Name: One Source of Truth: Why Longevity Consulting Ditched Disconnected IT Systems for Rippling
Uploaded: 2026-03-04T21:20:05.584Z
Duration: 1 h 20 min
Description: One Source of Truth: Why Longevity Consulting Ditched Disconnected IT Systems for Rippling

Transcript for "One Source of Truth: Why Longevity Consulting Ditched Disconnected IT Systems for Rippling": Alright. Let's get going. Hey, folks. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm really excited to talk with Andy Phelps and, of course, James Sorrenti from Rippling here. We'll give a little bit of an intro for for everybody for sure, but what about your yourselves? Feel free to, you know, chime in the chat and the q and a. We're gonna have a q and a at the end of this. And any questions that come up now or along the way, feel free to feel free to throw them in there. Would love to hear where you're from. Anything that you really wanna hear about in this or future webinars is also fair game. So we we really love hearing from y'all. A brief overview of who Andy is and longevity consulting here. They are a consultancy located in Washington DC for over twenty two years now. They've got 50 full time employees and more contractors. So it's kind of a really good glimpse, size wise into like a median kind of company that we talk to. So I think there's going to be a lot of, really on point things we discuss here. We're really going to talk about the hidden cost of disconnected IT systems and what can really spin out of control, as you start to either ramp a business or like change into a more cloud facing business maybe. But Andy is the co founder and advisor for IT at longevity consulting, and he tackles everything from strategy and security to the management and implementation as well. So he's responsible for their full IT stack, full technology stack, including, like, end user computing and the cloud infrastructure parts. James here is joining me from Ripley and he's our strategy and community lead, and he has a varied background that really includes, support and technical duties as well. So we should have a really great conversation today. James, Andy, do y'all just want to say hi and then maybe we'll just jump in. All you got to do is Hello, Yes. Hello, everybody. I'm happy to have you all here today. Awesome. Well, I think we will then kind of jump right in. There's no slides today. We're just gonna have a great conversation and really kind of hit on a lot of points of modern IT challenges and what you can kind of think about and do differently. So maybe we'll start there. For Andy, the before times, the disconnected systems, maybe your growing pains, maybe set the scene for us. What what did your IT stack look like before you ever saw Rippling? Primarily Office three sixty five, so that was our main email system identity provider as well. And we're kind of a split shop, about half our employees run Windows and the other half run Mac, so we were using Microsoft Intune for managing the Windows and then Mozel for managing the Mac environment. And then plus all of our other cloud tools that we have come to use over the years. Yeah. So that's just, that's like four plus five plus just kind of like five, tools. Yikes. Yeah. I didn't know if you were a split shop or not coming into this. So it's, it's cool to hear that. That's always a good pain point to to tackle. What what do you think about, like, do you have any specific moments when you realize that your stack wasn't working the way it was? I mean, it it was working, but, you know, we're a small IT shop. I'm the only one that does anything with IT. So having to juggle multiple tools every time a person onboarded or off boarded or anytime we needed to look up any bits of information specifically for a SOC two audit that we recently underwent, I just realized, you know, there was a better way to do things. And plus it's good for future growth as we decide to onboard new IT people having a singular tool or consolidating our tools will kind of help that process as well. I always kind of felt like even if I did at previous gigs that had that kind of similar setup, If I did get things kinda working the way I wanted to, like, something would inevitably break. So my my, like, operations key points were always just like firefighting, like, my system's talking to each other over and over. It kinda felt like. Yeah. And then, you know, we grew and added tools and changed tools over the last twenty years. So it, you know, it kind of became tool sprawl, which isn't efficient for any organization. James, that sounds familiar. What about what about what what about this kind of fragmented stack? You know, do you see do you see that in companies you're talking to lately and any kind of typical breaking point? Well, Yes. It really depends how like early in the process you meet with them because super early on there isn't much frogs aren't doing that much yet. You have one person that's kind of just admitting everything and making it all work, But then you grow up in the five, ten, 20, you start to scale upwards, and you've got these disparate teams to have their own decentralized tool choosing moments where they pick the thing that was right for their team. And then it's fine for a little while, and they have to work together. It's hard to mature, and you need to, like, bring people on. You no longer have the owners and founders actually doing the work of onboarding and offboarding people anymore. So people don't, like, contextually know what to do in these situations. So they just make it up, and your process becomes a process of, you know, getting it done, not just making sure it's finished by just, you know, clicking a button or whatever. So the breaking point for me is always when you need those extra systems to tie together that were never essentially chosen. Identity is the one that I think and identity and SSL are those together. Like, those really show the stresses of the breaking points because invariably, when these disparate teams choose their products, they aren't thinking about how it works with the other team's tools. So they'll all work together, and they'll all just click. It's a lot of effort, especially for onboardings and off boardings and role changes to kind of keep it all in line, to know the current state of your employees and who has access to what. So it's a lot of unknowns that you're kind of just rolling through until the next problem. That's exactly what I was about to ask Andy then is onboarding and offboarding. Andy, was that just like total pain in the butt for one one person? Yeah, it was kind of a pain in the butt or onboarding wasn't too bad because by default, every new employee gets an Office three sixty five account and then we would layer on the additional tools as they needed it. Off boarding was worse because if you don't do it right, if you leave something out, if you forget something, it's not just an annoyance to the employee, it can become a security risk. So I think that's the biggest benefit. One of the biggest benefits that we found so far is, know, let's get that off boarding automated and right. That way we don't have to second guess ourselves. Yeah. Having like to make sure that someone tells you that there's gonna be an off boarding. That's right. Yeah. That's the first step that always doesn't happen. Right? I want to touch on that for a moment. Back what I was saying, when you have these teams start to like bring their tools in, when you hire people, they end up needing the other team's tools for stuff like, you know, your marketing team might have been using Slack, so everyone's using Slack or whatever. But then when people are off boarded, especially if it's a more sudden off boarding, the other teams who are managing those tools independently are not told. So therefore, the manager may know and you may know, but that account lives on and on, and that acts as a whole is just there and there. Yeah. Which I guess brings us kind of to a next point of point of topic here. SOC two as frequent catalyst for this this moment of change and growth. Andy, you mentioned that SOC two was a major driver to us before this call. What specifically made, like, compliance difficult with, like, your previous setup maybe? With our previous setup, we would have to work with an auditor and work out of spreadsheets and then screenshots and pull reports off of five or 10 different systems. It's time consuming and a lot of people involved. And I'd been looking at rippling a long time before we went through the audit, but just the process of going through that just made me realize that we could have done it a lot easier, a lot less people using something like Rippling. And even when there were things that we weren't doing that SOC wanted us to do, implementing Rippling allowed us to check off, we could easily do these five things that we weren't doing before just because it was a pain. Rippling makes it a no brainer. So that was, that was really the catalyst to move to Rippling as soon as the audit was over. That was when I reached out to Rippling and started that process. Yeah. So no. Was there like a specific thing in that SOC two in that audit that you were like, oh, this is the most painful part or was it kind of the whole thing? It sounds like it's kind of the whole thing. And one of the questions was they were asking you if we allowed our employees to be admins of their machines. At that time we did, but then I knew that rippling, could make them standard and then with the push of a button, they could promote themselves. You know, that was pretty much the driver saying, yeah, we need to do something a little bit better and a little bit easier. Yeah. That specific feature definitely offers like a kind of a middle ground. I've I've been places where literally nobody even like, you know, engineers or developers are an admin that causes constant tickets and problems. And then I've been somewhere where it's like, no, we're just gonna let everybody be an admin. And it's like, that causes its own problems. And that's what we were doing honestly, because with 50 to 70 people, none of them work in the same spot. We were a 100% remote for all twenty two years. And it was just impossible deal with everyone who needed to do something with admin privileges. We had a lot of developers and a lot of engineers that need those higher permissions. And now with Rippling, they can promote themselves for a half an hour and then get what they need done and then still remain secure. Yeah. What about James from your perspective, my friend? Why? What about having these systems kind of all in the in one place makes such a difference for something like sought to readiness or, you know, any kind of audit at the end of the day? Right. Well, I'll I'll tie up my interesting point Andy brought up. He came to Ripley after his audit. So there was a whole lot of stress and pressure to get through the first one. But when you're not like in the space, you don't always realize this, that it's an ongoing process because it happens every year, and you don't want to repeat that pain. So when everything's in one system, it's actually really cool because it's hard to I don't wanna bring up specific tools on outside. But inside Rippling and tools when they're all together, the patterns, the the data structures, the way things talk to each other is a known quantity. So what might be called an admin here or a manager here, a super user here, and the different, like, framings and the way the data and the different systems are tied together and structured seems like not a big deal when you're independently managing the systems. But when you're trying to do a report based on certain controls in the stock audit or whatever compliance stack you're in, you need to then quantify what those terms mean, how it gets extrapolated, and then how the tools look for those. So when it's all in one system, well, it knows that. Right? It knows what the things are. And you've already it's already integrated because part of the same system or it's already tied together. So the reporting process just becomes essentially button pushing or just standard processes of doing your job. Totally. What patterns do you think then IT leaders who are preparing for audits with disconnected systems? Any kind of commonalities between pain points there? Alright. So two two things I'll I'll just say. The amount of time you have from when you want to have an audit to when it happens, like, will change your your workflow here. Any kind of tool change is gonna be a bit of a pain to decouple things and recouple things, however it works. So that first audit will always be painful because you don't know what you're looking for yet because you haven't prepared for it. So with disparate systems, I'll give you an example again without names. We had a very important CRM system, and we had a a tool that was doing our compliance checking. And the data structure for that tool would allow people to be deactivated when they're gone, but still own the contacts. So it's a CRM database with historical knowledge. We needed to keep that historical context. We couldn't remove the user account. Otherwise, those records have to get reassigned. It would change the ownership of their records. Great. But our compliance tool didn't respect deactivated as a term, right, for certain, like, classes. So it was very annoying the first year and then again the second year. But it was a whole process of, like, explaining, improving, having your sales and marketing team deal with your IT and systems team to explain something away each time. And you might say, well, you know, not that big of a deal. You have to write an explanation. Cool. But making sure that teams know this, that contact is shared year over year. And then when you're speaking with your actual auditors, those mismatches are flags. Right? So the fact that you have to even explain that you have these deactivated users because the system won't automatically account for it is a red flag. And more flags drop, the closer looking at things in the slower and more painful your process is. Yeah. That's a specific anecdote that I personally had deal with year over year for a while. And I, you know, I document it like heck, but you still have to deal with the conversations every single time. Yeah. And those are just two important systems. So, yeah, those are examples of patterns of things that don't talk the same language trying to work it through. And my other point was, if you have enough time before that first audit, because there are different pressures that force to get these things, vendor pressures, lots of other good reasons. Sometimes it's worth to just forego the process of getting to that audit to then do your tool change, to just do the tool change and make the audit easier. But I do respect that not everyone has the time to do so. But while you're going through the first audit, just keep track of all the problems you had. Because they will happen the next year if you don't make changes. Yeah. Deja vu. I guess Yeah. What we'll bring That kinda brings me to exactly the next thing I was gonna ask you then. So was it the SOC two pain that convinced you to consolidate to Ripley, or was that kinda just a consideration along the way? That was like the, you know, the tip of the iceberg, you know, I've been looking at consolidating for a long time, waiting for the right opportunity to do it. And then that gives, gave me a good business case to actually make the change. We're not just gonna stick with SOC two, we're gonna go through other audits. So at least being able to have the unified tool that gives us some SOC two audit capabilities and like our laptops, can apply a profile that says this laptop is gonna meet all the SOC two requirements and put all the settings on there. Before we didn't have that, now we do. So now we can use that as a baseline from not only the next audit, but also for other audits. Me think of like how often in my career you've I've I've like made solid role based access control choices Mhmm. And then couldn't really truly enforce them. So I'm just that's like just top of mind while I'm thinking about like, through an audit, knowing these are my pain points, wanting something different, you know, thinking if I could start it all from scratch, if I could do that kind of situation again, like, what what would that look like? Was there any, like, single piece of rippling that was the most enticing to you then? Like, was it was it the MDM part or was it the identity part or? All of it was great and all of it's important, but I think really what benefited me the most to start was the warehousing and ordering process. With your fully remote organization? With my fully remote staff, previously the warehouse was my basement where I would order machines and build them and then add them to Apple business manager or add them to Intune through Microsoft autopilot and then drive to UPS and ship them to the employee. And it just saved so many cycles with able to do this through Rippling. Yeah. Afternoons spent in line at UPS and FedEx were not my favorite. No. And it's easier for the employee too, as the off board, you know, before, you know, would have to send them a prepaid FedEx label so then they can ship their stuff back, but you'd be amazed that some of the packaging I received stuff in, you know, if they didn't have their original box, it would, you know, I'm surprised we didn't get a bunch of destroyed laptops back, but with rippling, you know, rippling will ship them a box, the label, all they have to do is drop it off and it's it's been great. I've seen that some as I say, I've seen that so many times the way people have packed things in their own boxes. Whether it's a new or whether it's a current employee, When they're outgoing play, sometimes they just don't aren't that familiar. Yeah. And I got one of a Mac, a MacBook Air in a Manila envelope, a big one. But there's no padding, no nothing. I think Steve, like, showed it off like that the first time. He did. He did. I had a I had a an exiting employee send a an iPad back, and it came loose in a box. You know? Sorry. Not nothing else in it. Right? But it was, like, shattered to a billion pieces. Mhmm. And I remember and this was year this was several several years ago. But I remember being like, there's no way that this happened just by being poorly packaged. It must have been maliciously destroyed. But then, like, six months six months ago, I dropped my iPad of the same kind, like, on a hard tile, and it shattered into a billion pieces. So I was like, they probably just put it in that box and didn't fully destroy it themselves, but you never know. What about maybe like day to day changes, Andy, for you, things that other than like the warehousing in particular, is there anything else day to day for like identity or device management that's like really off your plate now? I don't want to say off my plate, but it makes it easier to troubleshoot. We also use box. So we've had a number of new consultants come online, you know, not only do they need Office three sixty five, but then also Box access and we're using single sign on in front of Box with Rippling's identity, enabled just to go into the activity log to see, right, they can't get in, but did they authenticate with Rippling? Did they use your multifaction, fault, multifactor authentication? And then I can even go into the profile to see if they even set up their MFA correctly. So it helps narrow down issues. Whereas before it would have been a more of a back and forth with that person to try to get figure out what problems they were seeing. Right on. And then kind of final thought in this kind of area, what about like, oh, March, your March world? Has anything changed there with either onboardings or off boardings or the management kind of perpetually? Yeah. I mean, right now, once we get someone onboarded, I just entered them into rippling, it'll automatically create their office six sixty five accounts, send them an email with their credentials and then add them to groups that I've set up. So it's, you know, one step instead of going into multiple consoles And then the off boarding is even easier because I just put in their termination time or date rippling automatically. What are they doing? They rippling automatically disables our account, changes their password, removes their MFA, resets, all of their sessions, assigns their data to their manager and then deletes the license after X number of days that I set up. So, I mean, that's a 15 steps that I had to do previously. Yeah. And it's not in any kind of like PowerShell or bash script, just like hoping and then it's documented. So I can pull it up in an audit and say, are the steps that are taken to offer an employee and you can see their access is disabled and all of our external tools that we've got integrated. So it's really nice. Right on. James, how you doing over there? Doing great. Can can you explain maybe like a strategic advantage to tying identity to devices specifically? Like having having control of both your your debt your third party apps and your devices holistically instead of like jumping around like that? I mean, well, first, let's think about how things work now. I mean, I'm one employee. Right? I'm talking to you on my MacBook Pro. I walk around with my iPhone. Sometimes I have a task with my my Microsoft device. These are all different things I hop between, but I'm one person. Different three different platforms, but the same rules apply no matter where I am. And then depending on the context of those devices, those rules shift a bit. Like, my phone I own BYOD, but it's partially managed. Right? Like, so before that might be three different systems managing those devices or, honestly, it would be probably was system for the Microsoft, one for the Mac, and then nothing for the iPhone, and it is a very common starter scenario, especially for BYOD. But me, the employee, still has to access work things on all the devices. My Slack is a window into the entire, like, you know, collective knowledge of an organization. I go to, you know, our confluence or data points, you know, our our drives, from any of these devices. Right? So that's one employee. And extrapolate that as your team grows different teams and elsewhere and upwards. It's a lot. And we really can't like keep a handle on all of it all the time. Because when you're in each management console, you're looking at a snapshot of what's happening. So like strategically, when like it's all together and bound by that employee, you can follow that one data point and the things it touches and where that ripples out to, and like kind of keep it in check. So he took place a lot less effort to deal with that thing that doesn't change like your employee. As a unit, like it might change, they come on, they leave, they change roles. But as they do that, the same policies apply based on that context. So it's a different way of thinking about it, but it ends up being like a lot less of disparate work in different teams to manage that flow. Do you see a common thread about, you know, like, things that IT leaders might not know about even like, maybe they maybe folks that have never kinda seen these kind of all in one systems, things where you don't even know you could tie systems together at all? Like, is there, like, anything you think really surprises people the most? Alright, I'd like a three part answer this. Yeah, we're doing good in time. I'm a three part answer. So first, I want to touch on one quick thing Andy said that ties directly into this. You said you had a rule that removed the license afterwards. I have seen so many times where licenses get removed when finance asks the question like, hey, why do we have 237 Microsoft licenses with only a 120 employees? And then someone has to, like, explain that. They fix it, they save a bunch of money, but it's been months or years. Why is it just being burned there? A different scale that's very common across so many different, platforms that the money savings there that is outside of just the normal license costs. It's the known, like, we do know that you go from four tools to one, you're gonna probably spend less in license tools. That's true. But there's another balance to the license you're not spending because it'd be automatically removed, and that was, like, a really cool thing that happens. Yeah. So that was one. Another thing that I think IT leaders, like, notice or after the fact is how painful easy tasks are. And I I let me explain that one because it sounds silly. IT professionals have to deal with a whole lot of things, and the easy things are the ones we don't mind doing in small batches. But because they were easy, we didn't mind not automating them and not integrating them. This happens when you're adding someone to a system, changing someone's role, putting them like, someone, like, goes from moves from marketing to sales, right, in your organization. They're gonna go get added to this Slack group, then they have this organizational unit applied, this tool added, lots of little easy tasks you always just did for someone when they selected you. And when you were five, twenty, 30 employees, when you knew everybody's name, that wasn't that big of a deal. But and as you grow, it's like, I don't know everybody, and I'm gonna start, you know, having other people do some of these tasks for me. Things are just not gonna get done sometimes. And or sometimes worse, you're still gonna do all of those things, but dread it or do that in batches. And you start noticing it when, oh, a big product's happening. We're gonna hire 20 people or five or 10 people, and then that product starts and the product ends. So both for that quick onboarding and offboarding, you've done those same easy tasks a 100 times, and you got no other real work that done. No other real work done that day. So that was the the term, like, death by a thousand cuts. It's like one of those, like, those easy tasks that we agreed to because they're easy become a bane of our workflow because they keep us from doing our actual jobs. And lastly alright. So after they've already integrated everything, IT leaders don't always realize this going in, but things continue to be easier. Right? So all those tasks are gone. Right? And you push those buttons, someone gets hired. The machine shows up, they go, it goes through the process, they leave, the box shows up. All the things happen, and they happen on time. But now you have other cool things you can do. Right? Because you've now taken away the hard parts. The hard part being the stacks of easy things. Right? For example, I got hired. Right? And I got asked to my Slack the night before my job. I got access to my email a week before my job. I got access to a a protected data thing, you know, as soon as my actual start time was. Right? So it was a staged out thing. So those three or four easy tasks, which would normally be done at the exact same time, and you would all wait until that that last final moment because it's easier that way, you can now give the employee a better onboarding experience because you staged them out because there's automation involved. And the same thing goes on the outset. So when people leave, you cut off that access as soon as that call is over. Great. But what if that call went weird? You know? Like, what if they wanna stay on for a couple extra hours And they're a little, like, West Coast time and you're on East Coast times. Now what was gonna be an 8PM cutoff is now 09:30, but they're still gonna hold on to their Slack for two weeks so that they could have access to the team to talk about things. But they need to be like a single user. Like, there's so much nuance happens for offboarding, especially for special scenarios that are is not an IT concern. It's a management concern, and we just have to deal with it. And we don't always have the ability to do so. But when the person making those decisions can just push the button and the thing happens, it just works, which is kinda really cool. So to brought that back down, people are surprised about how you can increase the experience for the employee, both person making the decisions and receiving the results of those decisions. You can make it a better experience and not be more work. Hear. Hear. Thank you, James. Andy, do you agree some of those points? Do you feel like? I do. Yeah. And I think, you know, the employee experience is one of the most important, especially onboarding. You only have that one time to make a good impression with your organization, but off boarding as well are making changes. So having a tool that makes it easier for the employee to get access to the device they need, the systems they need, without having them go back and forth with IT or management makes it all that much better. I really like the documents in Ripley in that you can like send out something that's not necessarily your standard. Like, you know, it's not part of like onboarding in a standard way. It's nothing to do with payroll. It's nothing to do with like the actual SSO behind stuff or, like, your account. But you could send, an IT best practices doc that you want people to sign and acknowledge or, like, I I used to, like, dump that to, like, people's desktops and pray that they would open it just out of curiosity and, like, the idea that you could push that out, you know, as part of your onboarding with all the other things that they're hopefully reading because they're gonna get paid, or whatever. Like, hey, I'm starting a job. I should read this. It says I should sign this. So, like, you could do, like, an IT acceptable use policy and that kind of situation, things like that. Oh, one more note on that, and I had some personal experience, but this one, it also can tie things to that. Like, is it is it usually, the stick is you have to do it. Great. But there's also gets to be a carrot as well. So until you've done that security policy and signed off on it, you can't access certain things. Mhmm. Or you have, like, two weeks to do it. And if you don't do that time period, you lose access to stuff. Like, I didn't get through all my documentation in time because I was doing lots of stuff. And I got added to a I got automatically added to a Slack group, got instructions sent to me, was you know, told how to do it. And then I lost access to my email until I finished, which was, you know, it all made sense because it's got me to do it both with a carrot and a stick added upon that made sense for me to do it. And we say good point the whole time. I like it proof of proof of the proof is in the pudding. That's why I didn't do it. I want to wash it. I want to wash the automation work. That's why I didn't do my Unknown sure. Andy, what about your how you feel for, like, the your next SOC two or any other future compliance stuff you got going on? Well, I feel like it's gonna be a lot easier. You know, we're gonna be able to show evidence a lot easier. The auditor's gonna be happier. Actually doing things that we couldn't do before, or it was too difficult to do before we're doing. So I feel good that we have a good baseline. And then I know Rippon's coming out with additional things in the future. So we're looking forward to using those that should help with audit prep. I'm so excited to talk more about that in the future for anybody who's out there curious about that. We've got some cool stuff coming. Well, what about Andy things you like, anything you would have done differently either during the migration or kind of like up until this point with with building building your your new and improved stack? Probably would have moved earlier instead of waiting, but you know, a lot of times you just don't make a change until you really need to make a change. Yeah. True. But yeah, I think that's what we would have done first. I know we had, like I said, Intune for windows and Mozel Mac. And then we also had something called Ninja RMM, which kind of bridged the gap. And then there were overlaps. So being a one IT shop person, I can't be an expert in all the systems. So being able to consolidate into a system where I can then focus more of my time and energy, it makes things go a lot easier. Yeah. Even for like, think folks who are on the call, like, think about Andy's position there. I've met so many people are in the same spot where you have a Mac MDM, a Windows MDM, and maybe another tool to to tie everything together from a from a device management perspective. If you're going in and, like, having to update and patch manage things on both platforms and, like, holistically for your whole fleet, like, just think about, like, that's like that's like a full time that's like a full time job up until, like, eight years ago when people decided, no. You should just do that on top of everything else. It used to that used to be a full time job. So we're kind of proof of why maybe it doesn't, it doesn't have to be anymore. So what about advice Andy, to it leaders who are still in that managing tons of disconnected systems moment? My advice would just look for a tool that can help you consolidate. Think the off boarding process is probably the biggest win that you could take because then, you know, everything that needs to be off boarded has been done. You're secured. You're not leaving open gaps or anything like that. So try to focus on one thing and then kind of expand from there. I like it. And James, what about you from for folks like evaluating or like, if they're on the call thinking about thinking about their current stack, thinking about maybe rippling? I mean, is there certain criteria they should be focusing on when they're when they're considering everything? I mean, that's a good question. I'm gonna assume we've been touching a lot of things during this call. If you were nodding your head near any of those things that we discussed as pain points of the past, like the reason they're being brought up now on this call, like they're the reason why you're nodding along to it, because you don't want to do those things anymore. I know we all have a lot of hats to wear, but we have our primary hats. And the more time we spend on the tasks that can be automated away, the more time we could spend doing our actual jobs, putting the right hat on. So put your right hat on. Make those choices and, you know, look at how you can make those problems you've seen go away. I think that is a nail on the head, dude. Way to go. Andy, I got one big final question, I think, for you. What what do you think about, like, when you think about scale maybe not scaling necessarily, but if you think about scaling your your business and your your IT footprint, or if you think about fundamental changes in your IT footprint going forward, is there anything that you think is, like, the really holistically different now? Or do do do you have any kind of, like, thoughts about what's different now from your IT perspective? I guess the the biggest difference is that we could onboard a lot more people a lot faster than we could before. You know, some one time, for example, we won a contract where we had to bring on 10 people and order 10 laptops and get them all configured. It's a week long process. But now, you know, we've got our standard laptop builds in Rippling. I can push a button, add the people in the laptops automatically get ordered, shipped, delivered access granted. So I've saved, I've gone from a week's worth of work to ten minutes, fifteen minutes. So now I can be more strategic and less operational when I need to be. So cool to hear. Yeah. James, any kind of final takeaways from that perspective? I mean, first, I loved that part. I feel like I kind of alluded to that earlier at my 10 person, like, bursting higher thing. I did not know that your story ahead of time, so I'm glad it directly aligned. So, yeah, scaling is hard, but important. Businesses go through these different, like, like, humps they go through with different plateaus that they have to get through. And often those change point becomes huge stressors on the IT front. But often, IT gives them a voice in that room making those decisions. But to stay to be able to scale quickly, you need to be able to make decisions and have those decisions have immediate effect on your employee base, and it's IT tools that do a whole lot of that. I am biased over from the IT space. So a, let the IT people in that room. Let them see the tools you're talking about and be involved in the process because their job is gonna be improved by having better processes in place. Mhmm. And your company's ability to scale gets easier with tools in place that can scale with you. When the person that's helping you make your IT decisions spends had spent a week, like, literally pushing buttons on laptops that could have been just, you know, done automatically, that's it's frustrating looking backwards, right? But it's enlightening looking forward. So you can make those problems disappear by some choices you make, probably save money along the way, definitely save time, but be able to actually get through your scaling process without having to worry at each step. Are my tools going to scale with me? What's going to break? And when I add this tool and I go to this number of users, did my license here change completely? Like, you have a lot of questions that pop up as you grow that don't need to happen. I couldn't agree more. I I you'll you've heard definitely heard me say it before, James, but I find so much importance in communication with other departments. And if you're if you are siloed IT, please talk to folks in in your neighboring departments and, like, befriend them and, like, entrust them with some of the way you're doing things. Because I think, like, what we're talking about with Andy and, like, the idea of like role based permissions and like processes being better than they were previously. The way that all gets there is good communication and like an understanding with your with your the rest of your departments, the rest of your teammates. So yeah, I like that as a good as another key takeaway for sure. Well, any I've really enjoyed this conversation. Y'all any closing thoughts, Andy? Yeah. I mean, we're we've only been with Rippling six months now. We're not a 100% migrated over. There's still work for us to do, but the way rippling operates, it's made things much easier. And I'm looking forward to getting everybody into rippling all our machines into rippling and then, you know, taking advantage of what rippling is gonna be coming up and down the line. So I see it making my job a lot easier and our organization a lot more efficient. Awesome. Well, I really do appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today. James, any any closing thoughts as we say goodbye to all these fine people out here? I mean, I I do appreciate y'all spent the time to actually sit here and learn and listen to us. I'm sure there's a reason you hopped on this call, and let's help to push that forward. And I really ideally for me, I don't like inefficient work to exist. If I can make it go away, I would. But the little pains that you're experiencing that you don't think you have the right to complain about, start paying attention to them, jot them down, and figure out how we can make those problems go away. Yeah. I think that's like, that's a great thing. I before I was in this this role at Ripley, I was a solutions consultant, and I would talk to people all day long, talk to potential customers all day long. Folks who come in with their, like, pain point list make that conversation so much fun. So write like like James said, write down all those things that that tick you off throughout the day, and and then come talk to us because we got we got some cool stuff to show you. I think we're gonna have a q and a and just a couple of wrap up points, but I gotta close this door real quick. But stay on the line. We'll be right back. James, Andy, thank you so very much. I hope you have a great rest of your day. You too. Thank you. Thank you. Alright. Kicked out those other guys. Really glad that James and Andy and I got to have a talk. I hope everybody is having a good, day still. We've got a couple q and a points, and then we're gonna, raffle off some winners and, just let you know about a couple other, events coming up and things that we're gonna be talking about. First question that we had, I did wanna call out. We answered it in the Slack I saw I mean, in the in the chat I saw. But it was a question about does from Tara, does this work as well on Mac shops as it does on Windows shops like Andy's Andy's moment where he was talking about? And the answer is yes. We are absolutely Apple focused. We're a top 10 Apple reseller even. But, yeah, our MDM supports macOS, Windows ten and eleven, and iOS and iPadOS. So it's a it's a similar it's a fully par for the course, MDM experience there where you can remote lock, remote wipe, and software deploy stuff automatically, keep it up to date, declare OS policy updates, and do all that scoping via role based access controls like we were kinda talking through on on this on this webinar. Paul asks, in what ways can consolidating systems reduce security risks associated with redundant user identities? This is a big problem, and we recently re released, like, super new UI stuff for it. So Paul's asking, like, what does it help if I'm consolidating my systems to, like, see, like, duplicate user identities or, like, knowing exactly who has access to what is part of that, I think. But also knowing, like, when you hook up something like Google or Zoom or Slack to Rippling for the very first time, you see a list of all the users that you've declared should have access, what their email account that's going to be used to either create an account for those things will be, or what's already aligned with a user in that system. And it even goes as far to call out, hey. These are, like, users in this system that don't correlate with anything that you've set up as a rule. So if, like, Bob has an account in there and I didn't say, hey. Bob should have an account. It lets me know the very first time I hook it up and perpetually after that. It's denoted as, like, a point of of, you know, notice there that, hey. You've got a user in this environment that is not configured through your identity and through your SSO. It's it's kind of been placed there through another means. So really cool to be able to have that kind of visibility right away. Yeah. Paul mentioned streamlining and consolidating disconnected IT systems for sure. Just being able to report everything in single reports and keep them perpetually shared out is a huge part of rippling as well. So, like, if you build reports, you don't have to go in and send a new spreadsheet to your security admin every single week to show, like, inventory updates and things like that. You could keep keep that perpetually shared out with real data. Cool. We are gonna I just wanna blast through, the next couple webinars so you know what's coming up, what you can sign up for. This one's gonna be really awesome, cocktails. If anybody's done that with us before, they send you a cocktail kit. And I'm meeting with the bearded IT dad, and we're just gonna talk about, like, career advice. It's gonna be super informal. And we're just gonna have a great conversation and, like, make some cocktails together. So, everybody should sign up for that. And women in IT is coming up. March 11. That's coming up pretty soon. But these are some great guests. Becky Scott is awesome, if anybody is familiar with her. And I've I've talked to Erin and Jen before, but not recently, I think. So I'm excited to see that one. That's March 11. And then, Rippling on the Road is like an IRL event that we do, and it's coming to Chicago. So, if if you're around that area and you wanna come see things in person or even if you're, like, a current customer on this call, you can come and, like, ask about, you know, anything that's going on in your environment and get kinda answers and see new cool stuff. Oh, and this one's coming up too. We're a conversation with Tyler and June where we talk about, simplifying your I your tech stack. So that should be a good conversation as well. Alright. Here's the raffle for the LEGO Technic Mercedes. We got two winners today. So Kalil Adamson is a senior IT engineer, and Leonid Litvin, is a CTO. So you should get emails with further directions, and let us know, if you enjoy it. Post it on LinkedIn or something and call us out. I wanna see it. How big is it? It's gotta be pretty big. Alright. Y'all, it was a pleasure. I hope everybody has a good one. Thank you so much. Cheers. Have a great rest of your day.