Forecasting as Strategy: Sarah Schlott’s New Finance Lens

A Counterintuitive Start

Finance has always been seen as the function of “no.” No to risk. No to expansion. No to ideas that didn’t fit the spreadsheet. But what if finance wasn’t about rejection at all?

That’s the paradox Sarah Schlott leans into. For her, finance is not a brake pedal — it’s a navigation system. And it’s this reframing that has positioned her as one of today’s most relevant voices in financial planning and analysis (FP&A).

The Rise of a Finance Voice

Sarah doesn’t talk about finance like an accountant. She talks about it like a strategist. When she describes FP&A, it’s not about variance analysis or reporting packages — it’s about how finance can help founders, executives, and boards move with confidence in an unpredictable market.

“The role of FP&A isn’t just about the past,” Sarah says. “It’s about widening the lens on the future — showing leaders not just where they’ve been, but what’s possible next.”

That shift in perspective — from backward-looking reports to forward-looking strategy — is where her influence has grown.

From Technical Rigor to Strategic Relevance

The finance profession has been under transformation for years. Spreadsheets still dominate, but the pace of business has accelerated beyond the static model. Markets shift quarterly. Geopolitical volatility reshapes supply chains. AI and automation are rewriting job descriptions.

Sarah argues that finance leaders must evolve just as fast. As an FP&A expert, she pushes for finance teams to shed their role as scorekeepers and instead act as strategic partners who can help organizations navigate volatility.

“If your forecasting cadence is slower than your market cycle, you’re already behind,” she says. “The companies that thrive aren’t the ones with perfect models — they’re the ones with adaptive ones.”

The Macro Lens: Finance in an Age of Uncertainty

What makes Sarah’s perspective timely is that the macroeconomic backdrop has made forecasting harder than ever. Inflationary cycles, rising interest rates, and funding droughts have reshaped entire industries.

This uncertainty has only reinforced her core argument: finance can’t stay in the rearview mirror. Leaders need to use FP&A as a living system — one that tests scenarios, anticipates risks, and highlights opportunities faster than competitors.

Here, Sarah channels her work as a modern forecasting strategist. She frames finance as less about precision and more about agility.

“Forecasts are like weather models,” she explains. “You don’t need them to be perfect. You need them to tell you when to carry an umbrella, when to board up the windows, and when to go all-in on sunshine.”

Insights That Cut Through

Sarah’s appeal as a finance thought leader comes from her ability to make complex financial topics accessible, memorable, and actionable. Three insights stand out:

1. Finance as Navigation, Not Policing

   • “Great finance leaders don’t slow the business down. They give it the confidence to go faster — because people trust the map they’re driving with.”

2. Effort Tells

   • She emphasizes what she calls “effort tells” in financial models — those signals that reveal whether a founder or CFO has wrestled with the assumptions or just plugged numbers in. “The effort shows,” she says. “If you’ve fought with the model, the model will fight for you later.”

3. Adaptive Forecasting as Competitive Edge

   • “Forecasting used to be an annual ritual. Today, it’s a daily conversation. The winners are the teams that treat it as a muscle, not a report.”

These ideas resonate not just because they’re technically sound, but because they reframe finance as something leaders can act on immediately.

Entrepreneurial Finance and the Founder’s Dilemma

Sarah also speaks frequently to founders and entrepreneurs. For early-stage companies, the challenge is even sharper: they must make million-dollar bets with incomplete data.

Here, Sarah’s message lands with urgency. She argues that founders can no longer view FP&A as a luxury for later. It has to be embedded early, not just for investors but for survival.

“A startup without FP&A is like a pilot flying without instruments,” she warns. “You might get lucky in clear skies, but you won’t survive turbulence.”

This perspective aligns her with a growing movement to democratize finance — making forecasting and planning accessible to companies well before they can afford a full in-house team.

Finance Leadership in the Age of AI

Perhaps the most future-facing theme in Sarah’s work is her view on AI in finance. While many treat it as a buzzword or a cost-cutting tool, she sees a more nuanced future.

AI, she argues, can accelerate data cleaning, automate repetitive forecasting, and surface blind spots. But it cannot replace judgment.

“AI doesn’t eliminate the need for finance leaders,” she insists. “It eliminates the excuses. The excuse that the data was too messy, that the forecast took too long. What’s left is the real work: deciding what to do with the insight.”

For Sarah, AI in finance is not about replacement but about elevation — freeing FP&A experts to spend less time reconciling spreadsheets and more time advising on strategy.

Why Her Voice Matters Now

The finance profession is at a crossroads. The old guard of quarterly closes and static budgets is no longer sufficient. The new era demands real-time adaptation, cross-functional collaboration, and a willingness to question sacred cows.

Sarah’s role as a finance thought leader is to articulate that shift clearly and push her peers to embrace it. Her insights speak not just to CFOs, but to entrepreneurs, boards, and even investors.

She is one of the voices reframing finance not as a compliance function, but as a growth function.

A Forward-Looking Prediction

So where does this all go? Sarah believes the next decade will reshape FP&A into something unrecognizable to today’s practitioners.

• Finance teams will operate in rolling, adaptive cycles rather than static budgets.
• Forecasting will be increasingly AI-assisted but human-directed.
• Founders will expect FP&A discipline earlier — not as a “nice-to-have,” but as a survival skill.

Her prediction is blunt: “In the next five years, the companies that treat FP&A as strategy will systematically outperform those that treat it as accounting.”

And that’s the message Sarah Schlott carries into every boardroom and founder conversation: finance isn’t about slowing down the dream. It’s about building the runway to make it fly.