likely to lead to material changes of the original ideas about how the products/services will be brought to the market. --Schwaney 18:45, 5 Jun 2006 (NZST)

I agree, and this has been the case for me most definately. However, i think p eople may have at least two reasons to write a business plan.

• One, is to crystalize the plan the principals have. The business plan structure forces that. This i would term an evolution of the business plan, and may be what you are refering to?

• The second reason is to raise money. A plan designed to raise money needs to be planned out ahead of time, and maybe necessitates that One has been done above. In this sense, a business plan is a plan to Borrow Money and Pay it Back. --Phalseid 06:16, 5 Jun 2006 (NZST)

It looks like we are talking about the same thing. The business plan is always carried out before you start the business of what you are doing. It is used to formalise your own approach to setting up the main business (plus any secondaries), but I would say that the primary reason that business' undertake a business plan is to raise funding.

Sad, but true - probably the reason 80% of startups fail :-| --Nad 09:56, 6 Jun 2006 (NZST)

This is certainly the only reason for including an executive summary. My comments above only relate to the executive summary, which is considered a part of the business plan. This is what I mean when I say it is written last as it is a summary of your entire business plan, as such it is not normally written until the business plan has been finished.

There may be some benefit to maintaining an executive summary as the business plan evolves, so that people can be quickly kept abreast of progress of the report, but it would need to be rewritten at completion to satisfy the goal of attracting investor attention. This information is very likely to be different to the summary information required to keep stakeholders (sans investors) up to date on development of the plan. --Schwaney 09:51, 6 Jun 2006 (NZST)

it seems to me that the two different types of plans would necessitate two different types of summaries. since this whole thing is about organization, and we all know from experience that lack of planning dooms a business, perhpas we should have both (is that all?) types of plans templated here. One for the money, one for the production. They rely and feed eachother, and maybe they need to share some data. I for one am trying to grow mine with my own capital and resources. So i will shut up and pose the question: Do we want to fork into two business templates now? One for Borrowing Money and Paying it Back, and the other for How This Business will Help Even if It is Not Self Sustaining and Needs Some Outside Support. Phalseid 15:50, 5 Jun 2006 (NZST)

That may well be the way to go, although I would still recommend starting off with a single business plan that will address all the needs of the project and then once finished, or close to completion, compile, reduce and have a summarised version for potential investors. A business plan for investors is going to be around the 60 - 100 pages mark with a 1 page executive summary (not including appendices). It is unlikely they would want to see much more than this. I would imagine that this is not detailed enough to meet the informational aspect of the project though. As such, I would suggest that the planning needs of the project are met first and then produce a marketing intensive business plan for potential investors based on this. --Schwaney 12:54, 6 Jun 2006 (NZST)