Business Plan
There are several essential components to the business plan. The Executive Summary is one. This is a summary that goes at the front of the business plan, and it contains all of the key information that is contained within the plan. The Exec Summ fills a couple of key purposes as part of the plan. First, it serves as a shorthand for someone who wants to get the basics of the plan, without getting into the deeper details. There are many stakeholders who might prefer this. But the executive summary also serves as something of a roadmap of the rest of the document. For someone who wants to learn more about the business, in great detail, the executive summary plays an important role in explaining what information they can expect to find, and how the rest of the business plan is structured. So the executive summary ends up being a fairly important document, because it communicates the basic elements of the plan quickly, in an easy-to-digest format that suits a number of important stakeholders (Ciccarelli, 2014).
The financial summary is another important element to the plan, and again there are a few different reasons why the financial summary is important. First, many stakeholders including creditors and
They need this information because it helps them to understand what the company's expected financial performance is. But more than that, the financial summary is important because it is a garbage-in, garbage-out element. You could in theory make up a bunch of numbers to fill out this section, but then your business plan will have no value. The value lies in the discipline that the financial section instils. It forces you to research costs, to estimate what price you can sell for, to understand the dynamics of the middlemen, taxes and other costs elements of the industry in which you are going to compete. The more work you put into the financial plan, the more realistic it will be. And the investors or creditors will see this -- they will know the difference between a financial plan that took weeks to research and prepare and one that did not. By taking a disciplined approach to the financial plan, you will learn a lot about your company. The financial plan can even result in changes, such as a change in the "go/no-go" decision, or changes in tactical approach…
