- An executive summary
is like an elevator pitch of your business plan. Whether you're an entrepreneur looking for investors or a CEO
of a large corporation, having a strong executive
summary is critical for long-term growth. Here's the good news, it's short to write. The not so good news, it can be challenging to write because it serves different purposes. Today I'm gonna share my top five tips to help you write your
own executive summary and show you what key pieces of information you should include. Make sure to stick around until the end because I'm going to go
over a common mistake that people make that you should avoid. Let's get started. Your executive summary is a
brief overview of your company and it's located at the
beginning of your business plan or on the about us page of your website. Usually it's the first
thing that people read so it needs to be attention
grabbing, engaging and convincing. In one or two pages, it needs to have the following. Number one, it tells your story. When investors or CEOs
read your executive summary they should understand what
your business is about. What do you do and why do you do it? Let's use Connected as our example. Their executive summary
immediately grabs your attention with its headline. Before reading the rest of the summary, we already have a pretty
good idea of what they do. They're a product development
service firm that partners with clients to build better
products that delight customers and drive business impact. Simple enough. If you scroll down, you'll see they share more
details on the history, size and mission of the
company that explains how they help clients build better products. That brings me to my next tip. Number two, it shows
you've done your research. A good executive summary shows that you know what you're talking about and that you can communicate
your ideas effectively. This is a specially important if you're trying to win over
new clients or investors. In their summary, Connected
walks us through their approach on how their goal is to
build the right products for their clients. In a few short sentences,
the reader is confident that with the help of
their engineers, designers and product strategists,
Connected can help them deliver world class products. As a small business, the best way to stand out is to include information
on how your product or service fits in the market and how your business differs
from your competitors. If you're feeling unsure on how to structure your
executive summary here at HubSpot we have a free template that outlines all the necessary pieces you should include. You get detailed descriptions of how to write your financial plan, market analysis, business
operations, and more. The template is really helpful if you're writing an executive
summary for the first time or if you want to
refresh your existing one and include some things
that you may have missed. Like I mentioned, it's completely free. So if you'd like to download it I'll have it linked in
the description box. Tip number three for
writing an executive summary is to pay attention to your
tone and avoid cliche language. The tone of your writing tells a story and when it comes to a business document you have to make sure
your tone tells a story of who you are. You can decide to be formal
or informal depending on how you want to represent
your brand and your audience. It's also best to avoid cliches because they can be misunderstood and that is definitely not
something you want when someone is reading over
your executive summary. For example, saying something like you have the best restaurant in town is not necessarily
true and can't be tested. When you're writing
your executive summary, make sure to focus on the
things that reflect the truth of who you are as the company. Going back to our example, Connected doesn't claim
to build the best products but instead their purpose
explains the extraordinary impact they create through culture
and technology excellence. Tip number four is break
up your executive summary so it's easy to digest for your readers. This is especially
important to pay attention to on your website. Since this one document
is going to be jam-packed with bits of information,
you wanna break it up into sections and spend the most time on the section you feel your
audience will care most about. If this is for your general audience then you can focus more on your mission or company background and explain how exactly your
business provides value. Using multimedia to
break up your information will help keep the readers engaged and provide them with visuals
to better explain something like your business model,
which can be a bit complicated. If you're pitching this to investors, you may not want to include any visuals but instead spend more time on the market analysis and financial sections. Connected is a great example of a more formal executive
summary that provides value to both their general audience
and potential investors. In one page, we get to read about their mission, values, partners and their diverse team
that runs this machine. Tip number five, that is going to save you so much time when putting
this summary together is write your business plan first. If you're like me and like to
structure your work in order, you might be tempted to write
the executive summary first. Although it's the first
thing people read to learn about your business, it should
be the last thing you write once you've completed your business plan. Make sure you don't
make this common mistake or you'll probably have
to go back and fill in some gaps in your business
plan or executive summary. These five tips along with our template will make your executive summary
writing process a breeze. If you like this video,
make sure to subscribe for more marketing content and comment below which companies have
executive summaries that stand out to you. Thank you so much for watching,
and I'll see you next time. - I can find this client info. - Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform so it shares its data
across every application. Every team can stay aligned no out sync spreadsheets
or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better.
