A teaser document is a short, anonymous summary of a business for sale — sector, size, opportunity — circulated to prospective buyers before any of them sign a confidentiality agreement or learn the seller's name.
The teaser is the first stage of the same staged disclosure process a CIM sits inside. The comparison an Ontario M&A firm draws between the three stages places the teaser before any NDA is signed, carrying only anonymous, basic industry and size information — deliberately less than the CIM that follows once a buyer signs on, and far less than the complete records a data room discloses once a letter of intent is in place. The point of keeping it anonymous is commercial rather than legal: a seller does not want employees, customers or competitors learning the business is for sale from a document that reached the wrong desk, so the teaser is written to interest a buyer enough to request the NDA without giving away who is being sold. That creates a real drafting tension the advisor has to manage: too generic and a serious buyer has no way to judge fit, so real interest never materializes; too specific — a narrow geography combined with an unusual revenue figure, say — and an informed reader in a small industry can often guess who is being sold anyway, which is exactly the outcome anonymity was meant to prevent. Advisors manage that tension by disclosing the facts a buyer needs to screen on — sector, rough size, growth profile — while rounding or omitting the details that would narrow the field of candidates to one identifiable company.
A teaser circulated to a fund’s deal team describes “a Southern Ontario commercial HVAC service business, $8–10 million in annual revenue, recurring maintenance contracts, founder seeking full exit” — enough for the fund to judge fit against its mandate on sector and size alone, without the wider figure narrowing the field to one company a competitor could name on sight. Only after the fund signs the advisor’s NDA does it learn the company’s name and receive the CIM, at which point the same normalized financials the teaser only gestured at get set out in full.
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