Dennis Shelton of Bend, the former president of Morrow Snowboards of Vashon, Wash., told the Oregon Entrepreneurs Forum in Bend Thursday his experiences in taking the company public. The Central Oregon Pub Talk was titled ”Getting Big Air and Sticking the Landing – The Morrow Snowboards IPO Story.”

Shelton said the talk could also be titled ”Are you sure you want to do an IPO?”

During his tenure as president of the company from 1995 to 1997, the company’s sales doubled to $32 million and increased net income 350 percent. He successfully completed the company’s initial public offering (IPO) in 1996, raising about $25 million in equity.

In preparing to do a ”road show” in December 1995 and pre-sell the stock to institutional investors around the country, the company leaders had to refine their pitches to three-, 10- and 30-minute sound bites, said Shelton, now a strategic marketing and management consultant.

”Our smallest presentation was for one person and the largest was before 450 people in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York,” Shelton said.

The company visited 15 cities in 13 days and did 48 presentations. In the middle of the journey, the effort was going well. ”We were six times oversubscribed, meaning we had six times more buyers than available stock,” he said.

It looked as though the company would sell more than 2million shares of stock toward the high end of its $11 to $18 range and raise about $36 million. Like many snowboard companies, Morrow does nearly all its business in the final few months of each year.

”One week into December, we got the call in New York that we would miss our sales number,” Shelton said. ”Now I’ve got to call all these people and say we are not going to hit our (projected) sales. We went from six times oversubscribed to one-and-a-half times oversubscribed.”

The company managed to sell its shares at $11 per share, the low end of its projected range.

Shelton said any business should be sure an IPO is the best way to raise money only after considering other options such as selling the company or merging it.

Company leaders must remember that ”cash is king,” he added.

A business will remain successful if it operates as if it is ”bootstrapping” and not spending its money on extravagant things, he said.

Cathy Carroll can be reached at 541-383-0304 or at ccarroll@bendbulletin.com.