IOI Template?

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November 27, 2018

by a searcher from The University of Chicago - Booth School of Business in Sacramento, CA, USA

Does anyone have a template for IOI (Indication of Interest)?  Is it drastically different from an LOI?
The Stanford Exhibits includes templates for an LOI, but I didn't see any IOI template.

Thanks in advance.
Vijay

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commentor profile
Reply by a searcher
from The Johns Hopkins University in Sunnyvale, CA, USA
I never fully understood the difference until our team was in a few processes. Folks commenting skip straight to LOI have a point. If you have high conviction and want exclusivity this is usually what people call LOI.

LOI's tend to have time periods for exclusivity, NDA's, and potentially even a small fee for not going through. LOI's, in my experience, are serious and unless you're well funded or executing multi-strategy you should only have one LOI out there. You have a tight price range and valuation methodology outlined in the LOI and potentially

IOI is way less serious - you provide a wide range of valuations, how you'd value the business, what diligence points you're looking at and timeline. IOI's include info about the buyer and stuff to help it stand out. I'd say IOI's are only necessary where the seller has a defined process they are filtering out many buyers.
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Reply by a searcher
from Texas A&M University in Austin, TX 78746, USA
I used the IOI on Page 279 from "HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business" I retyped it and then chopped it down to a one pager per Jim Stein Sharpe's recommendation in the following article http://jimsteinsharpe.com/searching/making-the-offer/

The reason I did this on the last one was to see how serious they were and to hammer down a valuation before spending to much time on the deal.
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