The noise is getting louder SpaceX just raised $75bn in the largest IPO ever. Flutter is pulling its listing from the London Stock Exchange to focus on New York. Every week, another headline about who is going public, who is selling, who is staying private. And if you run your own thing, you start wondering: should I be doing something here? Most of the time, the answer is no. But sometimes it is yes. The problem is that the decision gets made for the wrong reasons. People chase liquidity events because they are tired, or because someone told them the market is hot, or because a competitor did it. None of those are good reasons on their own. I have watched people make this decision well and badly. The difference is almost always whether they understood what they were actually optimising for. What you are really choosing between Let me be specific about what each option actually means. Staying private means you keep control. You answer to yourself, maybe a small group of investors or partners. You can move fast, change direction, take risks without explaining yourself to a board. The trade-off is that your equity is illiquid. You cannot easily turn your ownership into cash. Growth is constrained by what you can fund internally or raise privately. Selling means you exchange ownership for cash, usually with an earn-out period where you stay involved. You get certainty. You also give up the future upside. If the business triples in value after you sell, that is someone else's gain. And you will likely spend two to four years working for the acquirer, which feels very different from working for yourself. Listing means you trade liquidity for scrutiny. Public markets give you access to capital and let you cash out over time. But you now report quarterly, manage investor relations, and operate under rules designed for much larger organisations. The compliance costs alone can run £200,000 to £500,000 annually for a smaller listed company. These are not interchangeable paths. They lead to fundamentally different lives. The questions that actually matter When I work with someone on this decision, I start with three questions. First: what do you want your days to look like in three years? Not your net worth. Not your exit multiple. Your actual days. If you sell, you will probably be an employee. If you list, you will be a public company CEO, which is a specific job with specific demands. If you stay private, you keep the autonomy but also the uncertainty. Most people skip this question. They focus on the financial outcome and assume they will figure out the lifestyle later. That is backwards. Second: what is the business actually worth, and to whom? A business is worth different amounts to different buyers. A strategic acquirer might pay 8x EBITDA because they can integrate your product and cut costs. A private equity firm might pay 5x because they are buying cash flow. The public market might value you at 15x revenue if you are growing fast enough, or barely at all if you are not. You need to know these numbers before you can make a rational decision. I have seen people turn down offers because they thought the public market would value them higher, only to discover that the public market did not care about their sector at all. Third: what happens if you do nothing for two more years? This is the question people forget. Staying private is not a passive choice. The business will change. The market will change. Your competitors will make moves. In two years, you might have more options or fewer. I helped someone work through this last year using the Decision Matrix at alira.london. They were torn between a solid acquisition offer and staying private to grow. When we mapped out the scenarios properly, they realised the offer was only attractive because they were exhausted. The real problem was operational, not strategic. They fixed the operations, turned down the offer, and now have a business worth 40% more. The timing trap People obsess over market timing. They read about SpaceX's IPO and think they need to move before the window closes. Or they see the UK economy contracting and decide to wait for better conditions. Here is what I have learned: you cannot time the market, but you can time your readiness. If your financials are messy, you are not ready to sell. If your management team cannot run the business without you, you are not ready to list. If you do not know your customer acquisition cost within £5, you are not ready for due diligence. The market will do what it does. Your job is to be ready when you decide to move. When each option makes sense Stay private if: You still have conviction about where the business is going. You have the resources to fund the next phase. You are not burned out. The business needs you specifically, and you want to be there. Sell if: You have reached the limit of what you can build alone. A larger organisation can take it further than you can. You want certainty over upside. You are ready to move on, properly ready, not just tired. List if: You need significant capital for growth. You have a management team that can handle public company demands. Your business model is understood by public market investors. You want liquidity but also want to stay involved long-term. Notice that none of these start with "the market is hot" or "someone made an offer". Those are triggers for analysis, not reasons for decisions. What to do this week Calculate your real number. What would you need to walk away with, after tax, to feel genuinely good about selling? Not a fantasy number. A real one that accounts for what you would do next. Write it down. Map your readiness gaps. Use the SWOT Analysis tool at alira.london to identify what would need to change before you could seriously pursue each option. If your answer is "nothing", you are not thinking hard enough. Talk to someone who has done it. Not an advisor who profits from the transaction. Someone who actually sold, or listed, or chose to stay private. Ask them what surprised them. Their answer will be more useful than any article, including this one.