Preparing an Information Memorandum: What Work Can an AI System Handle?

Preparing an Information Memorandum: What Work Can an AI System Handle?

Preparing an information memorandum and teaser for a potential sale or acquisition is crucial to a deal's success. Yet much of the work that goes into it isn't analysis and advice, it's collecting, typing, and organizing. For partners and owners of M&A firms, this means your team spends every day digging through inboxes for documents, retyping data from one system to another, and managing versions as they work on them. The deal moves forward, but the preparation crawls.

An AI system connected to your deal files and email can take that operational work off your hands. You save hours on each memorandum, and your team gets back the time to talk directly with the entrepreneur, dig into details, and provide real advice.

What Work in the Memorandum Is Repetitive?

For many firms, an information memorandum feels like part of the deal, but it's mostly collection and formatting work. It starts with the teaser. You ask the owner and his accountant for documents: completed financial statements, other business data, org charts, client lists. Those documents land in email, OneDrive, SharePoint. Someone from your team collects them, puts them in order, notes what's missing, and sends follow-up questions.

Once you have those documents, you move on to preparing the information memorandum itself. There's a lot of repetitive work there too. For each chapter, company history, financial performance, market position, you perform the same steps: search financial statements and business documents for data, copy it directly from documents or summarize it, check everything is correct, track versions. Then the owner comes back with changes, the team makes them, another team member reviews again. This repeats until the document is done.

The teaser itself follows the same pattern: take key points from the memorandum, sharpen them, create a first draft, process feedback, work it over again.

A Real-World Example

Say you're a partner at a small corporate finance boutique with five advisors. A candidate for sale comes through. You want a teaser fast to intercept information requests from interested buyers. You ask the owner and bookkeeper for documents, they come in scattered across three emails and two folders.

Now it starts. Someone on your team reads through everything and pulls out what belongs in the teaser: company size, number of clients, growth over the past three years, main services, capital structure. That work takes two to three hours, just because the documents are scattered in different places and formats don't match. Then that same person or a colleague writes a first draft of the teaser, you review it, notice something is incomplete or wrong, send it back with comments. Eventually you turn it into a final version.

For the information memorandum itself, that work quadruples. The same cycle for each chapter. And you want it to be good, so you have multiple people review it. Total, you lose two weeks on that preparation, while the real advising, conversations with the owner about strategy and goals, still needs to happen.

What Can an AI System Do with This Work?

An AI system that knows your deal files and is connected to your email, OneDrive, and document system can automate this operational work. The system learns from your previous memoranda and teasers how you format, what information goes in what chapter, what questions you typically ask.

As soon as you receive the documents, the system can read them, check completeness (missing financial statements, org chart?), and draft follow-up questions if needed. You no longer have to dig through ten emails yourself.

For the teaser, the system automatically pulls key data from the documents you already have, puts it in the right form, and generates a first draft your team only needs to review and refine. Not three hours of gathering and typing, but half an hour of checking and sharpening.

For the memorandum itself, the system generates a first draft per chapter based on source documents. Your team focuses on what truly adds value: is the analysis sharp? Are we missing anything? How do we best showcase the strengths? They no longer read along while typing.

The system also manages versions and feedback automatically, so you no longer need to track email chains with attached Word documents or manually number versions.

The Time Saved Goes Where It Matters

This is the real benefit. Your team doesn't just save hours, they get those hours back for what truly sets an M&A firm apart: solid advice. A partner can now speak deeply with the entrepreneur much earlier in the process about their goals, their concerns, their future vision. You can conduct more thorough research on competition, customer churn, whether there are blind spots in the numbers.

Practically speaking, a memorandum now takes four or five working days instead of two weeks. This gives your team capacity for new assignments and you can show entrepreneurs progress faster. In a firm where time is the bottleneck, that directly translates to revenue.

How Do You Get Started?

It starts with clarity on where your data lives: financial statements in OneDrive or SharePoint, emails with documents going to your Outlook, deal files have a standard structure with templates. An AI system that knows this can start working immediately. You don't have to replace anything: your email system, your document folders, your templates stay exactly the same. The system works alongside them, like an extra team member who knows the structure and does the repetitive work.

Want to explore how this works for your firm? We help M&A boutiques and corporate finance firms structure their memorandum preparation and deal management so your team has more time for advising. A conversation with our team shows you what's possible for your firm.

Reach out at 5cagency.nl for a follow-up call, and we'll pinpoint where your team loses the most time.