One major difference between publicly and privately held companies is the way they deal with public disclosure. A public company has to reveal everything quarterly and annually to the SEC who reviews this information. The company has to hire accountants who can prepare these reports to submit to the SEC, which means paying more workers. Public companies have more investors compared to private companies, which means if the company loses money, that loss will be divided among all of those people rather than only affecting the owner. However, having more people could result in delays in decision making processes. For private companies there is complete ownership. Decision making is a lot quicker with a small number of investors and board of directors. These companies don’t have to report their earnings to the SEC, which means they don’t need to hire accountants who prepare these documents. Investors can’t find out about the fluctuations in the companies’ earnings from the previous years since it is kept private. One con is that if the company loses money, the owner will lose a lot since there isn’t as many partners.