The Executive Summary: The Section Most Readers Decide On
The executive summary is a summary of your business plan. In this section you provide a brief review of your business's concept. The reader must realize what your business is generally about, what product you intend to sell, what goal you pursue by choosing this type of business, and what target market you have.
This section summarizes all the issues the reader is going to confront in the next pages: the financial plan, the target market, the marketing plan, the type of your business, the available opportunities, who your competitors are and how they work, and what competitive advantage you have over them. All of this must be included in one or two pages. You declare with the highest clarity what you want to do, using which specifications and plans.
The reader of a business plan may often avoid checking the pages which come after the executive summary and make the positive or negative decision based on this section. Therefore, you must write it in a quite simple, clear, and organized manner, and prepare it in different versions depending on your target audience. You can be sure that more than 50% of those who read this summary don't even take a look at the next pages, and only half of the readers check the details.
A reasonable technique to assess your summary is to ask various people to read it and tell you their impression. Since they simply tell you what they conclude from your writing, they are suitable options to assess your craft. If their conclusion is the same as the one you intended to convey, there will be no problem. Otherwise, you need to correct your writing. Taking a third person point of view and keeping a time distance after the preparation, check the summary yourself, as well.