A confidential information memorandum (CIM) is the detailed business summary — operations, market position, normalized financials — that a seller's advisor sends a prospective buyer once that buyer has signed a confidentiality agreement.
A CIM sits in the middle of a staged disclosure process, and where it sits matters. As one Ontario M&A firm’s own explainer puts it, a business broker or M&A advisor typically drafts the CIM, often working from financial statements the seller’s accountant has normalized first. It follows the anonymous teaser and precedes the data room: the teaser discloses only industry and size before any NDA is signed; the CIM, released after the NDA, adds “a business overview and brief history,” a description of products and services and how the business operates, its market position and competitive landscape, summarized historical financials, organizational structure, key assets, growth opportunities and the rationale for the sale — but it remains a curated document, more detailed than the teaser and still short of the complete records a data room discloses once a letter of intent is signed. For a fund, the CIM cuts both ways: it is what a deal team receives on most inbound opportunities it screens, and it is what a fund’s own advisor prepares when a portfolio company goes to market at exit.
A fund’s associate signs an NDA on an anonymized teaser describing a Southern Ontario specialty distribution business. The CIM that follows names the company, sets out three years of normalized EBITDA, breaks down customer concentration by account, and describes the founder’s planned role after closing — enough detail for the fund to decide whether to submit an indication of interest, but still short of the contracts, cap table and tax filings that only open up once the fund is inside the data room.
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