Selling Your Startup

5Preparing the Company's Pitchbook

Your company's pitchbook or acquisition memorandum is a vital piece of the puzzle for achieving the best possible exit. Like a pitch deck in equity fundraising, a pitchbook is about presenting your business and the opportunity, and selling both.

If you're thinking you've become pretty adept at whipping up pitch decks to raise capital on the fly and so the pitchbook will be a breeze, you should know that creating a pitchbook is a little more in-depth.

You'll have more to present, and the expectations of readers will be much higher. You may not be running ads or putting a for sale sign in your window, but your pitchbook is your chance to make the pitch and present the vision of the outcome of your companies working together to create value.

Packaging the Message

So how do you package all of your pertinent information, the data on your company, and deliver a subtle sales pitch?

Aside from more sensitive and in-depth data (which should be uploaded to your deal room in the cloud with revocable access), the best way to convey all of the necessary information is in a slide format, similar to a pitch deck.

Although effective pitch decks have become more condensed and simplified, when you get to the stage of selling your business, your presentation will need to have a lot more meat on the bone.

As a starting point, consider that you now probably have a lot more hard data and information to share versus when you first floated your idea in your deck ...