Public vs. Private — Wall Street Sways Fortunes

The direct mail and package printing firm based in Neenah, WI, opted to go private, in part, to generate liquidity for shareholders. As a microcap company, Outlook shareholders were at the mercy of Wall Street.

“Our investors found their investment going up and down, wildly, totally unrelated to the performance of the company,” Baksha says. “It was time to give them the liquidity they couldn’t get by selling their stock. And when you combine that with the cost of Sarbanes-Oxley, that would have put our ‘cost of being public’ bills in excess of $1 million per year, which is 10 percent to 11 percent of our EBITDA. It didn’t make sense to stay public and not give (shareholders) any kind of return on their equity.”