An executive summary is the opening section of a longer document that gives a busy reader the situation, the decision being asked of them and the consequence of that decision, in enough detail that they can act on it without reading the rest. It sits at the front of a board paper, a business plan, a consulting report or a project update, and it is written last, once the author knows what the document concluded.
The examples below are written out in full rather than described. Each one is followed by the reasoning behind it, because the shape of a good summary is easier to copy once you can see why each sentence is where it is.
What the reader is doing while they read it
A director reading a board pack on the train has a specific job in front of them. They are deciding whether this paper needs their attention in the meeting, what the author wants from them and whether they have enough to form a view. Everything in a summary either serves that job or gets in the way of it.
That is why the strongest summaries lead with the decision and the recommendation, then supply the reasoning underneath. The reader who agrees can stop reading. The reader who wants to argue knows exactly which paragraph to argue with.
A board paper about a pricing change
The scenario is a software company whose board is being asked to approve a move from per seat pricing to usage based pricing across its largest product.
We recommend moving the platform to usage based pricing from January, replacing the current per seat model for all new customers and at renewal for existing ones. Per seat pricing has held average contract value flat for 6 quarters while usage has grown, so customers who use the product heavily now pay the same as customers who barely log in. Usage pricing corrects that and is what the 4 largest competitors have already moved to. The change puts roughly 12% of current recurring revenue at risk in the first year from low usage accounts, against a modelled gain of 18% from high usage accounts by the end of year 2. We are asking the board to approve the change in principle today so that pricing and billing work can start, with the final rate card returning for approval in November.
What makes it work is that the first sentence contains the whole decision, including the date and the scope. The second and third sentences say why now, using a comparison the board can check. The fourth gives the downside before anybody has to ask for it, which is the single fastest way to earn a board's trust. The last sentence says precisely what is wanted in the meeting, which stops the discussion drifting into the rate card that is not being decided yet.
A business plan for an investor
The scenario is an early stage company raising money, where the summary is the only part many investors will read before deciding whether to take a meeting.
Northbeam builds scheduling software for independent veterinary practices in the UK, where appointment books are still run on general purpose calendars and practices lose revenue to no shows and unfilled slots. We charge a monthly subscription per practice and we are live in 40 practices, growing by 6 to 8 practices a month through referrals from the practices already using it. The market is around 5,000 independent practices in the UK before any expansion into Ireland or the Netherlands. We are raising to build the integrations with the 3 dominant practice management systems, which is the thing every prospect asks for and the thing currently limiting how fast we can sell. The founders have run a veterinary group and built clinical software respectively.
The order here is deliberate. An investor wants to know what the company does and for whom before anything else, then whether anybody is paying, then how large this could get, then what the money is for, then who is doing it. Each of those is one sentence, and any one of them can be expanded in the body of the plan. The summary makes no claim it cannot support later.
A project report
The scenario is a quarterly update on a data migration, going to a steering group that has heard about the project before and mainly wants to know whether it is still on track.
The migration is on track for the March cut over, with 7 of the 9 source systems now moved and validated. The 2 remaining systems are the finance ledger and the legacy CRM, both scheduled for February. The risk we flagged in December, that the CRM data would need manual cleaning before it could move, has proved correct and is taking longer than planned. We have added 2 contractors to that work for 8 weeks, funded from the existing contingency, and we do not expect it to move the cut over date. Nothing is being asked of the steering group this quarter.
The last sentence is the one people forget to write. A steering group reading an update with no ask still spends energy looking for the ask, and saying there is not one is a courtesy that gets the paper read.
Where else to look for examples
The examples that rank highest for this search are mostly written for coursework rather than for work. That is visible in the searches themselves, where a large share of the phrases people type alongside this one are about dissertations, job applications and student assignments. Those examples are perfectly good for their purpose and they will teach you a structure that a board will find long and slow.
For the working version, the sources worth reading are the ones written by people who sit on the receiving end. Harvard Business Review publishes regularly on writing for senior readers. Consulting firms publish sanitised versions of their own client reports, which are useful for structure even where the content is generic. Any company secretary you know will have a house style for board papers, and that style is a more reliable guide than anything general, because it tells you what your own board expects.
The Executive Summary publishes a guide and a template of its own, so treat this page as interested rather than neutral.
Questions and answers
What is an executive summary example?
An executive summary example is a complete summary written out in full, so you can see the order of the sentences and the level of detail rather than reading a description of them. A useful example carries the decision or the conclusion in its first sentence, gives the reasoning underneath, states the risk or the downside without being asked and ends by saying what the reader is expected to do.
What is an example of an executive summary?
The 3 on this page cover the situations most people are writing for, which are a board paper asking for a decision, a business plan asking for investment and a project report asking for nothing beyond attention. Each is around 100 words, which is the length that fits on a single screen and in a single reading.
How to write an executive summary example
Write the document first and the summary last. Then write 1 sentence for each of these: what is happening, what you recommend, why now, what the risk is and what you want from the reader. Put the recommendation at the top rather than at the end. Cut every sentence that would only make sense to somebody who had already read the full document, and read what remains aloud to check that it holds together on its own.
What is an executive summary in a business plan example?
In a business plan the summary answers what the company does and for whom, whether anybody is paying yet, how large the market is, what the money is for and who is running it. The Northbeam example above follows that order. Investors read this section to decide whether to read anything else, so it carries more weight than any other page in the plan.
Where to go next
The Executive Summary is a weekly briefing read by more than 6,000 senior executives from FTSE 350 and Fortune 1000 companies, written by Dan Ilett, a journalist who wrote for the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph. You can subscribe at theexecutivesummary.com, and if you want the writing looked at rather than read about, the enquiry form on the about page reaches us directly.