Product profitability
Profitability is a relative indicator of economic efficiency. The profitability of an enterprise comprehensively reflects...
Or a bank loan manager is not so easy. To increase your chances of success, you need to write a thoughtful business plan summary, and a sample summary will help with this.
Any aspiring entrepreneur needs support and cash injections. It is with the aim of attracting an investor/bank that a summary of the business plan is drawn up. They don't say it out loud, but most sponsors don't even read the basic business plan. But the resume is studied very carefully and scrupulously.
The summary should contain all the basic information and conclusions about your project. A properly written resume should fit on one or two pages and contain the following information:
The executive summary in a business plan is an example that shows your ingenuity and business acumen. Everything should be short, concise and strictly factual.
This section of the resume should contain all the basic information about the submitted project:
Your main task is to interest the reader from the first sentence. Therefore, at the very beginning of the business plan summary, give an example of future profits. Let's say you are sure that in two years your idea will begin to pay for itself at least 3-4 times. So, start your resume with this: “in 2018, the enterprise will be able to reach the level of income... (indicate specific amounts).” Once a potential sponsor/banker is interested in your proposal, he will read the resume to the very end.
When describing the project idea, be sure to indicate what kind of enterprise you are talking about: business expansion or organization from scratch. If you already have some achievements, be sure to mention them. For example: “Over the three years of the enterprise’s existence, we have managed to sell more than (indicate specific numbers here) soft toys. In 2018, the company plans to enter the global market and enter into a supply contract with (specify country).” An investor/bank employee, reading the summary in the business plan, will see an example of your hard work and ability to make money.
If you don’t have great achievements yet, limit yourself to general phrases and focus on describing examples and ways to achieve your goals. For example, you intend to produce environmentally friendly fertilizer for vegetables, which you will supply to partners from a neighboring region. When describing the essence of the project, do not forget to attach a copy of the agreement indicating the intentions of your partners.
The main stages of the project and the timing of their implementation can be presented in the form of a table. The calendar plan is visually perceived much easier.
The “financing” section can be combined with the schedule table. Show how much cash injections will be required to implement a specific stage of the project. Be sure to note how many of your own Money you have invested (are ready to invest) in the implementation of your idea.
If the applicant is an individual, you will need to present proof of income and documents for property (apartment, car, dacha). A potential investor should know what assets you have.
Sometimes one specific stage can drag on for quite a long time. This means there is no point in taking out a large loan at once. With this option, in the summary of the business plan you will need to indicate how much money will be needed at a particular stage, what interest you are expecting and in what parts you are going to repay the loan.
Attach to your resume documents that will indicate registration with the necessary authorities, as well as a license allowing you to conduct certain type activities. Without official papers, no investor will contact you.
The payback period of the project is the main and most interesting part of your “talmud” to any potential sponsor. Here you need to describe in more detail all potential earnings and expenses. The investor needs to know how long you will repay the borrowed funds and at what stage he will receive his profit.
Don’t forget to mention in the “profitability” section possible risks. If a potential sponsor sees that you look at things realistically and can navigate in force majeure circumstances, the chances of approving a loan/credit will increase significantly.
Of course, if a business plan is created for internal work, then a resume is not needed at all. However, by writing a sample business plan summary, you will have a clearer understanding of your goals.
As we know, a business plan (hereinafter referred to as BP) is a comprehensive document containing information about the nature of the project, implementation deadlines, payback, and investment attractiveness. Today we will look at the first two sections: business plan summary, product description.
When opening the cover page, the first thing an investor or employee will see is financial company– executive summary. Since this category of people is quite busy, they will not spend more than 10 minutes reading such documentation. Therefore, the Summary is the main paragraph of the BP, reflecting the essence of the project. The summary should interest the reader to move on to the next sections. Then the chance of project approval increases.
The abstract is compiled as a separate document; the text should not occupy more than 4 pages; do not fill it with complex terms or specific expressions. Try to display information in an accessible way. Let's look at what is included in the summary of a business plan:
The main indicators that will need to be calculated include:
The purpose of writing a resume is to attract the interest of investors, so you need to present the information in a favorable light. A description that has a chance of success shows:
If you intend to cooperate with foreign investors, please attach an abstract in English.
The first section of the document is the last. If you write a short description before writing the main part of the BP, you will encounter certain difficulties:
If the brief description is of interest to the lender, he will move on to the next paragraph containing information about the product or service that will be produced if the BP is sold. The description is compiled according to the general structure:
When describing competitive advantages indicate the features of the product. Take into account the satisfaction of market demand - price and consumer properties.
When composing the product description section, you need to provide a clear concept of how you will sell it. Study customer needs to identify special offer. Support all ideas with numbers.
It is important to fully present the result to the investor - provide a sample of the product, a layout, a drawing. Please enclose for service positive feedback about its usefulness. If you are not confident and have complete knowledge, lenders will not want to invest money in the project.
Describe in detail the production process and other developments. The conditions for the release of a product will clearly show what changes must occur in the company in order for the production of a product or service to be mastered.
After analyzing the data, creditors (investors) will conclude that it is advisable to inject capital into the planned enterprise.
The success of everything depends on a properly written resume. If you do not attract attention from the first page, all other developments will be useless. Give due attention to each paragraph with a claim to success.
A business plan summary is the essence and summary of its main sections. A resume is the first thing a potential investor sees. Most often the latter. If you want him to be interested in your business plan, then pay extra attention to your resume.
The project summary makes a presentation of what you wrote in the business plan. Investors need it more so that they don’t read your entire plan, but see the idea of your business and its rationale in these 2-3 pages.
Without clearly expressing the points and key points of your business plan in the executive summary, which are supported by numbers and convincing arguments, investors will not waste their time on you.
In order for an investor, who already has a lot of worries without you, to not just scroll through, but to look carefully at your investment project for which you came to ask for money, the summary of this project should be very convincing and interesting. It should show the investor that by investing in you, he can make money on it.
Rules for writing a summary of a business plan investment project The idea is not to bore the reader with long discussions, but to briefly, clearly and concisely express the main key points of the business plan.
The size of the resume should not exceed several pages. The information should be divided into paragraphs corresponding to the sections of the project. It should be structured, not continuous text. The font and its size are the same as the entire business plan. The same requirements can be applied to the entire document.
A summary of your project should include the main key points that will give the investor an understanding of what kind of project it is and whether it is worth investing in it.
Indicate the name of your project, who the initiator is, as well as information about the location of the project and the chosen organizational and legal form of its implementation.
Next, you need to reveal the essence of the project. Determine goals and ways to achieve them. For example, the goal of the project is to sell a thousand tons of organic fertilizers per year. This is achieved by organizing the production of these fertilizers and establishing wholesale supplies to Moscow partners. Don't forget to include letters of intent with these partners.
A plate is given with the main stages of the project and the deadlines for their implementation. This is the project schedule.
Now let's move on to financing.
You can link it to a calendar plan and show how much funding you need at each stage. What is the ratio between borrowed funds and your internal resources.
If loans are proposed at different stages of implementation, then it is necessary to indicate their volume, interest rate, and repayment schedule.
The most important thing is what will interest the investor and what determines economic efficiency and the attractiveness of the project are indicators of the payback period, internal rate of return, terms of repayment of borrowed funds, and the net present value of the project.
What risks may your project face during the implementation phase? Do you know about them and can you evaluate them qualitatively and quantitatively?
Here is a basic, but far from complete, list of what a business plan summary should include if you intend to use it to obtain a loan or attract investors.
If your business plan is being created for in-house work, then the resume does not have such importance, but it is still written so that you have a general idea of where you are going and what you want to achieve.
After the main part of the work on the business plan is completed and all sections of the document are ready, the developers begin to design it and prepare to convince interested parties to participate in the project. However, presentation participants may not pay attention to the project, if only because their first task is to select the most attractive investment solutions on a competitive basis. This means that interest in in-depth reading of the document still needs to be aroused. The project manager is helped in this by the summary of the business plan - the part that provides a brief overview of it.
A business plan is a very pragmatically focused document. External tasks of its development prevail over internal ones. For medium and small enterprises, business planning rarely goes beyond the format of cases and is drawn up in serious multi-page documents. The set of parameters for management to decide whether to launch a project is, as a rule, simplified, and this is justified. The situation is different with external tasks or in the situation of a large business diversified in areas of activity. The main goal of a business plan in such cases is to convince potential investors, bank managers or company owners on a number of points.
The points mentioned above are the arguments for the thesis “consider a partnership with the project organizer for investments, loans” or “make a decision to include the project in the company’s investment portfolio.” The main persuasive load is borne by the first, third and eighth points. The purpose of the business plan summary is significantly narrower than that of the entire document. It is intended to form the initial impetus for special attention to the project in a series of presentations.
And even if one single project is being considered, the workload of managers of the rank of strategic investor, businessman with funds for investment, or banker will not allow them to initially devote more than five to seven minutes of attention. Then, if they think so, the actual text of the business plan will be transferred to the relevant services, and they will systematically work out every aspect of it. The first step is to make a positive first impression.
Preparation for persuading presentation participants is based on consistently prepared:
Each of the indicated points represents a certain technology and at the same time art. Since the planner will not have a second chance to make a first impression, the summary plays a key role in the present process. Below is standard model creating persuasion vectors and persuasive fields based on technology, which we will consider in separate article. Let me briefly note that at a certain stage the author himself becomes congruent with the project (II), then he must rehearse the belief in front of the intended object (III) and only then enter into a persuasive interaction with it (IV).
Scheme of vectors of persuasion, conviction and persuasiveness field regarding a business plan
Although the purpose of preparing a summary of a business plan is essentially advertising, it should never look like an advertising brochure. He traditionally has a business style of writing. General phrases that have an emotional, major coloring should be excluded from the text of the section. Examples of such phrases could be:
The laconic, dry language of the summary creates in the reader a feeling of objectivity and balance of the information received. At the same time, emotionally toned, embellished expressions and jargon give the impression of imposing a subjective position. The tone of writing this section, and indeed the entire document, should be emotionally even, and the information condensed for review should form an objective, unbiased picture of the plan.
It is advisable to fit the total volume of the review section into three A4 pages. In my opinion, the most successful is the list view of the resume, where each element is presented in conjunction: position - transcript. The exception is a short essay on the main idea of the project, 8-10 sentences long. Below is an example of such a narrative. In general, the section usually consists of three conventional parts.
An example of a description of the main idea of the project
The most difficult thing in a resume is to present the main idea of the project and its purpose in a businesslike, correct, yet accessible manner. This work is usually the main focus. It is advisable to involve outside experts to evaluate this part of the business plan review. Usually it is assessed whether the idea itself is attractive or not. In general general composition The summary part usually consists of ten elements.
Almost every element of the resume has a direct connection with the corresponding section of the main part of the business plan. Some points require a separate decision from the management of the design company (for example, the name of the enterprise under new business, its legal address, etc.). Below you will find an example of the content of a resume with an explanation of the sources of information.
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The success of convincing a potential investor, lender or your general director. Therefore, even before preparing a presentation, it is necessary to repeatedly check its quality. Working on a business plan is a very labor-intensive process. Moreover, it is iterative, performed with numerous loops of return from the subsequent section to the previous one and back. These actions often exhaust the authors so much that it is quite natural that their view of the document becomes blurred.
In this situation, the solution is quite simple. Firstly, after the document has been laid out and the first edition of the resume has been prepared, you need to give yourself the opportunity to take a break from it, switching to other work for a day or two. Secondly, while you are relaxing, involve your colleagues and set them a simple task: to proofread the business plan and identify comments on spelling, syntax, vocabulary and, most importantly, on the logic of the narrative. Entrust this work to responsible people, attach to the text of the business plan a long list of errors, inaccurate and incorrect expressions. At the end, ask to express from a subjective point of view whether the expert would give money for such a plan or not?
Perform this procedure several times with colleagues, family members, and finally. After reviewing the comments and identified errors, proceed to a new reading of the text yourself. Make corrections. At the end of the steps to correct the resume and main text, draw up a quality checklist, in which you need to check the composition of the attributes on the formal and substantive side. To develop a checklist, I suggest using the sample resume content presented above. Checklist can also be formed according to the structure of a resume and business plan, according to aspects of persuasive influence and special issues of preparation for persuasion. Among the aspects of persuasion are the following.
On the one hand, a summary is prepared after the development of a business plan is completed; it summarizes the work on the content of the document. On the other hand, this section breaks off the cycle of actions to prepare for a meeting with those at whom all the work is aimed. And these procedures are no less responsible than the entire previous part. This article was written precisely with the aim of formulating and emphasizing the fact that it is not enough to develop the entire plan well, you need to be able to present it competently. It's a joke, but this also applies to the competencies of project managers and entrepreneurs striving for success.
An executive summary can also be called a brief description of a business plan. Its main goal is to present a complete picture of the project to a potential investor, so that he can immediately understand what the further conversation will be about. From this follow the basic requirements for the paragraph: brevity - 2-3 pages, the most complete reflection of all aspects raised in the plan.
Combining these two requirements is not as simple as it seems at first glance, especially if a large project is being developed.
As mentioned above, summary contains brief information about each section of the business plan. Therefore, it is advisable to start it with an introduction, which should contain information about the enterprise that will implement this project.
This part should include information:
After this, you can start writing the main part of the section. Here it is worth talking mainly about the fundamental parameters of the project that the organization will be implementing.
The main part should consist of:
The given list is approximate. The complexity of the project and the number of enterprises involved, as well as specific features and circumstances, may require the inclusion of other additional items.
The person responsible for drawing up the document must remember that making additions does not allow exceeding Recommended volume of resume – 3 pages of printed text in A4 format. In addition, due to the increase in the number of points, the clarity of the presentation should not be impaired.
The resume should include only those points of the project, without which it is impossible to interest a potential investor. The main considerations (project mission), stated in a concise form, can be highlighted using margins or font. This is necessary to attract the attention of the person reading the document.
In terms of the size of the statement, the project's mission should fit into 2-3 paragraphs, and in compliance with the main requirement - all the stated formulations must be extremely clear.
There is no need to prove this or that conclusion, the main objective– presenting a clear and concise presentation. That is, just as a resume should attract a potential investor, the mission should make the section itself interesting.
This part can be called the most important component of the section. Not only the first impression of a potential investor, but also the likelihood of further cooperation directly depends on the quality of its writing.
To ensure that the essence of the project is revealed as much as possible, you can resort to a detailed description of the main goals and possible ways to achieve them. Can be placed specific example: The goal of the project is the annual sale of goods (organic fertilizers) of 1000 tons. To achieve what you want, you can improve the production of this type of fertilizer, find new sales channels, or enter into a wholesale supply agreement.
In a short but succinct summary, a potential investor should see a number of main advantages and important features of the project.
Before drawing up a business plan, you need to remember that a bank, fund or organization that issues soft loans receives requests daily and in huge quantities. Therefore, the success of the project as a whole depends on how concisely, succinctly and attractively the information is presented for the investor. From the very first word it should be clear to a person that this business is profitable.
The need for this section arises when the developer believes that several additional arguments are missing to be convincing. The complexity of the project and a large number of factors that have a significant impact on its implementation lead to the fact that successful final implementation begins to seem doubtful to the investor.
So it makes sense highlight objective factors and circumstances that favorably influence the course of events. In addition, here you need to indicate the main measures that, according to the developers of the business plan, will achieve the desired result.
When writing a resume, you should remember that this part of the business plan should be representative in nature. In no case should it be similar to an advertising brochure. If the information presented is attractive and convincing, then the resume is written correctly.
This goal can be achieved by selecting appropriate illustrative materials, tables and graphs. Considering that the total volume of the section is small, therefore, the number of such materials should also be limited. And since the plan is being drawn up for several investors, it would be nice to imagine yourself in the place of each of them and focus on the points that are most attractive to them.