Sample CIM or CIM Template - for Investors

searcher profile

May 16, 2023

by a searcher from Harvard University in Castle Rock, CO, USA

Hi all,

In conversations with investors, I've gotten asks for a CIM on the deal (a CIM from me as the searcher, not the CIM from the broker). It seems that these are fairly common the further you go upmarket, but I haven't seen much in this space regarding putting one of these together.

Anyone have a resource they are willing to share on an investor CIM for SMB acquisitions?

Thanks in advance!

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commentor profile
Reply by a searcher
from Rutgers in Glen Gardner, NJ 08826, USA
I believe what your investors are looking for is an investment memorandum. Pulled the below from HBR Guide to buying a SMB :

“The investment memorandum, a detailed packet of information about your target company, should be sent to potential investors. Start putting this memo together once you have a signed LOI. The memo should include the following information:

1. Information about the business and its industry. What’s in the confidential information memorandum (CIM) is fine.

2. Details on the due diligence that you’ve done, covering your own preliminary and confirmatory due diligence together with input from your accountant and lawyer. Give special attention to any issues that concerned you and that you resolved so that investors can get comfortable both with the specific issue and with the scope and care of your due diligence.

3. Your financial projections.

4. The deal terms that you are proposing to potential investors. Include the types of securities available (more on this below), the sequence of payouts, an agreement about how the company will be governed, and the amount of equity you plan to retain. ”

Someone else out there might be able to provide their own example of this, but this is the framework as I understand it.
commentor profile
Reply by a searcher
in Sydney NSW, Australia
^redacted‌ thanks for the tag. Hay Jordan, I’m doing my own research as you are, and I use ChatGPT to give me overview & templates I can then educate myself with and edit and later have professional input on, but it’s a very handy place to start for me. So if you haven’t tried it already search OpenAI GhatGPT and register for free, and I use it on my mobile device.

and as example of the prompt I used

“ Hi GPT, please write me a detailed example of a confidential information memorandum (CIM) for a profitable medium sized manufacturing business based in Australia. I will be using this as a template document so please provide as much detail as possible.”
…. Then it responds to max text length so type in “please continue” until it is finished with the document.
…. Then I copy each window and paste into an email to myself to be used later in Word.

For tips on using AI for this sort of thing follow https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorgrennan on LinkedIn and YouTube.
hope this helps you!
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