How big should your Executive Summary be?

Q) I am doing a re-write of our old business plan, due to the significant changes to the ownership ... leadership... market and partner focus.

As I've crunched through the exec summary, the result is almost what some might call a "mini business plan," now approaching 20 pages (and I've got 3 to 6 more sections to complete).

As you also know, most VC's are not only asking for "nothing more than 5 pages... worst case", but some are asking for a "summary... of the exec summary" (no more than 1 page).

Given what you know about the VC climate right now, which of your sections from the exec summary would you call "mandatory", to ensure that entrepreneurs like myself can keep an exec summary in the 2 to 5 page range? (most important to least).

A) All of the detail you are adding to your executive summary should be organized elsewhere in your plan.
The executive summary should be a SUMMARY of your business plan -- cover all the areas (see the headings), but suffice it to suggest that more detail is available in the full-blown plan.

Also, you don't want to "give away" too much in the summary.

I would boil it down to 2-3 pages -- it's a device to get your investors interested, or enable you to move on without leaving behind too many secrets.

Once they're interested, they will want all of the details and then some!

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