Generally, investors will focus on less than fi ve pages of an entrepreneur’s fortypage investment proposal, so it is important to know what they are looking for and make it succinct. Th e last thing that you write should be the executive summary since it’s the one thing you can be sure the investors will read. Piece it together by lift ing information from each of your key topics. If it is your fi rst time to get investment funds, the executive summary can be one to two pages with a fi ft eenpage plan backing up your pitch. An early entrepreneurial business seeking funding can have two to three pages of executive summary and a thirtypage plan. Larger companies (over $20M) need three pages with a fortypage analysis. Investors expect to see the following in the executive summary: • how much money they could potentially earn; • evidence your team has the knowhow and guts to do what they say they will do; Creating Plans That Get You Funded 169 • how the investors can protect their interest; and • how they can exit their investment to get their money back and then some. The Opening Page Gets Their Attention Your fi rst page should be brimming with enticing information about you that uses energetic phrasing and bounds along with enthusiasm. In the fi rst paragraph, above all else, you must succinctly describe what it is your company does. Leave the superlatives and adjectives at home and keep it to a concise description. If your business makes banana bread from multigrain out of three locations in Montreal, you are not a national distributor of the fi nest baked good products in the country that promotes a healthy, balanced lifestyle; this is marketing and investors can smell it. To them it smells bad in an investment proposal. In fact, you are a producer of multigrain banana bread with three locations in urban Montreal. If you need to spice up what your company does, you tread dangerously on the brink of appearing to overcompensate for a bad business. In the next paragraph you must demonstrate the “pain” in the market. What is missing out there? Th e answer to this question should be, emphatically, your business. Aft er having described what the pain is, follow up with what you do to fi x this “pain” and introduce your target market. In a following paragraph show why your target market is attractive. If you can get market research to illustrate the size of the market, now is the time to show this data and how you are attractive to them. Are they big, niche, growing, retiring, or coming of age? How big are they now and how big will they be? If you only had this one paragraph to explain the most important point about your market, what would it be? As with all the information you are introducing in the investment proposal (and your business plan), illustrating the details with pie charts, tables, or graphs is a great way to let an investor’s discriminating eye scan your documents for pertinent information.