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Dan Herr

Summary

Dan Herr is a co-host of Deal Sourcery alongside Matt Rooney. Across episodes, Dan brings the perspective of a business development practitioner who has built and run sourcing functions inside a PE firm — he frequently anchors conversations with concrete examples drawn from his operating experience, especially around Portfolio Operations as a sourcing channel.

Current Affiliation

Dan is currently:

Per dealsourcery.com: Dan has "closed over $1B in transactions in the last decade while building and leading world-class deal sourcing teams," and Acqwired was founded "after more than a decade sourcing more than $1B in TEV in proprietary private equity deals across software, services and industrials highly engineered end markets like aerospace, medical and consumer electronics."

NOR carve-out: Current-firm and headline-biography content on host pages may be supplied from outside the transcript per CLAUDE.md's narrow host-page NOR carve-out. Everything else on this page cites an episode.

Personal Bio

Previous Roles

  • Serent Capital — Dan led business development at Serent Capital, a lower middle market PE firm focused on B2B software and tech-enabled services. In Ep. 2 Dan describes creating a new "sourcing operations" role at Serent that he likened to rev ops for the sourcing team: "I hired, I created a new position for us at Serent that I called sourcing operations, right? Which was effectively like that, right? It's like rev ops." He also points to Serent's 30% FTE concentration in portfolio resources as a concrete selling point he could use with prospects (Leveraging Portfolio Ops for Sourcing). In Ep. 3 Dan reveals more about Serent's comp philosophy: a lower base salary paired with high upside, where "you could earn $800,000 per year." He notes this structure didn't appeal to everyone — Serent lost junior candidates to competing offers with $140K bases but capped bonus upside of ~$25K.

Hosting Style & Perspectives

Dan draws heavily on his own operating experience to pressure-test guest frameworks. A few recurring themes:

  • Portfolio ops as a sourcing lever. In Ep. 2 Dan argues that "the most valuable thing that PortfolioOps does is that it exists and that I can use it as a selling point," framing portfolio operations as the firm's differentiator in competitive sourcing conversations.

  • Content repurposing for outreach. Dan enthusiastically adopted Kate Hopkins's "data snacks" framing in Ep. 2 ("I've got to start using that — data snacks") and describes his own example at Serent Capital: packaging hospitality tech data (hotel opening and closure rates from a CRS portfolio company, restaurant revenue data from POS portfolio companies) into prospect-facing market insights.

  • BD comp as incentive design. In Ep. 3 Dan advocates for adapting enterprise sales comp structures to PE BD, including tiered bonus multipliers that escalate payout rates as producers exceed successive hurdles, team-based bonus components (~10% of bonus pool) to prevent opportunity hoarding, and a 50/50 base-bonus split designed to keep people "hungry, not starving." Dan predicts the top-performing BD professionals will become the highest-paid people at private equity firms within five to ten years.

  • Outreach quality over volume. In Ep. 20 Dan is blunt about industry practice: "I think the majority of private equity firms suck at messaging and suck at outreach today. It's very generic... it's about how many assets we have under management... me, me, me."

  • Relationships as the starting point. In Ep. 22 Dan frames the work around human connection: "People do deals with people they like. I'm not saying that's the only reason, but you got to start with that human element and that trust building element."

  • Outputs over inputs in sourcing metrics. In Ep. 6 Dan argues PE firms fall into the trap of measuring raw outreach volume rather than engagement results. He advocates measuring "what percentage of your top prospects have you engaged in the last quarter" instead of total calls or emails, warning that input-only metrics incentivize box-checking: "You get what you measure."

  • Granular pipeline stages. In Ep. 6 Dan advocates for 10–15 CRM pipeline stages — from first outreach through reply, quality interaction, face-to-face meeting, investment team loop-in, NDA/financials, IC, IOI, management meeting, LOI submitted, LOI signed, and closed — rather than the typical 4–5. Combined with automation, these stages enable managers to cross-sectionalize where top prospects are stuck and tailor interventions per team member.

  • Structured accountability cadence. In Ep. 6 Dan lays out five meeting types that drive sourcing performance: annual goal setting, quarterly course correction, monthly firm-wide progress updates (with naming-and-shaming and best practice sharing), monthly group coaching on SLAs, and weekly one-on-one problem-solving sessions. He insists one-on-ones should be collaborative problem-solving, not status readouts: "You have two of the best, smartest minds in sourcing at the table together right now."

  • PE firms don't dogfood. In Ep. 6 Dan calls out a persistent blind spot: PE firms push sales and marketing best practices on portfolio companies but fail to apply those disciplines internally. "Somehow as an industry, we've been okay with that."

Notable Quotes

"The most valuable thing that PortfolioOps does is that it exists and that I can use it as a selling point." — Dan Herr, Ep. 2

"I hired, I created a new position for us at Serent that I called sourcing operations, right? Which was effectively like that, right? It's like rev ops." — Dan Herr, Ep. 2

"You need me to be hungry, not starving." — Dan Herr, Ep. 3

"Your success as a sourcing professional is highly dependent upon who you're coupled with." — Dan Herr, Ep. 3

"The top performing business development professionals are going to become the top paid people at private equity firms." — Dan Herr, Ep. 3

"I think the majority of private equity firms suck at messaging and suck at outreach today. It's very generic... it's about how many assets we have under management... me, me, me." — Dan Herr, Ep. 20

"People do deals with people they like. I'm not saying that's the only reason, but you got to start with that human element and that trust building element." — Dan Herr, Ep. 22

"We all have these portfolio companies where we're pushing sales and marketing initiatives and best practices on them. And we have all these metrics for our sales professionals. But for some reason, we don't dogfood that inside of the firms." — Dan Herr, Ep. 6

"You get what you measure." — Dan Herr, Ep. 6

"Goals are nothing if you don't perform." — Dan Herr, Ep. 6

"You have two of the best, smartest minds in sourcing at the table together right now. What's the best and highest use of your time? To me, the best use is for that to be a problem solving session." — Dan Herr, Ep. 6

Cross-References