How To Write Consulting Executive Summary Slides [BCG Example]

For most decks, the executive summary is the only slide senior people actually read. They’ll skim it in the elevator, in the five minutes before your meeting, or while half-listening on a call. If it holds up, you get the meeting you wanted. If it fails, the ninety slides behind it never get a chance.

And yet most of us build all the body slides first, sharpen the text, perfect the visualizations… and then quickly throw together an executive summary slide at the end.

Consulting firms do the opposite. At McKinsey, BCG and Bain, teams spend an enormous amount of time on this one slide, and their executive summaries all follow the same recognizable pattern. In this guide we’ll break down a real BCG executive summary to learn that pattern, walk through rewriting a weak executive summary step by step, and finish with a checklist you can run on your own slide before hitting send.

What is an executive summary slide?

An executive summary is a written overview of the main points or arguments of a larger document, memo or other report. Strategy consultants also write executive summaries for their presentations or slide decks.

An executive summary slide is the first content slide in your presentation. It summarizes the complete argument on a single slide: the context, the problem, and the recommendation, together with the key supporting evidence. Long decks sometimes use two slides, but one is the norm.

Why do you need executive summary slides?

As a reader, it’s easy to get lost in a PowerPoint slide deck. You need to keep previous slides and messages in your mind, follow the line of argument, and somehow put everything together into a coherent story. The executive summary does three jobs that solve this:

1. It’s the decision surface. Many executives will decide based on this slide alone, so it has to work by itself.
2. It’s a map. Readers who do go through the body slides use the summary to keep track of the overall argument, and reference back to it if they start losing the thread.
3. It’s a forcing function. If you can’t summarize the deck on one slide, the deck usually doesn’t have a clear storyline yet. Writing the summary exposes that problem early, while it’s still cheap to fix.

That third job is why experienced deck-writers at the top firms often draft the executive summary first, as a hypothesis of the storyline, and then keep it updated as the analysis firms up. The common alternative, writing it once at midnight after everything else is finished, is where bad summaries come from.

How to write executive summary slides

To understand the best practices of writing executive summary slides, we’re going to break down a BCG executive summary.

In doing so, we’re going to learn the simple framework for writing executive summary slides that is used by strategy consultants, such as McKinsey & Co, Bain, and BCG.

Below you can see an example of a BCG executive summary. This slide deck is a BCG report on “Melbourne as a Global Cultural Destination” and can be downloaded here. Dozens more decks like it are free to browse in our database of real consulting presentations.

Here are the two main executive summary slides:

These BCG executive summary slides are a great example of an executive summary done well. So we’ll use them to describe best practices.

Best practice #1: Bold text for summary sentences, bullet points for supporting data

One of the first things you’ll notice about the BCG executive summary is the bold-bullet structure. The bold sentences denote key statements or claims, and the bullet points support those statements (usually with data).

Two rules make this structure work:

1. Every bold sentence makes a claim. “Store network performance” is a topic label. “A quarter of the store network loses money at current volumes” is a claim. A claim is something an executive could agree or disagree with, and that’s what turns a slide into an argument.
2. No claim without evidence. Each bold claim gets one to three bullets of support, almost always with numbers. If the evidence were missing, or buried deep in the slide deck, the reader could easily doubt the claim, and ultimately the end conclusion of the deck. If you can’t put evidence under a claim, either the analysis isn’t finished or the claim doesn’t belong on the slide.

Let’s zoom in on one example:

The key statement in this part of the executive summary is “there are weaknesses in Melbourne’s cultural and creative offer”. This claim is supported by a bunch of data points, such as 90% of agencies and thought leaders believe the cultural offer is not clearly articulated.

Best practice #2: Bold summary sentences can be read alone to tell a story

Executives are busy people and many of them aren’t interested in diving into the supporting bullet points. They will simply read through your bolded summary sentences to understand the high-level argument and recommendations.

This means that your executive summary should be “skimmable by design”: your bolded summary sentences should tell a complete and logical story without requiring the supporting data in the bullet points below.

Let’s read just the bolded sentences in our BCG executive summary:

Melbourne has a compelling creative and cultural offer; the city attracted >10m Australian and international visitors in 2015. Cultural visitors and creative industries drive significant economic benefits; cultural tourism projected to grow further.

However, Melbourne’s position as Australia’s cultural and creative capital is being challenged. On a global index of cultural and creative cities, Melbourne ranks first in Australia, third in Asia and 12th globally.

Melbourne has clear strengths to build on as a cultural and creative city. However, there are some weaknesses to address to further improve Melbourne’s cultural and creative offer.

These findings suggest five strategic priorities to improve Melbourne’s position as a global cultural and creative destination, which may lift Melbourne’s position on the Performance Index.

It reads just like a narrative! Despite ignoring all the bullet points, we can still fully understand the argument that BCG is making.

This is the single most useful edit you can make to your own slide, and it’s worth naming: the skim test. Read only your bold sentences, in order, out loud. If they read as a coherent narrative, with context, problem and answer, the slide works, because that’s exactly how your busiest executive will consume it. If they read as a list of disconnected observations, no amount of formatting will save the slide. It takes thirty seconds and catches more problems than anything else.

Best practice #3: The executive summary should reflect the ‘SCR storyline’ structure of the slide deck

It’s not good enough to just “tell a story”, you need to tell the story using a particular structure.

The structure used by strategy consulting firms, such as McKinsey & Co, Bain, and BCG, is the ‘situation, complication, resolution’ (SCR) structure. You can learn more about how to craft a compelling argument and SCR storyline for your slide deck in our Complete Guide To Building Strategy Presentations.

Let’s take a look at how the SCR storyline applies to your slide deck:

Situation

• What baseline 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 particular problem important to solve?

Resolution

• How do we respond / solve the problem?
• What are the specific recommendations and/or next steps?

Your executive summary slide should communicate the complete storyline of your slide deck, and thus it should also follow the situation, complication, resolution structure. In our BCG example, you can clearly see the SCR structure in action:

It’s important to set the context with the situation, as there’s no guarantee that all of your readers will have the background knowledge to understand your argument. Then, in the complication section, you should succinctly define the problem and why it is important to solve.

Finally, you need to clearly articulate your proposed resolution or “answer” to the problem. You’ll note that most of the executive summary real estate is spent on the resolution component: it should earn 60 to 70 percent of the slide. The proportions are the part people get wrong most often. Weak executive summaries spend half the slide proving the author did a lot of background work. Strong ones spend that space on what should happen next and why, because from a reader’s perspective, the recommendations are the most important part of the slide deck.

Worked example: rewriting a weak executive summary

Although the structure is easy to describe, it’s harder to apply, so let’s walk through a full rewrite. The scenario: a retailer asked for a review of its store network, and the team’s recommendation is to close 40 stores and reinvest in “dark stores”, which are small warehouses that serve online orders.

Here’s the first draft:

Executive summary

• Project background and approach: 12-week review of the store network, covering 312 stores across all regions
• Store visits and management interviews were conducted across 45 locations
• Retail market trends: online penetration continues to grow across all categories
• Analysis of store-level P&Ls shows performance varies significantly by location
• Some stores are underperforming and options should be considered
• Next steps: align on approach and develop implementation plan

Everything on this slide is true, and it says nothing. It describes the work instead of the findings. Its statements are topics rather than claims. There’s no evidence attached to anything. And the recommendation, which is the entire point of the deck, is hiding inside “options should be considered.”

Let’s fix it in four passes.

Pass 1: impose the storyline. Ask three questions. What’s the situation, what’s the complication, what’s the answer? Then strip everything that serves none of the three. The project background, the methodology and the interview count all move to the appendix.

Pass 2: turn topics into claims. Every line becomes a sentence someone could disagree with:

The store network was built for a market where 90% of purchases happened in-store; online is now 34% and rising.

A quarter of the network loses money at current volumes.

Closing 40 stores and converting 12 to dark stores adds around £45m of annual operating profit within two years.

Pass 3: attach the evidence. Each claim gets its supporting bullets:

A quarter of the network loses money at current volumes.

• 78 of 312 stores are unprofitable after allocated costs, and 61 of them have been unprofitable for three or more consecutive years
• The weakest quarter of stores average an 8% operating loss, while the top half of the network averages an 11% profit margin

Pass 4: run the skim test. Reading the bold sentences alone:

The store network was built for a market where 90% of purchases happened in-store; online is now 34% and rising. A quarter of the network loses money at current volumes, and the causes are structural: location and format, not management. Closing 40 stores and converting 12 to dark stores adds around £45m of annual operating profit within two years, funding the online capacity the market shift demands. We recommend board approval to begin the first tranche of 15 closures in Q1.

Context, problem, answer, action, readable in fifteen seconds.

The difference between the two versions has nothing to do with writing talent. It’s four mechanical passes, applied in order.

When to deviate from the standard form

The SCR summary is the default, and there are three situations where you should deviate:

• Answer-first. When the audience already agrees there’s a problem, or has seen an earlier readout, leading them through situation and complication again wastes their time. Open with the recommendation and compress the supporting logic below it. Update meetings and steering committees usually want this form. Consultants sometimes call it RSC, since the resolution moves to the front.
• One slide or two. Stay on one slide until the evidence genuinely can’t fit. A two-slide summary is legitimate for a recommendation deck of 100+ slides. If you use two, the first slide carries the argument and the second carries the recommendation detail: costs, timeline, and what you’re asking for.
• Update decks. Progress updates have no complication and resolution arc. Use the equivalent structure: where we are, what’s changed since last time, and what we need from you. The bold-bullet mechanics and the skim test still apply.

Eight checks before you send it

Before a deck leaves a consulting team, a senior reviewer reads the summary looking for the weak plank. Run the same checks on your own slide before sending it:

1. Skim test. Do the bold sentences alone tell the complete story?
2. Claim test. Is every bold sentence something a stakeholder could disagree with?
3. Evidence test. Does every claim have data under it?
4. Proportion test. Does the resolution get at least 60% of the slide?
5. So-what test. Does the complication make your stakeholders need the resolution?
6. Standalone test. Could someone who’ll never see the body slides act on this one?
7. Ask test. Is the specific decision or action you want stated explicitly at the end?
8. Sync test. Does every claim on the summary appear in the body slides with the same numbers?

The last one catches more people than any other. The summary gets rewritten at midnight, the body slides don’t, and the first sharp-eyed executive finds the £45m on slide 1 that reads £38m on slide 14.

This class of problem is what we’re building our PowerPoint add-in SlideBrain for. It reads your deck inside PowerPoint and flags what a good reviewer would: bold sentences that don’t tell a story, claims with no evidence, and numbers that disagree across slides. The checklist above is the manual version.

Executive summary slide examples

Below you’ll find examples of executive summary slides from consulting firms like Bain & Co, BCG, L.E.K. Consulting, Oliver Wyman, and others. Several of these 25 real consulting proposals also open with exactly this kind of one-page summary.

FAQ

What should an executive summary slide include?

Context (situation), the problem or opportunity (complication), and your recommendation with key evidence (resolution), with most of the space on the recommendation. End with an explicit ask: the decision or action you want.

What about the “five parts of an executive summary”?

The five-part templates (objective, situation, complication, resolution, call to action) are expansions of SCR. They’re useful as a drafting scaffold. On the slide itself, situation, complication and resolution plus a clear ask covers all five.

Does the 5/5/5 rule apply?

Rules like “5 bullets of 5 words” exist to prevent walls of text on body slides that someone presents live. An executive summary is deliberately denser, because it’s a reading document. Full sentences in the bold text are correct here. Let the skim test provide the discipline instead of a word count.

How long should it be?

One slide, or two for very long recommendation decks. If it doesn’t fit, the storyline isn’t tight enough yet. Tighten the argument instead of shrinking the font.

Should I write it first or last?

Draft it first, as a hypothesis of your storyline. Finalize it last, so it stays in sync with the body slides.