Key points
- A confidential information memorandum (CIM) is a document that markets your business to serious, qualified buyers, including sensitive details you would not share publicly.
- A CIM typically covers your company’s structure, history, finances, growth potential, and how you want buyers to approach a deal.
- CIMs are usually shared confidentially, often only after a buyer signs an NDA, so the most sensitive figures stay protected.
- Traditionally written by brokers or investment banks over days or weeks, a CIM can now be built in under an hour on Acquire.com.
- Most small online businesses do not strictly need a formal CIM, but bringing one to the table tends to close deals far faster.
Traditionally written by brokers or investment banks over days or weeks, a CIM can now be built in under an hour on Acquire.com.
Most small online businesses do not strictly need a formal CIM, but bringing one to the table tends to close deals far faster.
Savvy business brokers only pass important information to qualified buyers, and they do it in a special document. This document, called a confidential information memorandum (CIM), markets your company to the most engaged and qualified buyers with intimate details like CAC, customer LTVs, marketing spend, and so on.
CIMs used to be documents most commonly used in big business transactions, like that $250 billion xAI and SpaceX merger. That is because there really was not much of a market for “smaller” tech acquisitions, that is, until Acquire.com came on the scene.
Acquire.com helped make small to mid-market technology acquisitions more accessible. Today we have made it simple for all of our sellers to create CIMs for buyers, whether you are selling for $25 thousand or $25 million. After arranging over 100,000 small business sales on our platform, we can explain exactly how a CIM works, what you absolutely need to put in yours, and how they work on our platform.
What Is a CIM?
A CIM is a document that you, a broker, or another intermediary creates to help sell your business. It is a summary of your operations that includes your company’s:
- Structure
- History
- Finances
- Growth potential
- Desired steps for courting buyers
A CIM gives qualified buyers a detailed view of the business so they can decide whether to pursue it. It also helps buyers evaluate efficiently and minimizes the endless back-and-forth that can make deals drag on forever.
How Are CIMs Used?
As the name implies, you would normally distribute a CIM confidentially to a select group of buyers. Usually, a broker or other M&A intermediary creates a CIM based on the information you give them.
Then they circulate a short list of key data points from the CIM to potential buyers, often called the executive summary. From the initial group of interested buyers, the seller and brokerage create a vetted list that can access the full CIM and may eventually bid for the business.
At Acquire.com, your CIM is offered to buyers after they have signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and you have accepted that they can look at your business.
How Do You Structure a CIM?
A CIM includes just about everything to do with your business and should give any potential buyer a clear understanding of what you are selling. Usually, it is divided into these categories:
- Executive summary: at-a-glance information to entice buyers to read further. It usually covers the most relevant points from the greater CIM.
- Business history: the highlights from your business’s past, like acquisitions, renovations, marketing, and major pivots.
- Investment considerations: a review of your company’s competitive landscape, operations, business lines, products, and strategies, and how these could help the business grow further.
- Financial review: a detailed overview of your finances (short of a full audit). It pairs well with your P&L by covering a summary of major cash flows, liabilities, assets, and revenue.
- Management: an overview of the key employees that will be part of the transaction.
- Process considerations: how you wish to be approached for a sale, including preferred deal terms and the periods when you will take offers.
At Acquire.com, we recently launched our own internal CIM builder that lets you quickly construct a polished CIM PDF with the help of voice transcription and AI editing. If you want a deeper walkthrough of the writing process itself, see our guide to writing a deal-winning CIM.
What Is Included in a CIM?
Below are the 49 questions we normally ask sellers to answer for their CIM, grouped by theme. Together they build the full picture a serious buyer needs.
Company story and growth
- Can you provide a brief history of how the company started, and highlight any major changes as the business has grown?
- How have your sales trends developed over the last few years, and what drove any significant peaks or valleys?
- What new features, products, or services are you planning to introduce, or would you recommend, to expand your market reach?
- What are the current challenges that, if resolved, could increase sales or profitability?
- If someone handed you a check for $3 million to grow the company as quickly as possible, what would you invest it in?
- Why would you buy this business if you were a buyer looking in from the outside?
- If your business suddenly received 10x more customers, could it physically handle it?
Market and positioning
- Does the company have a clearly defined target market, and if so, what is it?
- What have you tried that did not work?
- What sets your company apart from competitors in the industry?
- What barriers make it difficult for new competitors to enter the market?
- What geographic areas does the company serve?
Legal and corporate
- DBA name
- Legal name of company
- Type of incorporation
- State of incorporation
- Date business started
- US legal address
- Is the company currently involved in any legal proceedings?
- Are there outstanding loans that must be paid off to deliver assets free and clear?
Products and pricing
- What specific products and services does the company offer?
- If you offer multiple products or services, what percentage of total sales does each contribute?
- What are the key trends in sales and demand for each product or service? Is there seasonality? What market factors affect purchases?
- When was the last price increase, and is another one planned?
- How do you expect customers to react to a price increase?
- What is the average gross margin per product category?
Customers and retention
- What is the typical size of your customers?
- What is the one thing your customers care most about?
- Do you have a consistent method for measuring customer satisfaction?
- What is the approximate number of active customers, and how do you define “active”?
- What is your current customer churn rate, and how has it changed over the past year?
- What is your customer lifetime value (LTV), and how does it compare to your customer acquisition cost (CAC)?
- What is your monthly recurring revenue (MRR) growth rate, and what is contributing to it?
- How do you identify and engage at-risk customers before they churn?
- What is done to encourage repeat business?
- Have any of the top customers been added or lost recently?
- What percentage of sales comes from repeat versus new customers?
- Are there contracts in place with any customers? Please describe.
- What are the payment terms offered to customers?
Marketing
- How do you acquire customers, and which channels are most effective?
- How much are you currently spending on marketing? What are your top-performing campaigns, and what made them successful?
Team and operations
- How many total employees do you have, including full-time, part-time, and contractors?
- What is the ratio of technical staff (developers, engineers) to non-technical staff (sales, marketing, support)?
- Are there key employees whose departure would significantly impact the business?
- Are all key employees willing to remain with the company?
- Can the employees run the company without the daily involvement of the owner?
- How does the owner typically spend their business day, and what are their key roles and responsibilities?
- How many hours per week are you involved in the business?
- Are you willing to stay on to support the transition to new ownership?
Who Sends a CIM?
Traditionally, seller intermediaries like brokers and investment banks draft CIMs after discussing them with a business’s leadership team. On Acquire.com, CIMs are part of your seller assets and are automatically shown to buyers once they sign your NDA.
Who Receives a CIM?
There are traditionally two steps to receiving a CIM:
- A group of buyers the brokerage selects receives only the teaser, with the business name redacted. If a prospective buyer is still interested after reviewing that teaser, they sign an NDA or confidentiality agreement before viewing the rest. At Acquire.com, we do something similar by letting buyers view some information (like TTM revenue, price, and so on) while hiding others (name, marketing spend) until the NDA is signed.
- Buyers who sign an NDA gain full access to the CIM, including the company’s name and its operational and financial information.
Want to Sell Your Online Business Quickly and Seamlessly? Use Acquire.com
If you are thinking about selling your online business, Acquire.com makes the process simple, fast, and secure. We also put your business in front of more potential buyers than almost any other brokerage.
With Acquire.com, you can:
- List your business quickly and reach thousands of qualified buyers
- Maintain confidentiality with built-in NDA protection
- Manage conversations and offers directly through the platform
- Close deals securely using integrated escrow and acquisition workflows
- Avoid excessive broker fees and keep more of your exit
Thousands of founders have already sold their businesses on Acquire.com. If you are ready to explore a sale, or simply want to understand your options, create a free listing and start connecting with over 600,000 high-interest buyers today. It also helps to have the rest of your sale materials ready; our guide to preparing a business for sale walks through the full checklist.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are CIMs ever used in small sales?
Formal CIMs are less common in small sales, where sellers may instead provide a shorter business overview. However, at Acquire.com, we have made it easy for every seller to build a professional-grade CIM to show their buyers.
How long does it take to write a CIM?
Traditionally, CIMs are lengthy documents and are written by M&A intermediaries such as investment banks, corporate finance firms, and business brokers. A formal CIM can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, depending on how much information it contains. That is changing: when you create a CIM with Acquire.com’s CIM builder and you already know your internal data, you can have a fully polished document ready in less than an hour.
Who writes a CIM?
CIMs are usually created by M&A intermediaries like banks and brokers, but they can be created by anyone. Usually they are made by an entity connected with many buyers, because that entity knows exactly what to write to entice those buyers.
Do you need a CIM to sell a business?
Most businesses are not sold with a formal CIM. That said, many buyers will ask for much of the detail found in a CIM’s executive summary before agreeing to a deal, so you may end up creating an informal CIM in most online sales. You will likely provide all of this information during due diligence anyway. At Acquire.com, we find that deals close in a fraction of the time when the seller comes to the table with a completed CIM.
What is the difference between a CIM and a teaser?
A teaser (or executive summary) is a short, often anonymized snapshot used to gauge initial interest without revealing sensitive details or the company’s name. The full CIM contains the complete operational and financial picture and is shared only after a buyer signs an NDA.
The content on this site is not intended to provide legal, financial, or M&A advice. It is for information purposes only, and any links provided are for your convenience. Please seek the services of an M&A professional before any M&A transaction. It is not Acquire’s intention to solicit or interfere with any established relationship you may have with any M&A professional.