If you’re an undergraduate student or in your early career, you’re probably building your presentations with a focus on the main body slides and visuals. And only afterwards do you approach the Executive Summary Slide of your presentation slide deck.
This approach is okay if you’re just a student. However, if you work at a professional job, and especially as a strategy consultant, this approach is greatly flawed. The executive summary slide is the first impression of your presentation slide deck. It is the only slide where the reader can get a complete overview of your insights, suggestions, and arguments.
Therefore, the executive summary slides shouldn’t just be an afterthought or a conclusion. In fact, it’s crucial that you spend considerable time writing a strong executive summary that clearly details your argument and gives your reader a complete picture of what you are proposing.
What is an Executive Summary Slide?
The Executive Summary slide is the first slide in your presentation slide deck. It is an overview of your presentation and the only place where the reader can get a complete overview of your insights, suggestions, and arguments. The executive summary slide highlights the key points and the main findings of your presentation. The executive summary slide should fully summarize your presentation’s storyline and the body slides.
At management consulting firms, it is imperative that the strategy consultants build executive summaries for their presentations or slide decks.
Why do you need an Executive Summary Slide?
As a reader, it’s easy to get lost in a PowerPoint slide deck. The reader needs to keep the messages of the previous slides in their minds, follow the argument that is being discussed on the current slide, and put everything together into a coherent story to make sense of it.
Therefore, as a presenter, you must be very mindful of how you create your storyline and present your insights that make an impact. And this can be challenging, especially if you are presenting your slide deck to c-level executives or clients. These people usually have a shorter amount of time and prefer to understand the conclusion and recommendations instead of delving into minor details.
Consequently, you must structure your presentation slide deck and use an executive summary slide to present your analysis straight away in one place.
The Executive Summary slide helps quickly and clearly communicate suggestions, ideas, and business recommendations to executives.
- The executive summary provides context for what is going to be discussed in your slide deck.
- The executive summary slide communicates the high-level argument before the reader delves into the body of the slide deck & details.
- The executive summary slide can act as a “reference point” that the reader can refer back to if they lose the line of argument.
Important things to keep in mind while developing the Executive Summary Slide
When creating an executive summary, it’s essential to keep in mind a couple of things. Foremost, the executive summary should be concise, precise, and easy to read and understand. The executive summary should be written in clear and simple language and should be structured properly.
Here are some key elements that you can include in your executive summary slide:
- A brief overview of the purpose of the presentation
- A summary of the main findings and your conclusions & recommendations
- Key recommendations and action points
- A call to action, guiding the readers on the next step
You can use these elements to create a clear and compelling slide deck that summarizes the key points of your consulting report and highlights the key recommendations or action points for your audience.
How to write Executive Summary Slides (BCG Example)
Now let us understand how to write an executive summary slide. We will understand the best practices using an executive summary from an MBB slide deck. This will help us understand the frameworks and best practices adopted by strategy and MBB consulting firms, which include McKinsey, Bain, and BCG.
Writing an executive summary slide Principle 1: Bold text for the summary sentences, bullet points for the supporting data
In the BCG executive summary slide, notice the bold-bullet structure. The emboldened sentences highlight the key points and remarks, while the bullet points support those remarks. This helps you ground your argument in some sort of evidence that helps support your claims. Additionally, it is even better to provide quantified evidence. This establishes the credibility of the assertion, and your arguments appear much more impactful.
Besides, one of the key aspects of management consulting slide decks is that consultants make no claims without evidence. And this applies to the executive summary as well.
Writing an executive summary slide Principle 2: Bold sentences should form a logical story.
C-level executives are busy people, and often they are not interested in the minor details of your suggestions. Hence, your executive summary should be written in such a way that reading the headers alone gives away the presentation storyline. It’s pivotal that the bolded summary sentences contain a logical storyline.
Writing an executive summary slide Principle 3: The executive summary should follow the SCR storyline structure of the presentation
It is not enough that your executive summary simply forms a storyline, but rather that it follows the SCR structure. SCR stands for “Situation, Complication, and Resolution.” This structure is used by strategy consulting firms, including McKinsey, Bain, and BCG. To elaborate, take a look at what entails an SCR storyline structure:
Situation
- What knowledge do people need to have before they understand our argument?
- How did this problem come about
Complication
- What is the problem we need to solve?
- Why is this problem important to solve?
Resolution
- How can we resolve the problem?
- What are the specific recommendations for the next steps?
Your executive summary slide should communicate the complete storyline in your slide deck. And thus it should also follow the “situation, complication, and resolution” structure.
Writing the Executive Summary Slide: Example
Now that you have learned how to write the executive summary slide, here is an example of how an MBB consulting firm writes an executive summary slide. For reasons of confidentiality, the name of the company has been replaced by company A.
