When the Switch to PE Makes Sense

Long Angle is a private, vetted global community of accomplished entrepreneurs, executives, and professionals who have reached meaningful financial milestones and want to navigate wealth with peers who understand their challenges, opportunities, responsibilities, and ambitions.

Hosted by the founders of the Long Angle community, Navigating Wealth is a podcast for founders, executives, and investor operators who have built significant wealth. Each episode features a guest with an unusual career journey and deep expertise across some aspect of the economy, investing, family, health, or lifestyle.

Today we're thrilled to welcome Marc Boreham. He is the President and CEO of Technical Safety Services, a leading private equity-backed laboratory services company. Prior to joining TSS, Marc spent two decades at Agilent Technologies, including leading its billion-dollar field services organization before his 40th birthday. Marc shares his surprising insights on why PE firms can actually offer better work-life balance than Fortune 500 companies, how he thinks about investment risk after achieving financial independence, and the stark differences between decision-making in large corporations versus smaller PE-backed firms.

Key Topics Covered:

• How to allocate investments after reaching financial independence—balancing safe "don't break glass" portfolios with high-risk alternative investments

• Why PE-backed companies can offer better work-life balance than public Fortune 500 firms

• The meeting paradox: why big companies can't get out of their own way and how diffused responsibility creates decision paralysis

• Marc's transition from running a $1B+ division at Agilent to becoming a PE-backed CEO

• The tradeoff between decision-making speed and execution power at different company scales

• How to maintain agility while scaling: doing what made big companies big without the bureaucracy

• Risk tolerance in business: moving from zero-risk mentality to calculated decision-making

• The reality of PE value creation vs. financial engineering

• Why competitive edge and curiosity drive continued risk-taking even after financial success

Links:

• Marc Boreham on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boreham

• Technical Safety Services: https://www.techsafety.com

• Join Long Angle: https://longangle.com

Chapters: 

00:00 - Intro 

01:00 - Welcome to Navigating Wealth: Marc Boreham 

01:30 - Investment Risk After Financial Independence

04:45 - Bond Allocation Debate

10:17 - Why Marc Left Agilent for Private Equity

17:58 - Private Equity vs. Fortune 500 Work Culture

25:05 - The Economics of PE-Backed Companies

29:39 - Decision-Making Speed vs. Execution Power

42:01 - ​​Why Big Companies Can't Kill Their Meetings

46:46 - Risk Tolerance and Organizational Paralysis

47:59 - Connecting with Marc and Closing thoughts