Week 8 Reading Reflection

I was very surprised with the amount of steps and work that went into making a company "public." When you think of starting a company, I always believed that the owner focuses more on the finances side of the business, how much will this cost, how much will you sell the product for, how will this be different enough to sell, who will I sell to, is that a large enough population to keep the company afloat, etc? However, I rarely thought about the legal aspect to it all and having to file paperwork to get your company approved etc, meanwhile, the process in order to take your business public is all about the paper work and legality of it all, it appeared. So this seemed like 3 times the work because of the extra "stamps of approval" you now need as the business owner. But, going public does seem to bring in probably the most revenue or backing to a company so I could understand how this extra work would make sense for that extra financial support.
The most confusing part of this reading was the differences between all the different financing sources, I understand that the author was trying to give brief descriptions by not going into too much detail so that the chapter wasn't a novel in itself, but some of the financial backings seemed so similar I'm not sure what the difference was. I also don't understand how you would make your decision as to who to turn to for financial support as a business owner with so many different options. How do you know which is the best for you?
Where do you start, that'd be my first question. Is there someone you can go to for advice on this? Can you go to a financial advisor for advice as to which finical source to apply to and can they help you with the application process to make sure you're prepared and will be successful in your financial sourcing search? I'm also curious if any small-business owner can apply for any single one of these backings? Can a small-business owner of say, a local boutique, apply for an IPO?
I know nothing about the financial beings of companies and financial funding process so this chapter was much too over my head for me to know if I necessarily disagreed with the author on anything. Everything he said seemed to make sense to me and I liked that he tried to explain this complicated subject in such a simple and  basic way so someone like me, who like I said had no prior understanding of the topic, could understand it at the root of it and at least kind of understand it and research it in more detail on their own.