Teaser
A teaser is the one- or two-page anonymous summary of a company for sale that the seller's adviser sends to potential buyers before any confidentiality agreement — the sector, the size, the growth, the headline financials and the reason for the sale, without the name. It exists to get a buyer interested enough to sign the NDA that unlocks the information memorandum, and to do so without telling the market who is selling.
- Also known as
- Blind teaser, Anonymous teaser, One-pager
- Used at
- the launch of an auction process; also for a quiet bilateral approach to two or three buyers
- Binding
- no — a marketing document; it is sent without an NDA, which is why it must not identify the company
- Typical content
- a project codename; the sector and geography; revenue, EBITDA and growth for three years and the current year; the business model in three lines; the investment highlights; the transaction (majority sale, minority, carve-out); the adviser's contact and the process timetable
- Typical reach
- 30–80 parties for a mid-market process; the NDA conversion rate — a quarter to a half — is the first signal of how the market reads the asset
- Parties
- the seller's adviser, who writes and sends it; the buyers' corporate development and deal teams, who triage a dozen a week
How a teaser works in practice
The adviser's problem is to make a company interesting without making it identifiable. A payments company with €40m of revenue in the Baltics is one of three, and the teaser has to say "a leading payments provider in Northern Europe" and give the numbers rounded. The numbers are what buyers read — revenue, EBITDA, margin, growth, recurring share — and the highlights are what the seller wants read: the licence, the customer base, the product, the management team staying. The transaction line says what is for sale and roughly when the process runs.
Buyers get many. A corporate development team at a large acquirer sees several teasers a week and answers the ones that fit a thesis it already has; a fund answers the ones in its size band and sector. The reply is a signed NDA, which brings the information memorandum and the process letter, or silence. The adviser's craft is the list: the teaser should reach the buyers who would pay the most — the strategics with an overlap, the funds with a platform in the sector — and not the ones who would read it for market intelligence and pass.
For a fintech seller the teaser is also the first regulatory sentence: "licensed as an e-money institution in the EU" is a highlight worth a paragraph to the right buyer and a reason to pass for the wrong one, and better said on page one than discovered in the data room.
Example
An adviser launches the sale of a payments company with €6m of EBITDA under the codename "Project Amber": a two-page teaser describing "a profitable, licensed payments provider serving 30,000 SME merchants in Northern Europe, €38m revenue, 22% EBITDA margin, 25% three-year growth, majority sale by founders who will remain". It goes to 52 parties — 28 strategic, 24 financial — on a Tuesday; 19 sign the NDA within two weeks, 11 of them strategic. Two of the strategics guess the company from "Northern Europe" and "30,000 merchants" before signing; one calls the founders directly, which the process letter forbade and the adviser handles by moving it to the back of the queue. Six indicative offers arrive by the deadline. The teaser did its work: it filtered 52 down to the 19 who would pay for a licensed SME acquirer, at the cost of one leak.
Common mistakes
- A teaser so anonymised it says nothing, or so specific the whole market knows who is selling by Thursday. - Headline numbers that the information memorandum later contradicts — the first credibility loss of the process. - A buyer list built from the adviser's contacts rather than from who has a reason to pay. - Sending the teaser before the information memorandum and the data room are ready, so interested buyers wait and cool. - Forgetting that a teaser is a document the seller's competitors will also receive.