Why Finance Leaders
Belong On The Floor,
Not Just Behind A Desk
Samantha Singer spent years rising through hospitality finance before she realized the job could not be done from a desk. Here is what changed when she started asking operators why, instead of just telling them what their numbers had to be.
- Samantha Singer, a finance leader with a background in hospitality and gaming, built her career by leaving her desk and asking operators why they run things the way they do.
- Finance often hands down a target cost or labor ratio without ever seeing what running the kitchen or the floor actually requires.
- Being present changes two things at once: finance starts asking better questions, and operators start understanding how their department feeds the company's numbers.
- The habit scales down more easily than it scales up. In a large organization, floor time takes deliberate effort, not a lucky title.
On this episode of the Agent CFO Podcast, host Ashok Manthena talks with Samantha Singer, a finance leader who has worked as a CFO and controller across hospitality and gaming, an industry where the accounting looks nothing like a typical corporate close. Weekends do not run like weekdays. Seasonality is not a footnote, it drives the whole calendar. And the person who understands why a number moved is rarely the person sitting furthest from where it happened.
Singer's answer to that gap was simple to describe and harder to practice: get out from behind the computer and onto the floor.
Watch the full conversation with Samantha Singer, or keep reading below.
The problem with managing from a spreadsheet
Singer traces the shift to a specific frustration. As she rose into more senior finance roles, she noticed how often the department told operators what their numbers had to be, a target food cost, a labor ceiling, without ever having stood in the kitchen those operators ran.
In her words
"It wasn't efficient sitting behind a computer not understanding what the operators were doing. Very often the finance department tells the operators, you have to adhere to these metrics, this is what your costs have to be, this is what your labor has to be, but they've never actually stepped foot and understood how come the operators do things a certain way."
It started with questions, not a mandate
Singer did not set out to reinvent how finance operates in hospitality. She started by asking more questions, and the questions kept pulling her back onto the floor. That habit did two things she had not fully planned for.
Her current mandate: elevating food and beverage at a new casino
That same instinct is driving Singer's work today. She is part of the team opening a new casino, with a mandate to raise its food and beverage standard. Her reasoning is direct: gaming brings people in, but food and beverage is what keeps them there once they are done playing.
Casinos, she noted plainly in the conversation, are a profitable business. That makes F&B less of a cost center to defend and more of a lever finance can help operators pull well, provided finance understands what running that floor actually takes.
Why this is harder to replicate at scale
Ashok raised the honest limit of this approach directly in the episode: floor-level finance leadership is realistic at small and mid-sized companies. At a large organization, every layer of people between a finance leader and the operating floor makes that same closeness harder to sustain. There is no shortcut around it other than a leader choosing to spend the time, on the floor, learning the business piece by piece, on their own.
I realized very early on in my career in hospitality that you had to be a presence on the floor to understand how come the operators do things a certain way.
Samantha Singer, Agent CFO PodcastFloor-level judgment still belongs to a person. The routine work around it does not have to.
Singer's point was never that finance should abandon the numbers for the floor. It was that the numbers mean more once someone has seen where they come from. ChatFin runs the recurring analysis, variance flags, and reconciliation work that used to keep finance leaders behind their desks, so the time that opens up can go toward exactly the kind of floor presence Singer describes.
See how ChatFin frees up that timeGive your finance team back the time to be on the floor.
ChatFin runs reconciliation, variance analysis, and reporting on top of the systems you already use, so the people who understand the business are not stuck reviewing routine numbers instead of the operations behind them.