The most important page in any business plan, and how to get it right

Welcome to another edition of the March Foreword. Fresh off the back of another client project, I wanted to do a piece with some tips on writing good business plans. But while mulling that over on one of my many bike rides, it occurred to me that there is one factor separating good business plans from great business plans: it’s the quality of your executive summary.

The executive summary is not just a contents page in prose; it's where you tell the overarching story of your business plan by pulling together all the strands of its component parts.

Therefore, to perform this function effectively, your executive summary should be the very last page you write.

More on writing world-class executive summaries in a bit; but first, let’s briefly cover the key components of your business plan. They are the contributors to that overarching story encapsulated in the exec summary. If you don’t have them all, your story could be missing something.

If your business plan is for a relaunch of an existing proposition, then it’s valuable to articulate the current state so that you can effectively assert how it will be different under this new plan.

Much like crafting a strategy, your business plan should look at what customers want, what the competition is doing or likely to do in the future, and be mindful of the context in which you are operating – this includes the regulatory and technology landscape. You should also include your business’s own capabilities: your business plan might require you to develop new capabilities within the business that don't currently exist. Examples of this could be making better use of artificial intelligence or leveraging data to drive decision-making.

With all these 4 Cs in mind (customers, competition, context, and capabilities), you can begin to describe a future state for your proposition, juxtaposed with the current state you described before.

But I would urge caution here: the temptation is often to jump to a solution too soon. Yes, you have customer insights, an understanding of what the competition is up to, and you know the direction of travel regarding technology and regulation, but it's far too early to go into specifics – leave that to your product team. Stick to high-level themes or approaches for now.

Next, you can cover what it is going to take to get to your future state. This requires at least three elements: a look at technology, some attention on people, and some financial projections. There's a whole other newsletter on building the financial model. I would very strongly argue that any managing director or business unit leader should be very closely involved in the business modeling or do it themselves under the watchful eye of their finance partner. The reason for this is very simple: it is one of the very best ways to properly understand how your business works.

Of course, revenue and profit won't be the only measures of success in your business plan, so you should include what other metrics you are going to track.

There are a couple of other pages that I include, which others may not: the first is a completed business model canvas. This is a great template from Strategyzer that can summarize your business on one page – perfect for busy private equity partners! The second is a page that I like to title “What's going to make this work?” and contains three sections: start, stop, continue. This draws out what the business will need to do differently (or do more of) in order to make that transition from current state to future state.

Now that you have completed all the necessary components of your business plan, the executive summary should already be taking shape in your head, and it's time to get it on paper.

So here are three tips for doing that, and none of them involves any paper or even any typing.

1. Step back

Walk away from your work so far and let it marinate a little. Read it through a few times, but then put some distance between you and these pages. This is when I usually jump on the bike for a longish ride.

2. Talk it through

Find a colleague, your usual trusted advisor, or even someone else whose opinions you respect, and talk to them about it. If you can, you should talk to your stakeholders while you are writing and reviewing drafts of your business plan. This is a valuable way to surface questions, comments, and concerns in the process, and it helps to hone your business plan and its overarching message by dealing with those upfront.

Sometimes it can be helpful to have someone who knows the industry, but it can also be powerful to talk to someone who's not close to this area, because they can often surface something pertinent which you have missed – wood and trees syndrome. This, by the way, is another value that consultants can bring.

The psychologists among you will be able to explain why there is merit in transposing what's written into something that is vocalized. There's something similar in one of my earliest articles on prototyping , in which an idea transitions from something in your head into something sketched. The most important themes will already start to coalesce into coherence.

3. Dictate it out loud

I am a massive fan of dictation when it comes to writing not just video scripts but articles. In fact, I've dictated the first draft of this newsletter. In this particular case, your executive summary should aim to answer a high-level question: "So tell me, what's this all about?”

You should be able to fit on one page:

• What do you want to do
• Why you want it this way
• What it's going to take
• The risks and rewards of doing it.

Don't be afraid of having an opinion, especially if it doesn't conform to the prevailing views of your stakeholders. There should be a good reason why they've asked you to write this business plan – because they want your analysis rather than a homogenized regurgitation of views rattling around the echo chamber. But if you are going to go out on a limb, make sure you back up your argument with evidence.

If you get your executive summary right, you should be over halfway to landing your argument.

As always, I’m really keen to hear your experiences of writing and presenting business plans. Do share your experiences, tips, and tricks for others in the comments.

And if you happen to find yourself standing on the precipice of writing a business plan right now, then I hope this is of some help!