One page. A governing thought at the top, three or four key lines under it, and the ask at the bottom. Every key line rests on one headline figure, with a baseline alongside it only where the claim is a comparison.
What goes on an executive summary page?
The governing thought is the sentence the whole deck exists to install. It's a claim, it's falsifiable, and it's written in the client's terms rather than yours. For the India work, it reads: the network is profitable in aggregate at ₹4.6759 crore a month, and the aggregate is hiding a business that has to be closed. A reader who accepts that sentence and reads nothing else has taken the point.
The key lines are the pillars. Each one is a claim in its own right and rests on one headline number. Together they have to make the governing thought inevitable. Plausible isn't enough. Three works. Four is the ceiling. Five means the pyramid above them was never resolved, and the page is a list.
| Key line | The figure it carries |
|---|---|
| One cohort of four earns everything the network makes | Metro mature contributes ₹12.1094 crore a month |
| The other three destroy most of it | They lose ₹7.4335 crore a month between them |
| The worst cohort cannot be fixed by operating better | Tier-2 needs 750 orders a store a day to break even against 185 today |
| So the ask | Approve closure of the 95 Tier-2 stores at the March review |
Four claims, four headline figures, one ask. The network total appears once, in the governing thought. No key line repeats it. Print a figure twice and the reader starts doing arithmetic in the room when they should be listening.
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Why is the executive summary written last?
Write this page last, for a mechanical reason that has nothing to do with style. The executive summary compresses the body's title stack, so until the body's titles are final you're compressing a draft. Analysts who write it first almost always write a topic sentence, build a body that says something slightly different, and never go back to fix the summary. That's how a deck ends up arguing against its own first page. Build the body, read the titles aloud, then write the page that says what they said.
There's one exception, and it isn't really an exception. Writing a placeholder summary first, in a text file, is the ghost-deck habit, and it's worth doing. It forces you to state what you expect to conclude before the analysis can drag you somewhere convenient. What you don't do is design the page, format it, or believe it.