Name: From 2 contractors to 100+ employees: How an e-commerce tech brand scaled globally, fast.
Uploaded: 2026-09-22T17:02:08.342Z
Duration: 45 min 44 s
Description: From 2 contractors to 100+ employees: How an e-commerce tech brand scaled globally, fast.

Transcript for "From 2 contractors to 100+ employees: How an e-commerce tech brand scaled globally, fast.": two, so we'll get to talk about nothing for a couple minutes. Alrighty. Welcome. Welcome. As folks are. jumping in, we're gonna start off Let's just start by, dropping in where we are calling from, see if we how many international folks we have on the line for today. I am calling from maybe the less interesting location, Northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC, where we have definitely committed to the fall weather. Jim, what about you? Where are, you calling from? am just outside of Orlando, Florida, and there is no sign of fall weather yet here. It is hot and hot and hot. So yeah. And humid. Very, very humid. I am headed to just outside of Miami this weekend for a cousin's wedding, and I'm like, as I'm sitting here thinking about my wardrobe moving into fall, I my mom reminded me that it is going to be a brutally hot wedding, this weekend, so I've gotta stay summer for a little bit longer. Oh, yeah. Let's see. Eric, lots of mosquitoes. That is not my favorite, I'll be honest. The East Coast has a lot of mosquitoes, and I find that hard to deal with. I lived in San Francisco for almost a decade, and the thing they don't tell you about California, not really many bugs out there. never thought of it, that way. I I perk. lived in Louisiana for a while, and, the bugs there were prehistoric. Prehistoric. They were gigantic. Yeah. Everything was. I was gonna say, that's not that's not a, a good place to move if you don't like bugs. No. Let's at. all. Or humidity. Yes. Seriously. Boston, San Diego, Atlanta. Alright. We got some good locations. We're gonna give folks, like, a few more seconds, and I will get us sorted. I'm gonna pull up my notes since I'm on the hook for keeping us on track today. We are going to open it up with a little bit of housekeeping. Obviously, everyone here, seems to know where the chat function is. But if you don't and you see everyone dropping in geographies, that's where the chat function is. Please feel free to write in your comments, reactions, all the good stuff. It's just fun for Jim and I as we chat to see that you are participating, following along. The q and a feature, so on that same tab, there's a section that says q and a. Drop any questions that you have in there for us. The rippling team on the back end will be keeping track of those. We will make sure we get those questions answered. And then the most important question, yes, this is being recorded. Yes. It will come to you tomorrow. It will come to you via the, same email you registered for, so should be pretty straightforward. Gonna move to my agenda. Okay. So here's what you guys can expect today. We'll do a little bit of intros. I will introduce myself. Jim will introduce himself, and then we'll jump into the Mary Ruth story focusing in on some of the, maybe less sexy aspects. Right? Compliance challenges with growing really rapidly, figuring out how the heck you maintain culture while scaling, not just scaling, but across the, globe. And then, of course, the tactical, how do you figure out who the right EOR partner for all of this is? So without any further ado, I'm Emily. If you have been on these webinars before, sometimes my face is up here, and I am the yapper. My role is HR evangelist at Rippling, but as I said this, I was like, maybe it should just be HR yapper at Rippling. My background is all in HR. And when I joined Rippling at the beginning of this year, I now have the pleasure of getting to do a bunch of webinars representing Rippling's HR perspective and helping lead, Rippling's HR community. All fun stuff. And today, I'm joined by Jim. Jim, go ahead and introduce Hi. I'm Jim Rodden. I'm the chief people officer here at Merruth's. I've been at Merruth's about four years. I. lead not just our people experience, our HR function, but also our technology, our customer experience, and our learning and education functions as well. Merruths is a vitamin company focusing in on whole, whole family wellness. We're b corp, third party tested, Project Clean Label certified products. We're really just trying to do the healthy thing for most families, with a focus on women and, women and children. Okay. Amazing. That was, like, a really nice sell for all things, considered doing doing the healthy good thing. Alright. We are gonna open it up with a poll, and we're gonna just ask kinda to ground the conversation before we jump in. But I'm curious what is the biggest pain point everyone on the phone on the phone on the line has experienced as they have scaled? I'm gonna actually throw up the question real quick. So just a poll button should pop up similar to where that chat is. You'll see a little tab that says pull with a red button. Go ahead in there, and you can respond to the poll, letting us know what's been the biggest challenge. And then I am going to stop sharing this. We will, take a look at those results in a little bit, and we're gonna open up with the, fun conversation of Mary Ruth's. Jim okay. For those of us who maybe were not on TikTok. or, did not have the experience of discovering Mary Ruth a few years a number of years ago. Will you tell us about kind of the fun story about how oh my gosh. I'm gonna use, like, a maybe a millennial Gen Z term, but I was gonna say how Mary Ruth popped off and became a bit of a global phenomenon. Yeah. So we'd we'd, you know, been around for a little over fourteen years now. But, about four years ago, we had a, a customer who was just doing a testimonial video on TikTok and on Reels. She was on on, like, both and then posting this. Just did a very, like, authentic, real, organic. We was never paid. We were not consulted. This video about hair growth and how our vitamins and the supplements that she was taking was really helping her hair growth and hair health. Right? And so she made this video, and it just went insanely viral over the course of, like this is, like, November 2022, so right before Thanksgiving. Like, perfect timing for us. Right? Like, right before Black Friday. And before we knew it, like, this video was everywhere, and our product was selling like crazy. Right? Like, our raspberry liquid multivitamin was selling insanely well, and, we quickly found ourselves really unprepared for the winter season. Right? Like, we're a vitamin company. We prep for January, New Year, new you, back to school. We don't necessarily prep for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Well, now we do. But, we didn't really prep for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. We didn't really prep for Christmas holiday or the, you know, the holiday season in general. We just kinda prepped for January and then back to school, and and not a big deal. We weren't expecting anything like this. You know, I think I had seventeen, eighteen customer experience employees at the time. We went from, like, being able to handle everything at 90% service level. We were doing great. And then before I knew it, we were you know, within a week, we were within, like, 10,000 emails in our queue and a chat Oh my gosh. that was never ending and never this, like, insane SMS queue. Right? So we were, like, critically short staffed, you know, almost immediately after this video went viral. And then our marketing team was like, hey. This is a great thing for us. Let's, you know, let's monetize this. Let's put it out there and even make it bigger. And, you know, before we know it, like, every product we have is selling like wildfire. Right? Like, we had, you know, year over year, we had, like, more than 50% growth. It was every team in the company needed to grow rapidly. We were, you know, we were kinda in this phase of just kinda moving out of, like, startup phase into more of an operational company phase and just all of a sudden, just like this hit us like a brick truck out of nowhere. It was amazing. It was so cool. It was so organic, but it was one of those where just suddenly you're like, how do we deal with this? Yeah. I feel like best case scenario, not even having to pay someone for a testimonial. Right? Like, that's really what we all hope for. is, people evangelizing our products for us. But it, it kinda puts you on the back foot there. Right? Like, you're you're ready to go into your holiday season with your family, take a little time off, thinking about your own work, and all of a sudden, I imagine you get a call, a meeting, whatever, and it's great. Things are selling like hotcakes. But then you as the chief people officer, you're looking down at all of this saying, well, who's going to help solve the problem? Like, where are all the people that we can apply to this problem? So what what does it what did that experience look like for you in terms of, like, wow. Holy cow. We are we are trending. We're viral. But now I need to, like, flip a switch and start hiring, scaling. Like, what did that kind of process look like for you? Yeah. So, we didn't really at the time, we didn't really train new hires, like, in groups. We trained them as, like, one on one. And so very quickly, we had we put out postings. We'd already started hiring in The Philippines. We we'd we'd had a small core group in The Philippines, and we knew that we could expand that team rapidly. We had feet on the ground, essentially, in in The Philippines. And so, you know, we had referrals. So that's what I'm trying to say. Right? We had referrals in The Philippines. that we could leverage, and they came through. Right? So we essentially grew that team, the customer experience team from, like, 17, folks, which is about, you know, fifty fifty, international plus domestic. We grew that team to 60 people over the course of about eight weeks, all in The Philippines. Right? Like, our our. our people experience team at the time, they just this this amazing work to bring people on. The customer experience team just completely transformed how we bring folks in, and and just really, like, rallied around getting this done very quickly. Right? And it was just it's you know, kinda going back, it's one of those, like, COVID moments, like, where the company rallies around something. You know? Like, everybody has, like, a good COVID war story in terms of what you did for your business, and it's kinda the same thing. Right? Like, we we kinda use those same muscles to rapidly expand and, really, you know, tear apart everything that we were doing and, like, rethink it and deploy very quickly. Yeah. Yeah. That is first of all, that type of growth is hard hard to manage, hard to sustain. COVID war story is an appropriately, PTSD inducing experience for all of us, I think. What tell me tell me about so you had you started building a presence in The Philippines. You had a one on one hiring. process kind of growing. Right? Like. or training process. How did you how did you evolve that? How did you think, like, okay. Obviously, one to one, not gonna work. How do you think about or how did you think about the needs to scale that training and honestly just be able to bring people into that work more quickly. Yeah. We we, you know, I'd I'd because I came from big contact centers in the old days. Right? Like, I'd I'd I'd had done, like, you know, my my seasonal hirings were, like, a thousand people. So I I used some of those skills and just tried to, like, shrink them down a little bit. And, like, okay, we can do classes. And, you know, Yeah. in in conversations with, you know, the the HR team, the customer experience team, we, like, worked through, like, okay. What's the max class size we can do? How many classes can we run at once? How many and, like, how quickly can we recruit people and properly vet folks. Right? Because we were doing all the recruiting ourselves using our own team, Okay. and, you know, we we didn't outsource any of that. We kept it all in house, and we felt very strongly that we wanted to be direct, direct connection to our employees. And, so we we. brought them on very quickly. Some of them were as contractors. Some of them were as, actually, almost all of them were as contractors to begin with, and, we can talk about, like, that transition, a bit later. But, so, yes, we we brought them all in very quickly, and, you know, we we started to develop this training curriculum. Our well, it is now my learning experience team. I got a little crazy in my experience naming, but my learning experience, team really just, like, dove in and created, like, learning modules, you know, over the course of, like, two weeks. And we built this training program Oh, wow. that went from, like, the one on one modules into, like, these training groups very quickly. We had team leads within the customer experience team that volunteered to help train some of those classes, and we used, like, subject matter experts from the team. We brought them on, like, very quickly. Like, within like I said, within 60 within sixty days, we had an additional 60 people within customer experience. And when the whole company size is only a 120 at that time, that's a lot. Yeah. That's a lot, and it's clearly an all hands on deck situation. Yeah. And I think I always just like hearing, when it comes to, like, that rapid scale, it's, it's like, okay. Yeah. We do need to hire. We do need to change things. But it's always interesting to hear, you know, okay. We took these one on one learnings, and we had our team build them more into curriculums, pulled in the subject matter experts. I'd love to you mentioned talking about growing and hiring everyone on as contractors. This is a classic, thing to do as someone that worked in tech, high. growth tech. We love hiring contractors. It's great. It's also a little sketchy. So or it can be a little sketchy. So I wanna throw up up another poll just as we jump into compliance stuff. What is the biggest pain point folks on the call that you have experienced as you've scaled fast? And while folks are answering that, Jim, I'd love to hear how did the what did the hiring process look like trying to hire a bunch contractors? And when did you realize oh, sorry. Did I just reference the poll that we already put up? So sorry, everyone. I got ahead of myself or I got behind myself. Okay. I thank you for the correction. Okay. Well, you, Jim, tell us what did what did that hiring process look like when you're, like, you know, in the throes of having to get that turnaround? And then what were the maybe the issues or the process gaps that you realized, alright. This might not work, might not be sustainable. Tell. me tell me what that looked like. I mean, I put a ton of pressure on the hiring teams. Right? Like, unfair amount of pressure on the hiring teams, to get this done so quickly, and they all came through. And and they they really kinda worked miracles for us. But, you know, when you're you're hiring that fast, yes, you're you're, you know, scheduled three phase interview. We still had minor background checks, but probably not the the scale of which we would do for normal employees, definitely not the scale of which we do today. And so you're putting a lot of faith in, you know, the referral process and those interview processes. Yeah. You know, so that was all a little scary. Trying to get payroll set up very quickly was not did not go as well as we'd like. Right? I think we spent you know, we may have staffed up for in sixty days, but we probably spent three months, like, working through payroll challenges, with the team, trying to kinda make sure that everyone had gotten paid correctly and paid in full and and really understood just how complicated that was, for. that team at the time. It was it that that was probably the painful, most ugly part of it. And luckily, you know, my my teams, the the HR team, the CX team were all very, very friendly and and very, you know, caring, and and kinda that goes a long way when you're in that type of situation where you're being earnest with somebody and you're not kinda filling them with bull, and you're just like, hey. Here's what we're doing. Here's what we're we're trying to figure out. So it's it was it was a journey. Luckily, they trusted us, even though they didn't necessarily have a reason to trust us, right, because we didn't have a huge presence in The Philippines yet. And, you know, we we really just kind of work with them kinda day in and day out to just like, hey. We're we're figuring this out. And when in doubt, like, you know, there are probably times we probably significantly overpaid an individual because we made a mistake and needed to correct it in in in the moment. Right? So we, you. know, those wife's money transfers were a godsend at the time, but not necessarily a good thing over time. So yeah. It's it's so true. In those I think in those situations, it's really easy to want to almost bury your head in the sand and be like, it's all gonna be fine. It's gonna be fine. But, really, if you want your employees to or contractors to, be a little more chill with what's going on, you have to really be upfront saying, like, Yeah. we hear you. We see these are real problems. Use whatever mechanism you have at the time to spend money. And I really like that you said, you know, maybe we overpaid them. That to me is like that shows even when things are volatile. Right? Your employer is going to do the right thing for you, which. builds a lot of that, good trust and goodwill. What okay. So payroll not going well, not not great. Kind of like one of the core reasons people show up to work. Yes. Yeah. And and one of the most common issues that we've had with. EORs ever since, right, like, just getting payroll and getting alignment on payroll is unnaturally hard. It it it. shouldn't it's one of those things that, like, that should be the easy thing, and everything else should be the hard stuff because the payroll is just math. Right? Like, that part's just math. Yes. And, like, in theory, I'm paying someone else to be able to do the maths for me, Right. Yeah. so it should be a pretty easy thing. So stumbling into that is very frustrating. Did you run into any other compliance challenges? Like, I mean, payroll, that's a really nice big one. But were there other things you ran into as it related to whether, you know, employment classification, time off, things like that? Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest one was, kinda like The Philippines have a relatively complex version of holidays. Right? So you have regular holidays. You have. special nonworking holidays. You have special working holidays. And so for I feel like for a good six months, I could not get anybody to explain to me, what the difference was properly on between these three holidays. Like, I remember one Sunday night, like, just stuck in the dole the the dole, the, the Department of Labor guidebook for The Philippines. Just reading another country's government regulations, like, word for word trying to understand the holiday differentials. And it's just like, I should not be doing this right now. So and trying to. then explain to the rest of my team and and make sure they understood and then, like, have us heavily question the EOR we were using at the time, was just it was painful. Because at this point, we'd already we started to migrate folks from contractor to an EOR, and it was, Okay. you know, because we were trying to correct some of the payroll issues, which created different payroll issues. But you know that. Funny Yeah. how that works out. Oh, okay. Well, speaking of holidays, I think that's a great. segue into scaling culture. I know as a US based HR person. Right? We focus on a couple of pretty specific holidays. And then when you expand internationally, all of a sudden you're hit with things like I don't know. I feel like in Europe, people are always on holiday for, like, a month at a time. And then we, you know, there's a thirteen month pay thirteenth month pay. And so as we jump into this topic, this time I've got my polls correct. Folks on the call, tell us, we'll have a poll pop up. What matters most to you when expanding your workforce internationally? And go ahead and answer that question as Jim and I well, Jim, if you wanna answer it as well, you can. I'm looking at our options here. I'm submitting an answer because I think it's fun to do. Tell me tell me how you thought about maintaining a semblance of consistency within culture as you scaled globally? Right? Going all of a sudden hiring 60 people in The Philippines, that becomes maybe your largest hub. I'm not a 100%. sure. That that totally changes the cultural norms. So tell me a little bit about how as you went through that hypergrowth phase, like, what did you notice evolving with your culture, and what were the things you kind of tried to do to help maintain it or sustain it? Yeah. I mean, I I think there's a lot of the again, going back to kind of the COVID lessons from, you know, that we learned kind of during that time period is, like, it really helps to be connected and finding the common areas. Yeah. Right? And so I think one of the learnings we had early on is that we probably over celebrated The US holidays early on, right, and just kind of expected everybody to go along with US holidays. And what we very quickly started to shift to and as we started listening to our employees was that, you know, we started to honor seasons more than holidays in particular. Right? And because, you know, most countries, most areas have, kind of similar celebrations, just not necessarily at the same day or at the same time. So there's a lot of commonality when you kinda pull back a little bit. And so we try to celebrate the commonality. Yep. We have a team, of folks that works specifically on, like, building fun lunches and celebrations, like, cult you know, cultural celebrations and acknowledgments and really pulling forward, like, you know, kind of the the difference that, you know, our distinctions across the, you know, the organization, Yeah. but then also celebrating the commonalities more than anything, right, commonating our our shared experience. And, you know, that's really fun. Right? I mean, we have a fun lunch where we're, you know, having somebody cook us a Filipino dish or, you know, someone showing us, like, you know, Colombian cultural, curiosities. Right? I think we did this whole, like, Christmas party where we talked about, like, jeepneys and things like that in The Philippines. Right? Like, just, like, talking. about things that are different across the things and then you start talking deeper in those questions, you realize, okay, this is, like, 99% similar to The US, but it's very then also like, the human experience is similar, but the cultural experience is different. Right? Like, there's there's. really cool, aspects of that, and we try to celebrate those whenever possible. That's really neat. And I think that holidays well, one, ethnocentrism in The US when it comes to holidays is just, like, super high. Right? Like, we all think, well, of course, everyone knows about Christmas. But I love your idea of focusing on the seasonality. Yep. I think that has, like, a really cool way to tie a thread across all cultures. And then creating it sounds like you have you you all have done a pretty fantastic job of naturally opening the conversation of, like, and we are different people. We come from different backgrounds. And so, like, you seem to have a lot of I would almost call them, like, like, planned planned operations around making sure that people get to hear from one another and share their experiences to to, like, reinforce that sense of diverse community. Yeah. We recently, That's like, yeah. That's, roughly. started we recently started some resource groups as well that, really kinda help us kind of target in on that and and because it was, you know, kind of people experience focus. Like, people experience the one driving all this in the past. And this year, we've. really opened it up on the employee resources group to, like, give them resources to help them direct what we should be doing there to kinda honor and kinda recognize and show things off. So we we've kinda changed that function because it was just all on HR, all all on the people experience team. all the time. And, you know, we pulled back on that. It's like, okay. It's a lot of pressure on a small group of people. Let's let everybody else help participate, and the engagement has been fantastic. Right? Especially on the international Yeah. resource group. They've they've really kinda come come through in all sorts of, like, really great ways of celebrating culture and and kinda being there. You you made a you asked a question about kind of bonuses too, and I wanted to touch on that because, Oh, yeah. yeah, thirteenth month and Aguinaldo and Primo Primo, are are all very they're similar, like, thirteenth month kind of payments. Yeah. But in some cultures, they're you know, they it's understood as a bonus and some, it's not. And, like, early on, we made the mistake of, like, talking about bonuses and just kind of assuming that everyone understood that thirteenth month was part of the bonus process that we were going on. And it was. a mistake. Right? Like, it was offensive to some of the folks, that we had in The Philippines that really hurt some feelings, and we had to very quickly pivot and understand that, like, the thirteenth month payments are you know, depending what, you know, culture, what country you're in, how they're discussed locally, we had to change kind of how we discuss them. And now we're much more transparent about, you know, kind of where the bonuses are versus, you know, kind of statutory payments and, you know, who who gets what and when and and why, and and we're we're much more transparent there because communicating and over communicating and that stuff has been, you know, key to, like, keeping folks happy and, you know, kind of satisfied with the role and making sure that they understand that no one's trying to take advantage or no one's trying to we're trying. to do the right thing for all of our employees all the time. So I'm thinking about all of these things. And, candidly, if I were in your position, I'd be like, isn't this what my EOR partner is supposed to tell me? Right? Like, thirteenth pay, you know that that happens and you know that it's expected or in this place, it's considered a assumed bonus, whatever. And so, this might be a nice switch to talk about evaluating EORs and, kind of like the the compliance gaps that they should, in theory, be helping you, not fall into. And so I'll do one, last poll for the crowd. How has your culture held up as you've scaled? So fill out that poll, and we will, and also sorry. One other plug for everyone on the line. Drop in questions. We would love to answer them. This is kind of our last segment, so we will have good time to answer some questions. But back to our convo, Jim. We, there are a lot of moving pieces going international. You talked about, moving to an EOR and then still searching through government labor laws about how things work. Can you tell me, like, you actually, you know what? I'll just say it. You've done a lot of the hard work for, I think, a lot of people on this call by stumbling through the, the gotchas and surprises of going international. What do you think the questions you you wish you wish you knew to ask upfront what are the questions you wish you knew to ask upfront when evaluating EOR partners? I mean, I I think it it kinda all starts back with payroll. Like, how do you calculate payroll? Like, what like, what is the like, does your like, how do you recognize our like, in The US, we have this, you know, hourly and salaried exempt, nonexempt kind of thought process. Right? And not every country mimics that. And so having that conversation with folks early on to ask how are they handling that in each of the countries in which you wanna be in is super important. Right? Like, having and that they should. be able to explain something to you in a way that you understand it, in a way that is easily understandable to anyone on your team. Right? Like, so many folks would just kinda wave it away, like, we've got this, we've got it handled. And, like, no. I I need to understand how do you got it handled. Right? Like, payroll is. insanely important, and it's been one of the biggest issues we've had with going international. And, like, how are you how are you addressing these things, right, and and making them answer those questions huge. Right? How do they explain, you know, the holiday process and the bonus process in every. country, right, or the the additional payment process, right, Because those are critical pieces. And if you have folks who are, like, migrating from contractors to an EOR relationship, which is critically important for your own like, not just for the employee, but for, you know, the country in which they're in, You wanna make sure that you're paying appropriate taxes. You don't wanna get hit with that later. Yep. Rippling is really good about guiding you through that. But, like, you wanna make sure that the employee understands the benefits of, like, why they need to move from a contractor to an employee to an EOR relationship, and the EOR should be able to express that to not just to you, but to them. Right? And and when. you're having that selection conversation, you're thinking about not just what's good for me as a business, but what's good for me my employees and the folks that rely on us. every day for their employment. So it's it's really critical that they can answer those questions fully and completely. Like, our, you know, our relationship with Rippling, you know, every time we've come somewhere like, we we convert a bunch of contractors in, like, Austria and Colombia and Spain, and, you know, and having those conversations with Rippling team was night and day compared to all the other conversations we'd had about setting up in The Philippines and other countries. Right? Like because those were our first, you know, first countries with, Rippling. And the Rippling team was able to answer everything. They answered it in ways that we understood, and we're then able to kinda have those conversations with our employees as well, right, not just us. So it was really, really strong, Yeah. in those conversations. It was night and day compared to most of that, and the structure in which those things happened made me feel comfortable because so many of EORs and because EOR is relatively a new newish concept or, like, newish mainstream concept, and it is it is a lot. Right? Like, a lot of folks just felt like, okay. You're just gonna disappear tomorrow. And so, you know, Yeah. Yeah. it was very scary. It's I think the EOR is it's fantastic. My experience with EOR, I've also used many products. And some of them, to your point, you get in and it's actually just scary once you get in. You're like, oh, I can just type anything into this and hit go. Like, the the the system itself is, it sounds really great. You get in. There are some often some surprises that you don't find out during the sales process. And so one of the things I'd love to hear is, you know, obviously, Rippling customer. Obviously, we're Rippling. What do you like about having everything sitting within Rippling? And I'll I'll tease up a little bit here, but, like, I remember clicking through multiple EORs because one would only do Germany, one would do Australia, Yes. whatever it was, and being like, oh my gosh. I have, to process payroll in eight different systems. So tell me what it's like having kind of a, if I may, all in one EOR. It is, because, just as a little bit of a a longer I know we're most talking about international, but we moved our domestic from a PEO. in The US to Rippling at the same time. Right? So I was working off of three platforms, you know, before. Right? Like, the EOR, Oh my gosh. PEO like, the EOR, our PEO, and, our HRIS. Right? Because we needed one centralized HRIS to handle everything. And we moved over to to Rippling and now everything's in the same place. And, like, the number of headaches right? Like, we need to, like, correct somebody's time. It just flows into all the systems we need to touch. Right? Like, I don't. need to go anywhere else. So I recommend definitely recommend that an all in an all in one solution or a consolidated solution is saves you so much stress, through the process. I I I I think payroll was, like, a constant all month long process for us. Right? And now it's it's, Yeah. it's still, like, intense. Right? Because we have a lot of things we need to cover, but it's not. It is it's a couple of clicks, and we just need to make sure things, like, flow and and it's just some checking, and that's it. Right? Like, all of our, like, all of our rippling team members are kind of fantastic, and it's super easy. I still have a few folks on another EOR that I'm in the process of transitioning, and I just cannot wait to get them over. Yeah. To throw that. system out. Love that. Yeah. Okay. We have a good question in the chat that I'm going to bring up. Before we do, I am going to have our last poll, which is actually about whether or not you're interested in checking out a rippling demo. I will just nicely summarize Jim's, glowing review of, people who actually know what they're talking about in the locations you're trying to hire in. And, all in one system, very nice. But I really think that first piece is actually what I would care most about is, not having to go Google and find out and then hope that what I okay. Fine. I probably wouldn't Google. I'd probably use some sort of AI tool to search, but then I'd have to wonder, is that really right? So survey is open if you're interested in checking out Rippling. And I'm gonna throw this question over to you, Jim. How do you navigate compliance and hiring when hiring in countries where the strong preference of local talent is to be a contractor or to be paid in USD as opposed to being hired through an EOR? I'm curious if you have thoughts on that one. Yeah. We've we've faced this one a couple of times in a couple of different countries, and the bottom line is that almost every country in which they prefer to be paid in US dollars or that they would be a contractor, those countries are tightening their laws very quickly. And I don't think anybody wants to be held on the outside of that as they tighten those laws and and try to get rid of those loopholes because, in the end, those countries are losing out on tax dollars, payroll tax dollars, and, you know, a lot of them have, you know, socialized benefits and things like that that are really good for the the population. And so, you know, I would say that you find a way to explain it. Like, we're trying to help you be compliant within your country, and we're trying to to to work through that. It's not always successful. I mean, it was, you know, kind of candidly, we had some challenges in Colombia kinda moving over. And when we explained kind of what the rules were and then what benefits they would have access to in country that they didn't have access to as contractors, you know, it made it a lot easier. Right? But it wasn't it wasn't an immediate yes. It was like, hey. Let's talk this. through. We we have a tendency to primarily hire in Philippines, Mexico, and The US, but we have, you know, pockets in Colombia and in other countries and India and whatnot. So we're you know, we we try to focus our hiring in countries that, you know, the the benefit is significantly to be an employee of an EOR. Right? Yeah. I was I as I was listening to you answer this question, I was thinking about how I've handled this in the past. And I pull out a little calculator, and I'm like, well, here's the value of your benefits by coming through on an EOR, which, Right. you know, hopefully is compelling, but, it can be a little person by person. You you. mentioned something about I just one question that I think is always a burning question. How do you guys manage time zones? You just listed pretty much one location per continent. How how does VeriRoots handle time zones? I mean, we primarily operate in kind of a nine five or I think a a 10 to three where we expect everybody to kind of be available online kind of ten to three Pacific hours. But. we we're you know, outside of customer experience and a couple other, like, presence based roles, we're really pretty open with, like, work from home. And when you get your work done, you get your work done. And that's worked well for us. Like I said, the CX team and a couple other groups do need folks to work overnights in their local time zone. Yep. And we pay all appropriate, you know, overnight things and and, differentials is one of the words I was looking for. And it works. Yep. Right? Like, you know, we find folks who are okay with doing that over time and and, Yeah. you know, it does it does add a little bit more stress to the recruiting process, to be fair. For sure. I feel like my when I was working in a fully remote organization, my Yeah. guidance was always, like, control your own notifications. Right? Like, you can encourage people to schedule send as much as you want as someone who literally struggles to do time zones within an hour difference. Like, I can only do so much on schedule send. I feel like controlling your own notifications is, like, the power to give to employees in those types of global, global workforce environment. Yeah. So that's just my 2¢. Alright. We've got another oh, I got this. This is a great question, Jim. This is very compliancy. How do you decide when a contractor relationship needs to become a real employment relationship? There's technically, there's some real thresholds, Yeah. but I think we all know there's some different timelines on the backside. So how do how do you think about this? I mean, clearly, we, you know, we follow kind of the laws of each country there kind of as a starting point, but, normally, we're kind of before that because anytime we know that a role is gonna be consistent. Right? Like, this role needs to be here kinda day in and day out. It's not project based. It's presence based as much as anything. Right? Like, I don't have, like, a preset set of guidelines to give you, you know, preset project list to give you that you work on. on your own. Right? So as soon as the employment relationship really starts to feel like an employment relationship, we start to make that move. There are some places where, you know, we have a global contractor in The Kingdom Of Bahrain. We there is no employment relationship possible there, but she's been with us for seven years. And we. are Yeah. we want to keep her near and dear to us for all time. So we're gonna you know, she's gonna be a global contractor, and and that is what it is. But everywhere else, we've converted, you know, all of our contractors into employees, and it's been super successful. Right? Because in addition to, you know, paying taxes and everything else that you wanna do locally, we're also then we do the extra benefits. Right? So we do a full load for these folks and we really make them part of the team versus contractors. You always have to. keep a certain amount of. distance from them and what we found is that folks wanna be embraced by the company, right? They wanna be known and loved by the organization and if you're not doing those things, then they they walk away anyways. Right? So you wanna bring them. in. You want them to be employees even if it's through the EOR relationship or direct employment relationship. Right? Like, contractors create distance just by their nature. Yeah. I think that's a really great answer. The, especially the are we giving you a project, or are you kind of on a long term recurring basis for us. just. being a part of the team? How how long did it take to feel confident in your compliance situation? Right? You had rapid growth, some maybe mild disasters with other EOR providers. What what did it look like when you were finally, like, sleeping sleeping peacefully at night? Right. I I would say, you know, it was the first couple times we had, like, within a month or two of moving some of the folks, like, from Colombia and and India and and The UK over. And we had a couple of situations pop up where employees ask questions we didn't know the answer to. Like, because we weren't experts in those countries. yet because, you know, we'd we'd become experts in The Philippines and Mexico, and we weren't experts in Colombia or The UK or India. And we asked a question, and we got an answer and a real answer, and that was explainable and verifiable and easy. And after that, it was really easy just to be like, okay. They got this. I can relax. You know, our teams, Yeah. It's know, our. teams yeah. It it is it is that simple. Right? Like, when you, Yeah. like, you when you get answers that are just like, there's no way that's true. Right? And, like, there that that makes no logical sense. And then you you Google you do a little bit of Google or AI research. It's like, that doesn't make any sense either. Like, they're what they're telling me doesn't align to anything else you've ever seen or you heard of. And it's like, what's going on? Yeah. And so that happens more often than you would expect from some. of the EOR providers. And, you know, it's because they've they're outsourcing to another outsourcer to another outsourcer and it's like there's so many layers between you and the actual. employment relationship that it doesn't make sense. So so, yeah, I think it's, that. That's a that's a big part of it. Just being able to answer questions. and, you know, satisfy the employee as well as kind of my my people experience team. Yeah. I love that. Okay. I'm going to do one last question because we are coming up on time here. How much of your international growth do you feel like was intentional versus kind of following where the product and the talent were? I'm saying product or customers. Right? Like, how much were because you you mentioned, you know, we look for places we can hire people more as EOR folks. But how much of that was it was initially led by, like, customers, product, just purely the need for hires versus really intentionally following, hiring plan? I mean, I think, you know, we, like, we never intended to hire a bunch of people in Colombia. Right? Like, our whole influencer management. team is in Colombia. That was unintentional, but, like, we knew we needed that talent likely to be international, but we didn't know like, we'd found this, like, pocket of this influencer specialty. Like, they're amazing, amazing. Right? Like, they're some of the best in the business, period. Right? Doesn't matter where they're at, like, in the world. They're just the best in business. We needed them. And, Yep. you know, so that that that was kinda unintentional, but kind of intentional. Like, we knew we needed the talent international, like, AI. Yeah. Right? AI AI enablement. My almost my entire AI enablement team is in Mexico. Right? And it was just, you know, we knew that we wanted to hire kinda more data centric folks in Mexico given my previous experience and a couple other team members' previous experience hiring in Mexico. And, you know, all of a sudden, like, you know, this international intention became very specifically, like, if I need somebody, you know, I because I've now created a network. Right? Now I've now I can get. referrals. Now I can, like, easily hire in Mexico for AI enablement, data analytics, you know, and and very process oriented roles, in in Mexico. I have, QA and compliance folks in The Philippines who are amazing. And now we've got a little network of folks who are amazing at QA and compliance in The Philippines. And so when I open one of those roles, I'm opening it in The Philippines because I know I've got a network now that can get me talent. And so that that. you know, I would say that the intentionality of our international growth was very specific that we wanted to grow more than 50% of everybody we added in in internationally. The where we got folks from, that was more happy accidents across the way, right? Like, Yeah. I've I've not always been as successful hiring customer experience employees in Mexico as I have in The Philippines. That's not I I've. I've outsourced to Mexico plenty of. times. It's a fantastic area to get customer experience books from. I just haven't built up a network there yet to be able to do that. Yep. And so it's it's, it's an interesting kind of experimental process. Yeah. That makes total sense. Wow. Jim, what a what a crazy adventure. You know? Like, it's not often that you get to be a part of, like, a a viral TikTok video that then actually impacts the business you work for. That is, like, a super cool journey, and I am so grateful you shared, some of the fun ins and outs of the global expansion because as we all know, it's it's actually really not that straightforward. Yeah. No. It's not, but it's it's very worth it. Right? Like, I wouldn't trade this team. for anything. Right? This team is amazing. We've we we're resilient. We adapt quickly. We even though we're much larger now, we kinda still have that start up mindset. Right? Like and I think because we've been so international focused in our hiring, you know, that we've got this really good just cultural and vibe across the whole organization. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's awesome. Well, I will, let us leave it there for today unless you have any closing parting thoughts for everyone online. Otherwise, happy Tuesday. I almost said Thursday. Wrong half of the week. Happy Tuesday, everyone, and, thank you so much for, joining us today.