Public offerings may be back, but Kohler and other big U.S. private companies show why going public may not always be the thing to do. For Kohler, according to Forbes, the 130-year-old Wisconsin maker of kitchen and bath fixtures, it comes down to long-term planning. “When we say ‘long-term,’ we’re not talking about three or five years,” says Natalie Black, Kohler’s general counsel. “We mean generations.”

Kohler is an exception to the old saw that the first generation earns the money and the third fritters it away. Black’s husband, Chairman and President Herbert V. Kohler, Jr., is a grandson of found John Michael Kohler, an Austrian immigrant who created the company’s first bathtub by baking enamel into a horse trough. Kohler wants to keep the business in the family. He oversaw a recapitalization of the company in 1998 that makes it harder for him or any Kohler heir to sell shares to the public. Voting control of Kohler’s shares is now held by an ironclad trust that makes a public offering or any other sale “highly unlikely,” Black says.

Free from the quarterly pressure of Wall Street conference calls, Kohler is able to be more patient in its business planning than its public peers. Take China -a promising but difficult market for foreigners. Kohler, which had exported products to China since the 1930s, started manufacturing in the country in 1991 when foreign companies still had to form joint ventures with local partners. “That was a big risk for us,” Black says.

Today all of Kohler’s operations in China are wholly owned, profitable and among the company’s fastest growing. Black says: “If not for our being private, we probably never would have tried to enter China .”

Kohler’s expansion into the resort business is also something that Wall Street might have vetoed. In the 1970s consultants told the company to tear down a building one hour north of Milwaukee (originally used as housing for employees) or convert it into offices. Kohler had a different idea: turn it into a hotel. Kohler later bought an abandoned military airstrip nearby.

No faint-hearted diversification. “There was still live ammunition there when we bought it,” Black recalls. “It was an environment nightmare.” Today the former airstrip is the Whistling Straights golf course, which staged the 2004 PGA Championship, and the old building was reincarnated as the American Club, the Midwest ’s only luxury resort hotel to get the AAA’s highest rating. This and a string of other resorts present an opportunity for synergy, of a sort: The hotels showcase Kohler’s furniture, fixtures, whirlpool bathtubs and power generators.

Among enterprises of their size, the holdouts in the table are the exception. Big companies need public shares for any of several reasons, says Jon Anda, global head of corporate finance at Morgan Stanley : they offer a source of new capital, a currency for acquisitions, liquidity for estate planning and a means to reward employees with options.

Kohler’s Black notes that job security can be as alluring in today’s shaky job market as stock options were in the bubble years. “Okay, we don’t have options,” she says. But we’re not going anywhere, and we’re not going to get taken over.”

Not that Kohler stock would be such a bad deal: Executives are able to buy and sell shares from Kohler at book value, which has compounded at an 11% annualized rate over the past 32 years-easily beating the S & P 500’s 7.5% return, minus dividends on either investment.