Report to executive summary

What report to executive summary is

Report to executive summary takes one long document you already have and produces two pages that a busy person reads instead of it. The finding goes first. What follows exists only to make the finding usable: what it means, what it will cost, and what has to be decided.

This is the one conversion in this group that does not start with a recording. The input is a document. A forty-page consultant's report, a technical assessment, a year-end analysis, a research write-up, a feasibility study. Nothing is recorded, transcribed or interviewed. The broader case for reusing what you already have is made on the repurposing page; this is a single, specific job.

It is not an abstract, which describes what the document contains. A summary that says "this report examines three options" has told the reader nothing. It says which option, and why.

When you need one

You need this when a report you commissioned is not being read by the people it was for. This is the usual situation. The report cost money, took three months, and is sitting unopened on a board member's desk because forty pages on a Sunday is not a reasonable ask.

The second case is a report you intend to publish. A long document with no summary is downloaded and abandoned. The two pages are what gets forwarded, quoted and acted on, and they are also what makes somebody decide the forty pages are worth their evening.

You do not need this if the document is already short and simply badly organised. That is structural editing, or tightening if it is merely too long. And if there is no report and you want two pages on a subject anyway, that is written from scratch as an executive briefing.

What I need and where the difficulty is

The input is the full document in an editable format or a PDF, and one sentence from you about who will read the summary and what they have to decide. That second part is not optional, because it determines everything.

The hard part is not cutting. Cutting is mechanical. The hard part is deciding what the finding actually is, and long reports very often do not say. They present evidence in the order it was gathered, hedge the conclusion across three paragraphs in section seven, and leave the reader to assemble it.

• Finding the finding. Reading the whole document and writing down, in one sentence, what it concluded. If that sentence cannot be supported by the text, I come back and say so before writing anything.
• Separating the finding from the caveats. Qualifications matter and they are kept, but they go after the conclusion rather than in front of it.
• The numbers that carry it. Usually three or four figures out of the hundreds in the document. Quoted exactly as the report has them.
• The decision. What the reader is being asked to approve, fund, stop or wait on, stated as a decision rather than implied.
• The pointer back. Page references, so anybody who wants the working can find it in ninety seconds.

What you get

The summary. Two pages, editable file and PDF, laid out as the finding, what it means, the figures, the decision and the caveats. It stands on its own and can be sent with no covering explanation.

A one-paragraph version. About eighty words, for an email, a slide or a covering note, saying the same thing in the same order.

A note on the report. One page listing anything the document states two different ways, any figure that does not reconcile, and any conclusion the evidence does not appear to support. Sometimes this is the most useful thing delivered.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Prince Edward Island food processor commissions a thirty-eight-page engineering assessment of whether to refit an existing line or buy a new one. The report never says which. It gives capital figures for both, three pages of throughput tables, and a conclusion beginning "either approach is technically viable".

The summary runs to two pages and opens by saying the refit is the better option and why, which the report does support once the maintenance figures on page twenty-nine are set against the capital numbers on page eleven. Four figures carry it. The caveat about a supplier lead time goes on the second page. The note on the report flags that one throughput table contradicts the text, which the engineers then correct. The owner reads the two pages on a Tuesday and takes it to the bank. The thirty-eight pages go in the appendix of the loan application, which is what long reports are genuinely good for.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What the report is, who has to read the summary, and what they are deciding. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Based on the length and the technical density of the document, agreed before anything starts.
3. The document. You send it, plus the name of somebody I can ask one or two questions of if the conclusion is genuinely ambiguous.
4. The work. Three to five working days for a document under fifty pages. A technical report with a lot of tables takes longer and the quote says so.
5. Your review. One round of changes. If you disagree with what I have called the finding, that conversation happens here and it is a useful one.
6. Delivery. The summary, the one-paragraph version and the note on the report.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because a thirty-page market study and a hundred-page technical assessment are not the same job. Several reports summarised together are quoted as a batch. The pricing page shows the four ways of working so you can see the shape of the pricing, and your number is fixed in writing before anything starts.

What happens next

If the report is going to be published, the summary is usually followed by a shorter sheet for people who will not read even two pages, which is a one-pager. If the report itself is being sent outside the business, it often needs plain-language editing so that the body matches the summary in readability. And if the same exercise is due every quarter, the sensible thing is to agree the format once rather than rebuild it, which sits alongside regular reporting. Two pages from one report is a complete piece of work, and nothing further is assumed.