Should You Go Public? Five Questions to Ask Before Hiring Bankers

Before engaging sponsors, before the beauty parade of investment banks, before the A1 filing — there are five questions every founder should answer honestly: (1) Why does this company need to be public? If the answer is ‘to provide liquidity for shareholders’, that is a valid reason but it sets a very different tone from ‘to fund our global expansion’. (2) Are we ready to be a public company — not financially, but operationally? Do we have a CFO who can run an earnings call? A board that can handle activist investors? Internal controls that can survive a SOX or HKEX-equivalent audit? (3) Will being public make us better or worse at what we do? Public markets demand quarterly consistency, which can either discipline or suffocate a company depending on its business model. (4) Are our shareholders aligned on the post-IPO path? If some shareholders want to sell at the first opportunity and others want to ‘hold forever’, that misalignment will surface painfully. (5) If the IPO fails — if the market doesn’t want our stock at any price we can accept — what is Plan B? If Plan B is ‘sell the company’, is there a credible buyer at a credible price?