Читать книгу Business Plans For Dummies - Paul Tiffany - Страница 23

Your executive summary touches on every important part of your business plan. It’s more than just a simple introduction; it’s the whole plan, only shorter. In many cases, the people who read your plan don’t need to go any further than the executive summary; if they do, however, the summary points them to the right place.

The executive summary isn’t much longer than a page or two, and you can wait until you complete the rest of the business plan before you compose it; that way, all you have to do is review the plan to identify the key ideas you want to cover.

If you want to make sure that people remember what you tell them, follow the Public Speaker’s Rule of Three: You have to summarize what you’re going to say, say it, and then reiterate what you’ve just said. The executive summary is the place where you summarize what your business plan says.

The preceding little note might be helpful to recall if you deliver a summary of your business plan as a verbal plea to a VC (venture capitalist) or some comparable funding source. The senseis of Silicon Valley are known for requiring their acolytes to make the Big Ask as succinctly as possible, which has become known as “the elevator pitch.” (The idea being that these gurus’ time is so valuable that all you’ve got is the minute or so it takes to ride up the elevator with them to their palatial office digs.) But aside from the personal indignity involved, it’s actually not a bad idea. See whether you can boil down your concept to as simplified a version as possible — say, two or three sentences at most (but please, don’t take James Joyce as a model here). Chapter 4 gives you more on this topic.