In April 2020, Laura Miller stepped into her first CFO role at Pampered Chef. According to Miller, she was pregnant with her second child, working with a new CEO and joining an executive team that had never worked together in the building before the pandemic sent everyone home.
Demand was anything but predictable. Miller tells us that Pampered Chef’s independent consultants could hold parties online while consumers, confined to their homes, purchased kitchen equipment and looked for ways to earn money. That summer brought a business boom—and immediate pressure on working capital, supply chains and forecasting.
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Miller says the company quickly replaced its rolling forecast with a daily forecast. One of her first CFO assignments was determining what would happen if the warehouse could not remain open as an essential business. Finance modeled scenarios “from zero to quadruple” while weighing when to continue accepting orders, when to stop, and how to manage back orders without overwhelming the business.
The professional challenge unfolded alongside a personal one: Miller tells us that she had her baby in June. Navigating both made the period “the fastest crash course into being a CFO.”
The experience also overturned much of her preparation. Miller says she had spent “16, 18 months prepping and planning to be a CFO,” yet none of the issues she had anticipated became her greatest challenges after taking the role.
Her lesson emerges from that collision between preparation and reality: the CFO’s work is not simply executing a carefully developed plan. Sometimes it means rebuilding the forecast daily, considering outcomes at opposite extremes and learning the role while the conditions surrounding it continue to change.
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CFOTL: For listeners new to Strata, what does the company provide, whom does it serve, and where is the opportunity?
Miller: Strata Decision Technology serves highly complex industries. We don’t serve everyone; we’re in specific markets. You mentioned healthcare at the opening. We also serve higher education and financial institutions—complex, highly regulated industries. We serve more than 2,300 organizations, and we are a software platform that helps the CFO office, as well as the broader executive team and operational leaders within these organizations, make strategic and financial decisions. We bring financial, operational, and strategic data into one platform across many modules. There are modules such as budgeting, forecasting, planning, workforce management, and, forecasting, cost accounting management,, which is really important. Leaders use this platform to make strategic decisions every day.
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CFOTL: Which customer need is creating the most momentum for the business?
Miller: Today, we serve quite a few healthcare customers, where the underlying thesis is around cost accounting, planning, reporting, and so on. The momentum comes from 30 years of data intelligence, experience, nomenclature, and data standardization across all of our 2,300 organizations. We do benchmarking and comparative analytics across the industry, so we’re well positioned for the direction we’re headed with our new product, which is an intelligence layer that sits on top of this and is driven by artificial intelligence. You’re able to use natural language to understand your business and what’s happening within it in real time, as quickly as possible, to make the best decisions. What’s driving the organization is our longstanding history with these customers and the underlying data we utilize.
CFOTL: Roper acquired Strata and Syntellis and brought the companies together. How is that combination shaping the business today, and what benefits are still emerging?
Miller: Just to clarify, Roper bought them, but those two events were pretty far apart. They were not simultaneous. Roper bought Strata and, years later, bought Syntellis and merged the two companies. The first benefit is that we continue to be the market leader in the industries we serve while bringing together the intelligence of the two organizations. With Syntellis also came two new industries. Strata had not previously been in financial institutions or higher education; those came with the Syntellis acquisition or combination. Previously, Strata was healthcare-focused, and now it has expanded more broadly into these highly regulated, complex environments. That’s the first major change. Beyond that, we’re bringing together the knowledge, the underlying data, and the broader infrastructure needed to remain experts in the markets we serve.
Strata Decision Technology | www.stratadecision.com | Chicago, IL