1203: Making Strategy—and the Money—Move Together | Laura Miller, CFO, Strata Design Technology

Laura Miller traces her career arc from starting at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Phoenix, where she took an early opportunity to work overseas in Geneva, Switzerland, learning French and developing a global perspective. Though this international assignment initially slowed her advancement at PwC (as peers who stayed gained more visibility), she views it as the best part of her firm experience and foundational to her willingness to embrace new challenges throughout her career.

After five years at PwC, Miller transitioned to Starwood Hotels, initially in a SOX compliance role before deliberately moving into a property-level finance director position at the Westin Cureland to gain operational experience and lead a team. This move, across the street from corporate offices, allowed her to build bridges between corporate strategy and hotel operations while developing people leadership skills—an area she identified as crucial to her development. She spent seven years at Starwood, moving through various roles including FP&A, before recognizing her preference for operational and people-focused work over individual contributor analytics roles.

Miller then moved into private equity environments, first as a global controller at Stats (a sports companies holding company), where she experienced leading leaders rather than just individual contributors, and subsequently to a Berkshire Hathaway-owned company where she worked in the CFO office for four years with a clear path to the CFO role. This strategic positioning proved critical to her transition.

Her most significant learning experience came in April 2020 when she became CFO of Pampered Chef while simultaneously becoming a new mother and navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite 16-18 months of preparation for the CFO role, virtually none of her planning addressed the actual challenges she faced: supply chain disruptions, daily forecasting instead of rolling forecasts, working capital management, and making real-time decisions about order acceptance, back orders, and stop-sell policies. She learned more in this crash-course period than in years of preparation, discovering that growth and cash management are deeply intertwined during crisis periods.

At Strata Decision Technology, Miller now leads finance for a software platform serving 2,300+ organizations across healthcare, higher education, and financial services. The company provides budgeting, forecasting, planning, and cost accounting modules, with recent momentum driven by a new AI-powered intelligence layer that allows customers to query their financial and operational data using natural language. Strata was acquired by Roper and later merged with Centellas, expanding from healthcare focus into additional regulated industries. The company operates on a SaaS model with implementation services, and Miller tracks customer adoption through module expansion, user additions, acquisition-related growth, cloud migration, and implementation timelines.

Miller emphasizes finance's strategic role in resource allocation, operating through: establishing strategic planning processes, allocating both dollars and people based on priorities, measuring outcomes through dashboards, and solving problems when results diverge from expectations. She views continuous value creation as central to finance's partnership with the business.

Regarding AI, Strata approaches it through three lenses: development (using AI in product coding), internal usage (across the organization), and customer-facing products that embed AI. Miller argues that as an incumbent software vendor, Strata should develop AI capabilities within its platform rather than layering AI on top, positioning itself as the trusted partner that evolves alongside customer needs. She notes that AI has already changed Strata's product roadmap, with the intelligence layer being a development that likely wouldn't have existed pre-AI.

On career transitions, Miller emphasizes the importance of following passion for companies and cultures, drawing on mentor relationships and ownership references, and taking time to ensure the right fit. She acknowledges that senior-level recruitment is far more complex and networking-dependent than early-career job searching, and notes that while she hasn't needed to move on from roles due to poor fit, she wouldn't hesitate to do so if necessary.

Her near-term priorities as CFO center on managing AI costs and token usage while creating measurable value, and strategically focusing product development and go-to-market efforts for critical new products.