Decision architecture for lower-middle-market acquisitions
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 check — 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 Sprint 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 and a DBA candidate at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, known for its rigorous practitioner-scholar business doctorate.
Before Decision Signal, nearly two decades were spent reading thousands of open-ended, structured responses a year — first as a frontline evaluator, then training others to do it consistently, then designing the scoring architecture itself.
The work was never about the score. It was about spotting the same handful of hidden problems surfacing again and again, buried in language no rubric was built to catch — a pattern-recognition instinct sharpened by sheer repetition. That same discernment was tested for years against individual and small-business tax filings — environments where a missed inconsistency compounds quickly, and where governance and compliance leave no room for assumption.
Redirected at acquisition decisions, that instinct is what a Sprint brings to your deal — not a score, but the undiscovered hangup before it costs you the deal.
This practice exists because deals keep closing
with critical issues no one caught in time.
Don't let that be your story.
The engagement
A structured diagnostic against a specific live decision node — under LOI, at signing, in the first 100 days. From confirmation to delivery in 48 to 72 hours: pattern identification, assumption mapping, and one clear deliverable.
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.