About this episode
Sarah Schlott, Senior Director of Finance at Tray, a leading point of sale system in entertainment, joins Glenn Hopper to tear down the sacred rituals of corporate finance. Rising from billing temp to strategic finance leader, Schlott who has been in corporate finance for 18 years, delivers brutal honesty about what’s broken in FP&A and how to fix it. She challenges everything from annual budgets to variance analysis (“forensic accounting in disguise”) while advocating for a bottoms-up, operator-first approach that actually works.
In this episode:
The power of aggressive curiosity in finance
My most accurate forecast was also the one that failed
My views on variance analysis
Running a $100M forecast in Excel
Why we shouldn’t treat the annual budget as a “golden idol”
Moving away from a “spreadsheet guilt trip” every month
From Singer-Songwriter to Finance Leader
Connect with Sarah Schlott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahschlott/
