Barry Lyon recently made a career move that may have seemed odd. He was a rising executive as president of subsidiaries at Danaher, a Fortune 500 manufacturing conglomerate with 71,000 employees. Last summer, in his mid-40s, he left Danaher to become CEO of Industrial Physics, a 300-employee test and inspection company comprising 14 highly specialized brands.
The job’s appeal wouldn’t seem obvious except for one irresistible feature: Industrial Physics is owned by KKR, one of the world’s largest and most famous private equity firms, and it has big plans for the company. “I talked to other people who have made the jump from a public company over to a private equity CEO,” Lyon says. “The resounding theme is they just wish they did it earlier.”
