A business plan, an elevator pitch, a pitch deck — the number of different things you have to have to successfully pitch your company is amazing. Now add in the one pager. Whether you call it that or an executive summary or a company overview, it’s an essential part of the whole story. Like the one-page resume, you want a single, concise one-page document that you can hand to potential investors and business partners. There are lots of advantages to having it be a single page, but I’m only going to mention the most important one — investors expect it.

To create my one pager, I started with my five-page business plan. I went through and highlighted all the most important stuff, then consolidated that in a new document which ended up about two pages long. Then I started looking for things to trim. I was pretty close to finished when I decided that I should make sure what I was doing was consistent with what I needed to submit to another competition, the Willamette Angel Conference (although I’ll be at a disadvantage because Groupthink isn’t an Oregon company, I figure the extra connections will be worth it). It was at that point that I realized I’d made a mistake. The Willamette Angel Conference uses Angelsoft, and the whole way it works is different — your one pager gets created by filling in a form on the site. Here are the items you’re asked for:

• One line pitch
• Summarize your business
• What specifically makes your management team most qualified to build this business?
• Define customer problem
• Describe the solution you sell
• Define your market
• List your current or potential customers
• Sales and marketing strategy
• Describe your business model
• Describe the competitive landscape and list your competitors
• Define your competitive advantage and list barriers to entry

Each of these items also has a longer explanation you see as you’re filling out the form. For example, the explanation for “Define customer problem” reads: Investors fund pain killers, not vitamin pills. What critical customer need does your company address? If you are a web company, you may need to make a hard decision here on whether to talk about your audience or the people who will ultimately pay you (like your advertisers). You only get 210 characters to answer that one. When you’re done, Angelsoft turns your information into a one page summary that looks like this sample:

At first, I was thrown for a loop, but then I realized that this was a much better way to do it. After all, investors looking at your one pager have a bunch of questions in their head that the’ll use to decide if they want to read anymore. If you don’t answer those questions, it’s over. So the number one task really should be to make sure you answer those questions!

In the process of answering the questions, I managed to get in every one of my key points and pretty much nothing extraneous, but the document wasn’t exactly what I wanted to best represent the company. For Angelsoft applications, I have to take what I get, but that’s not true for NWEN or other investors. So, after I finished up the Angelsoft process, I took all the information and created a new document that I could edit. Then I made a few changes:

• Combined the one line pitch, business summary, and customer problem into a new opening section which read better than the three individual sections.
• Combined target market and customers sections.
• Combined competitors and competitive advantage sections.
• Added a little bit of additional detail in a few places where I’d been constrained by Angelsoft’s character limits.
• Added a (small) illustration to help explain the product.

In each of the cases, I made the change to improve readability or punch. But, overall, it’s a lot like the one pager from Angelsoft. You don’t have to do your one pager like I did and your executive summary might be longer. Garage.com recommends two to three pages in this excellent article. But, whatever you do, keep these things in mind:

• The purpose is to sell your company to investors, not tell them everything about it
• You want to convey the excitement and the energy behind your business
• To the extent that you can, answer the questions potential investors will have before they ask them

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

I’ve gotten a lot of advice on my slide deck for the NWEN First Look Forum competition. So much advice, in fact, that I followed it too well.

The first versions of my business plan and my pitch deck were so focused on the product, the technology, and all the cool things that we’re doing for customers, that I neglected to talk enough about the business. I talked about how the technology scaled, but not how the business scaled. As one of my advisors said, investors will assume your technology will scale — they want to know how the company can grow to be a billion dollar business. And I’d made the same mistake in other areas. The pitch deck (and the pitch that goes with it), initially had a lot less about the business side of the business than the business plan, so, off I went, removing technical stuff, and fleshing out the business side. It was looking pretty good.

Then, I went to my first coaching session with my NWEN advisors. We went through the whole deck and they gave me a lot of great feedback. When we were done, they asked a few questions, including a key one — what’s exciting about this? When I explained what I thought was exciting, they both responded, practically in unison, why isn’t that in the pitch? It turns out that I had over-corrected, by a long shot. I had spent so much time working on my weaknesses that I had given my strengths short shrift. I wanted to make sure that everybody knew the business was solid, that I had basically left out what was exciting about the business in the first place.

In the final deck, I lead with the big vision and the long-term plan that is a key part of the excitement, then I segue to the first product and the customer pain that it’s all about. The pain is a bit less exciting, but it’s compelling. Elsewhere in the deck, I make sure to revisit the things about the business that I think make it really exciting. And, I try to talk about technology only where it directly relates to customer pain, solutions, or growth. The result is a significantly better pitch.

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

They tricked me! NWEN told me I only had to answer five questions, but I essentially wrote a business plan. Just five questions, one page each, but each question had questions inside it. For “Describe the market in terms of characteristics and size,” I ended up doing market research to get very precise data, then I analyzed the data to narrow in on exactly my target market. And the innocent looking question “What will be the funding requirements to grow?” caused me to create a cash flow spreadsheet to be able to provide an answer.

In the process, I ended up doing two complete rewrites. On Tuesday, I sent out what was basically the best business plan I’d ever written to a bunch of my advisors. The feedback came back that it needed a ton of rework. I did a complete top-to-bottom rewrite and sent out a new version on Thursday which was a lot better — the new best business plan I’d ever written. Back came feedback. Yes, it was better, but it was still way off from what it needed to be. So on Friday and over the weekend (thanks to NWEN extending the deadline), I rewrote it once again and on Monday I sent out what was now clearly the best business plan I’ve ever written. I hope it’s good enough!

I used Word to do a comparison of the first and third versions of the plan. In case it’s not clear, red indicates text which changed between the first and third versions of the plan.

Despite all the red, there’s a lot of similarity between the versions — after all, they’re describing the same business. But the way in which they say it changed completely.

Here are some of the things that I’ve learned.

Start with a hook. I decided to start every page with a hook, a sentence or two that summarizes the page. In essence, put the summary at the top, not the bottom. Your readers might not get to the bottom.

This isn’t a literature contest. I had some writing that I was really proud of. It was eloquent and had a great feeling to it. Save that for your novel. I tossed almost all of it and now I have a lot of short to-the-point paragraphs and bullet points.

Stories are OK, but keep them short. Real world stories that convey customer pain that you will be addressing is a good thing. On the first page, my hook is a story that illustrates the customer pain I aim to solve. This is the only place where I kept some of the great prose I’d written.

Answer all the questions. If they’ve asked a question, don’t make them read between the lines. Provide the answer as directly as possible. What’s the value proposition? How does your business scale? What are you actually doing?

Don’t answer all the questions. I like to be complete, but if you’re generating your own questions, there are lots that just don’t need to be answered. I removed a ton of information that was answering unasked and, probably, unimportant questions. Working through and figuring out those answers wasn’t a wasted exercise — I still know the answers if I get asked them.

Forget technology. This one was particularly hard for me. My first version had half a page on technology and more in my bio. Investors want to know that the technology is doable and that the team has the technological expertise. They don’t care about the actual technology. My final version has almost nothing about technology, even in my bio.

Scaling is about your business, not your technology. Following on to the last point, investors will assume that if your business is successful, then your technology will scale (they may want details on this during due diligence). But, at the beginning, they want to know if the business is going to grow through greater market penetration, opening up additional markets, selling more expensive versions, selling additional products, etc.

Get real numbers. I think every single talk that I’ve been to about business plans or pitches trots out the line that you can’t just say that you’ll get 1% of a billion dollar market. You’ll hear investors talk about the addressable market over and over again. It took me way too long to internalize that, but, when I did, it took me a lot less time to get real numbers than I thought it would.

Use real numbers. Investors will know if you’re hand waving when you say you need an $X million investment with no explanation. Cash flow projections aren’t that hard. Figure out your assumptions and be ready to talk about them, but get some real numbers.

Be positive. Every business plan is, in some sense, a guess. You don’t have to say “We plan to…” or “We hope to…” or “We don’t know ….” Everytime you do this, your readers view you as less positive, less certain, less able to be successful. They know it’s all a plan and that there are many things that you don’t know yet, so don’t hit them over the head with it. Personally, I tend to be a bit too honest about my deficiences (for example, many people have heard me say “I suck at marketing”). The business plan isn’t the place for that.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you don’t ask, nobody will help you. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I am very appreciative of my advisors.

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

It’s 4AM and I just sent out copies of my 5-page business plan for the Northwest Entrepreneurs’ Network’s First Look Forum to a bunch of advisors, plus a few extra people who I haven’t previously solicited advice from. It’s so easy to wait to finish something until right before the deadline, so I deliberately set my own deadline three days early so I’d be able to get some feedback before I have to submit it.

If you’re still working on your own plan, here are some thoughts from my process:

• I’ve been pitching my business concept and long-term vision to people for months now, but where does that go? Strictly speaking, it’s not an answer to any of the five questions they’re asking. I ended up putting parts of it in each of the first three sections (Market/Opportunity, Novelty/Concept, and Scalability of the Business Model).
• Similarly, in discussions with people, a decent amount of technology has been discussed — what I’m using, why, what’s good about it, what were the alternatives, etc. Almost none of that made it into the document. Investors want confidence that you’ll make the right technical decisions. They don’t need details on those decisions.
• The addressable market, funding needs, sales projections — if I was a business person, these probably would have been trivial. I think I did a reasonable job and, in this document, a lot of detail isn’t required.
• Competitors — there’s an often discussed trap of saying you have no competitors. It’s like a catch-22, though. If you have exact competitors, you probably don’t have a viable business. I pointed out competitors and how none of them are doing exactly what Groupthink is. I did not have room for one of those market charts, but, when I do one, I’m thinking of putting Groupthink in the middle — Papa Bear’s on one side, Mama Bear’s on the other side, and Groupthink is in the middle, just right.
• Scalability — don’t confuse scalable technology with a scalable business. I wrote about both.
• The Team — gee, it’s just me right now. I wrote about both my own skills and experience as well as my search for a CEO.
• Even if you’re not applying to the First Look Forum, this is a great exercise. I put a lot of stuff down on paper that I’ve been saying over and over again. Now I have the opportunity to really refine it.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the version I sent out, but I also fully expect that I’ll be making major surgery on it once I get some feedback. And, of course, when I wake up, I’ll have at least half a dozen things I’ve realized on my own while I slept. I predict I’ll be busy until Friday.

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

A while back, when I was working on a business plan for a potential startup, I met up with someone who was also working on a business plan. He was a marketing guy, with limited technology knowledge, so it seemed that we could help each other. His business plan was gorgeous and read well, and it had all the right revenue projections and graphs. Now I’m no slouch as a writer, but mine was dreadful. My plan had accurate descriptions and diagrams of the architecture of the system that I planned to build, and I had a working prototype to go with it. And his plan? He also had some architecture diagrams, but they were basically fiction. I pointed that out to him, but he said it didn’t matter — they were just placeholders and investors wouldn’t care. Guess which company got funding?

I’m not saying that technology people like myself are dismissed entirely, but it’s certainly a much easier road for people with a business background.

So, I was really pleased to hear about the details of the Northwest Entrepreneurs’ Network’s First Look Forum (FLF) earlier this week. The FLF replaces the annual Early Stage Investment Forum (ESIF) that NWEN used to run, with some big differences, the biggest one being that it’s not an investment forum. NWEN properly recognized that there are already plenty of investment forums in the area, but there was very little for the stage before that. And they recognized that early stage entrepreneurs need more than money — they need help. The forum is designed to:

• Recognize early stage companies that show promise and could benefit from the process.
• Help the companies to take their idea and make it presentable, through intensive, personal coaching.
• Provide presenting companies an audience of qualified angel investors that they can present to and network with.
• Provide those angel investors with interesting opportunities that they probably haven’t heard about before.

• What’s the Market and Opportunity?
• What differentiates the concept from others?
• How can the business scale?
• What traction do you have so far?
• Who are you? What’s your experience?

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.