The Myth of “Time Savings” Most teams justify Excel automation with a single argument:“It’ll save us hours.” And it does.But that’s not the real return. Time saved is the surface ROI — the easy win you can measure in hours reclaimed or manual steps eliminated.The hidden ROI lives deeper — in the decisions, precision, and […]
The problem isn’t your data. It’s your model’s belief system. Every forecast carries an invisible worldview — how the company thinks growth “should” behave.But as markets shift faster than spreadsheets update, those belief systems quietly harden into constraints. The result?Your forecast doesn’t just predict the future.It limits it. At The Schlott Company, we’ve rebuilt hundreds […]
Operational Leverage Liberation: How FP&A Measures and Monetises Hidden Cost Elasticity When revenue swings, CFOs panic.When costs don’t move with it, FP&A panics louder. We’ve all seen it—sales dip 10 percent, but expenses refuse to follow.Margins implode not because revenue fell, but because costs stayed still. That’s operational leverage in action—and mis-action. Most finance teams […]
Shadow Liquidity in FP&A: Unlocking Hidden Working-Capital Levers for Resilient Enterprises Finance loves visibility.Cash, cost, margin — we model what we can see.But what if the most valuable liquidity isn’t visible at all? In every company sits a quiet balance sheet.Not the one in the ERP — the one hiding in contracts, supplier terms, deferred […]
Beyond Budgets: How FP&A Can Serve as the Third Line of Defence Most finance teams still see risk as someone else’s problem.Compliance writes the rules.Audit checks the boxes.FP&A builds the model. But every forecast is a risk statement — a reflection of where the business could break.The problem?We treat those models like math, not warning […]
We once reviewed a model from a CFO who claimed his forecast was accurate to the penny. It wasn’t.It only looked that way. The workbook was polished — balanced, reconciled, color-coded, every cell accounted for. Yet inside that perfection lived a quiet flaw that erodes credibility across finance teams: false precision. The Illusion of Accuracy […]
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 quiet fragility of FP&A’s favorite tool. Why Driver-Based Forecasting Fails in FP&A Every finance leader preaches driver-based planning. It’s elegant: revenue linked to sales capacity, churn tied to retention, headcount driving operating expenses. But the moment volatility hits — a market downturn, a hiring freeze, or a sudden churn spike — those neat branches […]