Charlotte Fudge and the business hiding in the paperwork

Paperwork is an unlikely place to look for a founder story. It has poor lighting, repetitive dialogue and a cast of invoices. Charlotte Fudge nevertheless found the beginnings of a software company there. While running her own business, she encountered a collection of administrative jobs that needed to work together. Staff had to be scheduled. Information had to be organized. The business needed a system that understood the relationship between those tasks.

Fudge sought technical expertise to build software around that work. CentralReach, founded in 2012, grew from the practical demands of operating a business. Its origin gives her story a particular shape: an operator encountering a problem from the customer’s side of the desk, then helping create something other operators could use. The attraction was in the daily repetitions. A task that looks minor from a distance can become quite a companion when it returns every morning.

A founder on the customer’s side of the desk

There is a useful distinction between identifying a market and having to finish its paperwork. Fudge’s experience supplied the latter. The company’s early premise joined several familiar administrative needs in one place, rather than asking an owner to treat each as an isolated chore. Scheduling and billing may occupy different columns in a product description. In a working business, they belong to the same day.

That proximity matters when considering her move into software. She had experienced the work she wanted the product to organize. Seeking technical help was the next documented step. It placed operational knowledge alongside the expertise required to turn a recurring problem into a usable tool. The founder’s contribution began with knowing what needed to happen, and why the existing arrangements were consuming attention.

A business built around such tasks has an unusually concrete examination to pass. Can someone find the information? Can colleagues coordinate? Can the necessary work be completed without another detour? These are ordinary questions, which is precisely their appeal. Software earns a place in an office through the accumulation of small, useful answers.

Five minutes into the demonstration

By October 2015, Fudge was personally presenting a CentralReach product webinar. The recorded presentation introduced an updated interface and improvements to navigation, reporting and the organization of goals and targets. Around five minutes into the demonstration, attention turned to the mobile-optimized interface. This is a revealing piece of her public working life: the founding CEO explaining changes that users would encounter on a screen.

Product demonstrations have their own peculiar drama. The plot advances when a menu becomes easier to navigate. A reporting option makes an entrance. The audience wants to know where something has moved, and whether the change will help with work already waiting. Fudge’s appearance in that setting puts a practical detail into the founder portrait. She was participating in the explanation of the product itself.

The updates were specific. Branch filters gained color coding. Navigation for adding and editing branches improved. Reporting options expanded. Each sounds modest when separated from its context. Together they show the sort of recurring refinement that business software requires: taking a complicated working process and making its individual steps easier to locate and follow.

“To say that I am ecstatic about this partnership is an understatement.”Charlotte Fudge, February 2018

The less photogenic promise

Another part of Fudge’s company-building work concerned trust. In 2017, CentralReach announced a SOC 3 security certification. Fudge spoke publicly about giving users assurance that the company’s services met security standards. For a business asking customers to organize important information in its software, the promise extended beyond the appearance of the interface.

Security is an awkward guest in a founder profile. It rarely supplies a picturesque anecdote. Yet it belongs in this one because it shows the obligations that came with Fudge’s original idea. Once customers depend on a system, the company must attend to the conditions under which that system operates. The useful tool acquires responsibilities.

Consider what that does to the original operating problem. A founder starts with work that needs organizing. Customers then entrust the software with part of their own organization. The product has to justify that decision over time. Features may bring a customer to the demonstration; reliability and confidence help determine whether the software becomes part of the furniture.

The year the numbers changed

CentralReach was self-funded before Insight Venture Partners invested in February 2018. By the investment announcement, the company served more than 500 customers and employed more than 100 team members. Sales had increased by over 65% in 2017. Those figures give the founding period a useful scale. Fudge’s operating problem had become a business with customers, employees and a substantial pace of growth.

The investment introduced another kind of expertise. Insight specialized in software businesses, and Fudge welcomed the experience it could bring to CentralReach’s expansion. Her response was conspicuously enthusiastic. The announcement paired that enthusiasm with a practical ambition: further development of the software and support for its users.

Growth at this stage changes the texture of a founder’s job. An early product can be understood through the problem that prompted it. A company with more than a hundred people also has to organize the work of making and supporting that product. The numbers do not explain every decision. They do explain why the next decisions would have consequences well beyond the founder’s own desk.

There is an agreeable irony in a company created to manage work acquiring so much work of its own. The administrative problem does not disappear when it becomes a commercial opportunity. It changes address. Fudge’s business had reached a point where the machinery behind the software demanded attention alongside the software itself.

Adding a company, then changing the chair

In May 2018, CentralReach acquired Chartlytics, a software company focused on measurement and analytics. Fudge welcomed it into the business. The transaction widened the product portfolio during a year already marked by new investment. CentralReach was now adding capabilities through acquisition as well as developing its existing platform.

An acquisition is a compact sentence in a company history and a larger undertaking in practice. Products, teams and customers have to fit into a continuing business. For the founder story, this particular transaction marks a change in scale and method. The company that began by addressing an internal operating need was bringing another software business into its orbit.

Then came a change in leadership. On July 31, 2018, CentralReach appointed Chris Sullens as CEO, effective immediately. Fudge welcomed him publicly. The company also planned a New Jersey office alongside its Florida headquarters. Investment, acquisition and a new chief executive had arrived within the same year.

Sullens brought experience running WorkWave, another software business. Fudge’s welcome emphasized his execution and customer focus. Her language was warm, referring to the company as a family. It is a small detail, but it locates her voice in the transition: the founder introducing the person who would lead the next period.

The handover deserves its date. Calling Fudge the founding CEO captures her role in creating and leading the business through its early years. The July appointment identifies where that executive chapter ended. Both facts are necessary to understand the shape of her contribution.

A different kind of local business

A later business chapter connected Fudge with PostPact, where she was listed as managing partner from April 2020. PostPact’s proposition concerned local commerce: connecting people with businesses and making social influence easier to understand. It brought a different commercial setting into her professional history, beyond the software company she had helped establish in Florida.

The connection is interesting because the customer relationship has changed. A local business trying to reach people faces different questions from an organization buying software to run its operations. Both settings, however, put the working business close to the center of the proposition. For Fudge’s career, PostPact adds a subsequent venture to an account often dominated by CentralReach’s founding years. It also gives that account a wider commercial frame before returning to the company’s later history.

A business that could outgrow its first job

CentralReach’s later history supplies an epilogue to those founding years. On April 23, 2025, Roper Technologies acquired the company for approximately $1.85 billion, with an anticipated tax benefit of about $200 million. The purchase came nearly seven years after Fudge’s CEO handover. It belongs to the continuing history of the company she helped start.

A transaction figure naturally draws the eye. The more interesting connection to Fudge is the distance between the first problem and the business that followed. A founder’s own administrative needs supplied an initial reason to build. Other organizations supplied the evidence that the reason was shared. Employees, investors and later leaders carried the enterprise into subsequent chapters.

Her story rewards a return to the beginning: the schedule, the records, the work awaiting completion. A company can begin with close attention to something familiar enough to be overlooked. Fudge helped turn that attention into software, then into an organization capable of continuing beyond her tenure as CEO. The paperwork, against considerable odds, had acquired a plot.