Executive Summary Deck

About this template

Sixteen slides in five minutes

The deck is built for a room where you state the conclusion first. Order: cover, agenda, five section-divider and detail pairs (the one-page conclusion, the evidence, the options compared, the financial impact, risks and responses), a before-and-after comparison, four key-metric cards, a trend slide with four bars, and a closing slide. It works for getting a decision; it is too thin for a working kickoff that needs screen-by-screen detail.

Six agenda lines against five sections

The agenda lists six items but the file contains five section dividers – only the final “approval requested” item has no slide – so the audience waits for a section that never arrives. Either duplicate a divider-and-detail pair for it, or cut the agenda to five lines and let the closing slide carry the ask. The sentence you need approved already sits on the one-page conclusion slide, so repeating it at the end is the cheapest fix.

Filling order

1. Delete the template blurb in the cover subtitle and put the report title, date and presenter there.
2. Reconcile the agenda with the number of sections.
3. Each of the five detail slides is title, one-line lead, three bullets. Three is a fixed layout, so merge rather than add a fourth.
4. On slide 13 every line on the left has to be answered by the line facing it: 61% budget utilisation by the reallocation approval, the three-month hiring delay by the extra recruiting budget. A request with nothing facing it gets deferred on the spot.
5. Then finish the metric cards, the four trend values and the closing line.

Four cards and the option bars

The cards read one page of reporting, three options reviewed, 22-month payback, and 1.4 billion won of profit impact. The last two repeat the financial impact body slide word for word, so changing one breaks the pair; the “three options” must also match the A, B and C options on the comparison slide. Decision-makers read money and dates fastest, so turn the remaining tiles into figures like “184 million won a year, about 3.2 headcount” and “start 2 March, stabilised 10 April”.

The trend slide holds four bars – option A 118, B 76, C 42, status quo 20 – captioned as an index with a base of 100, yet none of the four is 100, so nothing says what the base is. Either set the status quo to 100 and rescale, or replace the caption with real units. An unexplained index always draws a question.

Common mistakes in the approval room

• Presenting with the template footnote still on the metrics slide.
• Talking over the five divider slides instead of spending time on comparison, metrics and trend.
• Skipping the risk section for time; the worst case and the stop-line are the two things approvers ask about first.
• Showing only the recommendation and dropping the options you rejected, which pushes the decision to the next meeting.