Buyer-side advisory for independent sponsors and acquisition operators
Most of what goes wrong in a deal was already true before close.
It just hadn't been named yet.
You're in the right place if
You've done the diligence. The model works. But you can't fully articulate why you're still uncertain — and close is three weeks away.
You're an independent sponsor with capital committed and a structural assumption you keep skipping past because the seller has a good answer for it.
The deal looks different now than it did at LOI. You're not sure if that's diligence doing its job or search fatigue making you talk yourself into something.
You're a second-deal operator who knows what post-close surprise feels like, and you'd rather pay to find it early than absorb it at month four.
What this is
Decision Signal is a third-axis advisory practice. Legal and financial disciplines name the facts. Decision Signal works on the layer beneath them — the structural assumptions, cognitive patterns, and decision-design gaps that produce post-close surprises even when diligence was thorough.
You already commission a Quality of Earnings to test whether the numbers are real. This is the Quality of Deal review — QoD, the way you already say QoE — testing whether the reasoning underneath the whole deal is sound.
The failure is almost never in the data. It's in the question nobody asked. DS locates that question before you sign.
This is not coaching. A coach fixes the person. DS fixes the architecture. The process structure would have produced the same outcome for anyone in your position.
How we do it
Most diligence answers what the numbers say. A Quality of Deal review answers a different question — what hasn't been said yet, who would need to say it, and by when. It reads your deal against a library of recognized patterns and separates what's been verified from what's been assumed, what's been disclosed from what's been implied. The deliverable names the specific, previously unknown assumption at risk and hands back a working document built to resolve the critical decision in front of you.
Who's behind it
Decision Signal is built and run by Daniel N. Harris, an independent advisor to acquisition operators. His doctoral research at Case Western Reserve's Weatherhead School of Management — a practitioner-scholar DBA — studies exactly this terrain: how lower-middle-market buyers misjudge what a fair deal looks like, and what corrects it.
Notice what this seat is not. Your deal already has a CPA. It has attorneys, and maybe a QoE firm. Decision Signal doesn't compete with any of them — the third axis isn't an accounting seat or a legal seat. It's a judgment seat, and the training for judgment looks different.
Before this practice, nearly two decades were spent evaluating open-ended human reasoning at industrial scale — thousands of structured responses a year, first as a frontline evaluator, then training evaluators to score consistently, then designing the scoring architecture itself. That is calibration work: learning to spot the same handful of hidden problems surfacing again and again, buried in language no rubric was built to catch, and to be provably consistent about it. Alongside it, eighteen years running an independent tax practice — adversarial document review where a missed inconsistency compounds quickly and "we assumed" is not an accepted answer.
Redirected at acquisition decisions, that's what a review brings to your deal: not a second model — a calibrated read. The undiscovered hangup, named before it costs you the deal.
Patterns from the field
Working scenes from the Decision Signal field guide — composites drawn from real conversations across the search, sponsor, and holdco community. Details changed; no client identified. Each scene stops where the engagement begins: the why and the what are open. The how is the work.
An independent sponsor ran his thesis through several AI tools. Consistent feedback: the logic holds. Eight out of ten confidence. One question changed the read — which risks did the tools surface that you rejected? He didn't have a list. The tools surface risks in the shape of your thesis; they don't surface the risks your thesis never considered. He'd addressed every objection raised and kept no record of the ones that weren't. That isn't diligence. That's confirmation with extra steps — and the pattern is spreading as fast as the tools are.
An operator weighing a 7% equity ask from an incoming COO — anchored to the percentage for weeks. One reframe: at his target exit, 7% is roughly $450,000. So the question was never whether seven is high. It's whether this person's operational impact generates more than $450,000 of enterprise value over the hold. Percentages are psychological. Value impact is the unit. A single-axis engagement like this prices at the $3,500 floor — because the work is the same regardless of the grant size, and the decision deserves it.
Capital committed, close four weeks out, and 44% of revenue sitting on one customer relationship the seller insists is transferable. The sponsor's own words: "We keep skipping past it because the seller has a good answer for it. I think we're rationalizing." He was right to name it — most operators don't until month four. The assumption everyone keeps skipping past is almost always the load-bearing one. That's the axis a review starts on.
The Known vs. Assumed Ledger is a twelve-question instrument for a live deal. It separates what you've verified from what you've assumed — dressed as known — and takes about twenty minutes against a deal you're actually in.
Most operators who run it find the same thing: more live assumptions than there are diligence hours left to resolve them. That's not a diligence failure. It's the architecture of deal timelines — knowledge is expensive, assumptions are free, and close dates don't wait for either. The Ledger won't resolve the assumptions. It will tell you how many you're carrying, which ones are load-bearing, and whether the gap between what you know and what you've assumed is one you can live with.
Free with a subscription to the Decision Signal Journal.
It arrives with the welcome note, immediately.
The Journal is the practice's published pattern work — one structural read at a time.
No charge, no follow-up sequence.
No position in the outcome
Since this practice opened, adjacent professionals have offered generous referral arrangements — the customary way one practice honors another for a name passed along. The offers were made with respect, and received the same way. Each one was quietly declined.
The objection was never to the people offering. It's to the architecture underneath. Referral fees work fine in practices built to absorb them, and for many professions they do. But in a practice where discretion and discernment are the product — where a client is paying to hear what they may not want to hear — a fee riding on the introduction is poison to the very trust being purchased. To be chosen for that lane, a practice has to stay on the high road that put it there.
So, stated publicly: Decision Signal accepts no referral honorariums, and pays none. The advice holds no position in whether a deal closes, and no fee rides on how a client arrived. When this practice passes a name to another professional, the name is given as mutual respect — a trust that they'll treat the person sent with the same discernment Decision Signal would. The only payment asked in return: do their very best for the person sent.
This practice exists because deals keep closing
with critical issues no one caught in time.
Don't let that be your story.
The engagements
The full check is the QoD Sprint — the complete Quality of Deal review, run across a live deal: pattern identification, assumption mapping, one clear deliverable within four days of a confirmed intake.
Most first engagements start smaller. The Single-Axis QoD takes one axis — the single stated decision in front of you — and resolves it at the same depth. Same method, one node. It's how most clients experience the thinking before committing a full deal to it.
The fee is a ratio, not a rate card: half a percent of the value you say the deal — or the decision — carries. A $700K option prices near the floor. A decision that carries the whole deal prices like it. And delivery scales with scope the way the fee scales with value — one axis inside 72 hours, a Sprint across two inside four days. Past two axes, complexity sets the calendar, so the date is quoted like the fee. Either way it's one number and one date, confirmed before intake opens — no hourly meter, no scope creep, no success fee.
DS works on the architecture that gets you there
without losing a year to a question nobody asked.
DS works on the architecture that
gets you there without losing
a year to a question nobody asked.
Finish the intake and give us seventy-two hours
and we'll find the regret you'd feel in six months.
Finish the intake and give us
seventy-two hours and we'll find
the regret you'd feel in six months.
Or book a 15-minute call directly.
Not in a live deal yet? Subscribe to the Journal and start with the Ledger — it runs backward against your last deal, too.