Middle Market Deals and how to buy, sell and raise capital from $5 to $500 million

Today, Shelli Gardner, CEO and Founder of Stampin' Up, spoke to the Utah Chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth.  Stampin' Up is a $300+ million revenue scrapbooking company based in Utah.  (I know, I promised not to mention scrapbooking, but I can't help it.)

The following is a short excerpt from Shelli's official bio.

Later, the company moved to Kanab, Utah.  Kanab can be found on a map dead center in the region marked "nowhere."  You can't get there from here.  Or from anywhere else for that matter.    Two years ago, the company moved its headquarters and distribution center to the Salt Lake Valley--no where near nowhere.  All the while, the Company has kept a production facility in Kanab.

The New York Times Deal Book blog includes a note about Patrick Byrne's relationship with his father, John "Jack" Byrne, including their disagreement over Patrick's efforts to encourage reform in the stock market over short selling.  As you know, Patrick is the CEO of Overstock.com Inc.(Nasdaq: OSTK) and his father sits as the Chairman.  The senior Byrne is a billionaire who made his name by turning around Geico in the 1970s.

Patrick himself describes his efforts as a "jihad" to reform Wall Street, which he calls a "cesspool of greed and corruption."  His focus is on the practice of short-selling, which he points out is inadequately regulated.  He's even sued some hedge funds.

I have been considering of late the ethical implications of over-regulation. While over-regulation is difficult to define, let's presume for a moment that we could agree on what that would mean.

If the rules of play within a given arena, say securities regulations, are too complex to be followed by many practitioners, three problems arise.

First, and of greatest concern, is that participants may feel compelled to ignore certain rules simply because they can't understand and implement all of the required nuances. Having made the decision to disregard certain regulations, a psychological barrier has been breached--the practitioner is now choosing to break the rules. The threshold for rule-breaking becomes the ethical debate rather than whether or not to comply.