March board meeting.You open the renewal pipeline slide. On paper, the numbers look solid — high logo renewal rates, expansion potential, optimistic AE notes. But deep down, you know the danger: timing. Half your top contracts renew in Q3, yet the plan smears them evenly across the year. The CFO wants predictability. The CEO wants […]
The Tuesday Night Forecast Spiral It always happens the same way. Tuesday night. The forecast is due in the morning. You’re staring at Salesforce pipeline data, trying to reconcile it with the cash forecast in your Excel model. The CRM says $12 million in “committed” deals will close. Finance knows only half of that ever […]
Why I Built This Company I remember the night vividly. It was 11:47 p.m. I had three different spreadsheets open, each telling me a different version of reality. Revenue looked fine in one tab, runway was evaporating in another, and the board deck waiting in my inbox demanded an answer I didn’t have. That’s when […]
The New Obsession Every Founder Shares If you’re a Gen Z or millennial founder, you already know the obsession: AI copilots rewriting code, drafting pitch decks, generating customer insights, even simulating entire product launches. Every scroll through X or LinkedIn brings another demo promising speed, leverage, and disruption. But here’s the paradox: while product, marketing, […]
The Trend Every Founder Sees — But Few Connect If you’ve scrolled LinkedIn or Twitter this week, you’ve seen it: AI copilots rewriting code, generating marketing campaigns, and even pitching investors. Every founder is asking the same question: how fast can I bend this to my advantage? But there’s one place the conversation hasn’t caught […]
The Scene: A Runway Measured in Weeks The boardroom was silent except for the clicking of laptops. A startup CEO had just walked investors through their “18 months of runway.” The numbers looked neat. Charts were polished. Yet one backer leaned forward and asked a simple question: “What happens if churn doubles?” The room froze. […]
The Provocation “Annual planning is dead.” That’s not the kind of line you expect to hear from a finance leader. It’s the sort of heresy that makes a boardroom go silent and a CFO shift in their chair. Yet Sarah Schlott, Founder & CEO of The Schlott Company, has built her reputation on saying the […]
The Tuesday Night Forecast Spiral It’s always Tuesday night.The board deck is due in 48 hours.Your forecast says margins are holding steady. But your gut says otherwise. Support costs have crept up. New customer implementations are heavier than expected. And the last churn cohort looked more expensive to serve than the models predicted. You know […]
It’s the Sunday night before a board meeting, and your SaaS CFO is pacing the living room like a trial lawyer rehearsing an opening argument. ARR is growing. Churn looks stable. CAC payback is “reasonable enough.” And yet, something’s off. The deferred revenue balance doesn’t reconcile with the forecast. The new cohort model shows higher […]
The expense that grows faster than your ARR. Why SaaS Support Cost Forecasting Matters Most SaaS FP&A models obsess over ARR and gross margin. But buried in opex is a line item that can break forecasts: customer support cost forecasting in SaaS FP&A. Support feels predictable — until it isn’t. A new product launch, a […]