Hi all, I work for a new middle-market private equity fund. I would appreciate advice on how to format a long Investment Memorandum.
We don't have shortcuts built into word (like bulge bracket investment banks do) to help us format company colors, etc. Any advice about how I can build a macro to format stuff faster? Also the table of contents doesn't automatically update in word and it doesn't show our company colors.
Would appreciate your thoughts soon as we have a tight timeline. Many thanks in advance!
Anyone? best practices?
First off why are you building CIMs at a new PE firm? You should be reading them not building them...not trying to be mean just curious
Perhaps they are exiting an investment and have decided not to hire an IB to market their portfolio company.
Why are you building the CIM in Word? Is PowerPoint an option?
We are small and we create them for our internal meetings. We have always used word instead of powerpoint.
Do you mean an investment committee memo (investment highlights and risks, etc) which is different than a CIM and would make more sense that you're using word. I would suggest looking at past memos and seeing what formatting they use. My company has a template that we use for these memos so I just plug in the info which is probably similar. From my experience, an internal memo is more about using reader friendly formatting that allows people to review it efficiently rather than using fancy graphics and colors like a CIM. In that case, I would stick to something simple and don't go crazy with fonts/colors.
I agree with you completely. For the template you have - does any of it autopopulate - i.e. the table of contents, typical sections like deal process, operations, appendix etc? I just want to find a way to avoid manually formatting all the headers and stuff ...!
I feel your pain. My PE fund favors word docs for IC memos and it's a pain. Also we don't have the pre-loaded palette options for ppt, excel, and word like a BB does.
I will say that CIQ or Factset plugins help it just depends on how dependent you were on those at your IB. I personally never used my bank's like "custom" tool bar and don't use macros so it's easier but the color palette thing is a PAIN
Nice to hear I am not the only one! I think Factset and CIQ are too expensive ... I want to research if there is a way to set up a standardized template. I heard of this program called Thinkcell which is cheap - like $200 a year and allows you to format powerpoint charts pretty fast - but it doesn't translate into word. Did you ever consider asking your fund to switch to powerpoint?
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