Upper Crust saves time and money managing 2,200 employees across 44 states

According to Melanie, Upper Crust was lucky to switch to Rippling when it did. Shortly after, it acquired another company—its third in three years—and doubled its headcount from 1,100 to 2,200. That’s a huge stress test, and often a no-go, for most systems. Rippling made the sudden growth possible. “I’m so glad we implemented Rippling before that happened,” Melanie said. 

“It’s important we build a harmonious workforce with both companies merging together. We've made a lot of strides building foundational systems like Rippling that allow us to grow,” she said. “Growth and stability simultaneously is a very difficult thing to do, but we want both.” Rippling bridges the gap.

Apart from supporting 2,200 employees, Rippling meets the complicated demands of managing a seasonal workforce spread throughout 44 states. Most employees work in fraternity and sorority houses throughout the nine-month college school year, then technically “leave” the company, meaning Upper Crust has to rehire them and backfill roles for the employees who don’t come back. 

Rippling makes the once-dizzying process easy. She can automatically create Google accounts during onboarding and deactivate them during offboarding, instead of manually setting up email addresses for everyone the company hires and re-hires. The system also automatically sends locally-compliant offer letters to people, saving its HR team hours of busywork, and automatically creates new job requisitions when the company needs to backfill seats when people don’t return after the offseason.

“For us, the most important, coolest product Rippling offered was headcount planning. No one else had anything like it,” Melanie said, who finally got to ditch the dreaded spreadsheets. Instead of draining 20 hours a week manually checking employees’ work placements across hundreds of fraternity or sorority houses, she can now track work locations for everyone in an hour. The team can also pull in market data to set compensation bands—which account for employee performance, tenure, and market conditions—and use the platform to figure out how many headcount seats the company needs to fill at any given time.

“Having a place to maintain future seats that’s connected to recruiting and all these other pieces of the system is really huge for us,” Melanie said.

Rippling also helps Upper Crust comply with the different wage, employment, and tax laws throughout the 44 states its employees work. “Those default policies Rippling has, with the ability to set them by supergroup, is genius,” Melanie said. Instead of learning and memorizing meal and break laws, overtime rates, and sick time minimums everywhere, she can lean on Rippling’s pre-set, compliant policies. 

“For me, the automation is about us having more time to spend with our employees and less time to spend on looking up sick time laws in Colorado.”

Melanie found her prior HR provider’s UX clunky. Rippling’s is a different story. “It makes it a lot easier to communicate with employees,” she said. While people can be apprehensive when they have to use a new tool, “I didn’t have to sell people on Rippling. I’m like, ‘just sign in and let me know what you think.’ It sells itself… People bring it up randomly now. I'll be in a meeting, and they'll be like, 'by the way, Rippling's really cool.’ It makes me look good.”

It’s also a value add for employees, who get SSO’d into all their systems during onboarding. “It’s been a much more positive experience for them to have all the resources and passwords they need on their first day, instead of us having to piecemeal that between all the different departments,” Melanie said, adding that Upper Crust’s non-exempt employees have an easy time navigating the system. “It’s so simple and clean.”

After four years of asking her previous HR solution for help only to get stonewalled, Rippling changed the game. “I thought that Rippling was too good to be true when it promised it would care about my voice, but it clearly does,” Melanie said. “It’s been really wonderful to have a partnership.”

For instance, Melanie approached the support team about getting a search bar to help her toggle through information throughout the company’s 650 work locations. “The next day, the search bar was there,” she said.