FREE online courses on Venture Capital Funding - What do Venture Capitalists look for - Executive Summary

 

Five reasons why your business needs an Executive Summary:

Venture Capitalists are busy

Venture Capitalists specialize in being very busy people. Imagine getting 500 e-mail messages per day, receiving 3 lengthy business plans per day, or monitoring five or six companies in an investment portfolio at once. Imagine having only ten or twelve years to receive your return on an investment portfolio after you've put $50 million into it. And imagine being concerned about all this at the same time. An Executive Summary of two to three pages fits the attention span of the VC industry.

 

Caption: Venture Capitalists are driven to assess most business opportunities within 30 seconds of their being described.

 

Operative social device

A well-crafted Executive Summary of two to three pages has become an operative social device in the Venture Capitalists community for the introduction, presentation, and assessment of a business potential.

 

Without this concise document, one is hardly prepared to explain a business. But to create a new business, one must anticipate explaining it many times -- to investors, partners, employees, and customers.

 

Merging technology with vision

An Executive Summary often needs to unite a technological and business vision. This requires a broad mastery of differing types of concepts.

 

Crystallizing your concept

A brilliant Executive Summary represents a crystallization of your business plan or concept. This short document of two or three pages says everything about your business!

It serves as an outline of a business plan and as a consolidation of a business's business model. While businesses must develop their business plans and then concisely present themselves with an Executive Summary, a summary can also serve those who are in the process of developing their business plan and business model.

 

Caption: An Executive Summary has to “say it all”.

 

Future touchstone

An Executive Summary is a wonderful tool, which the executive management of a business can rely upon as a touchstone of its ongoing, harried efforts. To review the Executive Summary every four months and check the development of the business against it would not be a bad idea. If the vision of the business has shifted, a re-conceptualization or adjustment is due.