The challenge
This case study document pulls from a conversation between Philip Eller, CEO at AccessOwl, and Shane Fritts from Maxio.
Last October, Shane Fritts and one teammate ran IT for all of Maxio. They were juggling 88 applications, with admin access to about 120 more, and no HRIS that talked to anything. Every onboarding was a manual ritual: ticket submitted, mirror access from a similar role, deconstruct a homegrown Salesforce record, screenshot for the auditor, ping the owner of the right Slack channel, repeat. A salesperson took 45 minutes to onboard. An engineer with DevOps approvals took longer. Offboarding was the part that worried Shane.
Forty-five minutes to an hour of manual revocation, “and that’s not necessarily guaranteed that they’re fully offboarded.”
The search for a solution
Philip asks: So, why did you start looking for a different way?
In this audio snippet, Shane discusses what manual offboarding actually looked like at 240 employees, why he’d been hunting for an access management tool for four years, and the budget conversations that kept it on the back burner.
Read transcript summary
Assessing Lumos, ConductorOne, 1Password SaaS Manager, and the Rippling IT idea
Shane built a spreadsheet. He talked to vendors. He talked to peers who’d consolidated everything into Rippling. Here’s what he found.
Philip asks: What other tools did you explore?
Shane Fritts:
Lumos:
“It started at, like, twenty-eight for the basics. It was missing a lot of integrations. I think we dodged a bullet, if you want me to be honest with you.”
Then Shane heard Lumos was rethinking which identity providers it would support: “They’re like, ‘Oh, we’re kinda shifting away from Google Workspace altogether.’ That right there made me feel very concerned for the direction of the company. As an operating model, you should be more open to multiple ends of identity.”
Rippling IT:
“Rippling can be good at a lot of things. The IT side has not been a good experience. They wouldn’t give us a proof of concept. We had to buy it, which blew my mind. Same with the access controls. We had to buy it to test it.”
“They are very cookie cutter. They will only do what is out of the box with whatever SaaS tooling you’re on. For Notion, that SCIM bridge only works if you have the enterprise plan. Not cost effective.”
Trellica (Acquired by 1Password):
“I met with the Trellica founder and had a really good interaction. It was a pretty impressive tool, but it felt like, ‘we have to stay in this lane and this is how we’re gonna operate.’”
Trellica has since been acquired by 1Password, and that rigidity is what led Shane to AccessOwl, where the team was actually open to building around how he works.
Maxio discovers Shadow IT with AccessOwl
In this audio snippet, Shane explains how AccessOwl’s Shadow IT alerts changed what Maxio can see across its stack.
Read transcript summary
Before AccessOwl, Maxio had almost no insight into shadow IT. Now Shane gets pinged whenever someone signs up for a new tool with their company email. He uses it as a buying signal: “Hey, we have eight people on Loom, and we’ve had ten others ask about it in our Slack channel. Is this something we want to look at investing in?”
When the chief product officer asked Shane how he knew about a new AI tool an employee had quietly signed up for, Shane told him: “We’re always watching. Always.”
Shane Fritts
Senior IT Admin, Maxio
“AccessOwl’s Shadow IT features are just unmatched.”
“Here’s the keys. Go for a drive.”
Philip asks: What sealed the deal for you to use AccessOwl?
In this audio snippet, Shane explains how AccessOwl’s proof of concept closed the deal for him.
Read transcript summary
The solution
Philip asks: How does your workflow look now?
With AccessOwl, Shane now builds an onboarding template once per role, derived from a person who already does the job. New hire shows up, template applies, done in five minutes. The Zoom license, the GitHub seat, the DevOps approvals: all handled. “Five to ten minutes if you’re not distracted, tops,” Shane says. “And that’s going slow one-handed while drinking a Dutch Bros.”
Offboarding is the bigger unlock. He schedules it the moment the ticket lands. At the chosen hour, AccessOwl pings every tool owner in Slack, every tool with a native integration auto-revokes, and the audit trail writes itself. Shane describes it as a set-it-and-forget-it situation.
Shane Fritts
Senior IT Admin, Maxio
“I can call it an early day on a Friday. It’s 3 PM, there’s nothing going on. ‘Guys, clock out. I’ll watch our escalation channel, and the offboarding’s gonna just kick off when it kicks off.’”
Audits used to mean hours per tool, side-by-side spreadsheets, “find a way to fully export the list and then go and compare spreadsheet to spreadsheet.” Now Shane pulls up the live report in AccessOwl, scans for terminated users with access, finalizes the audit. Ten to fifteen minutes.
“Time is money. Money is time.”
In this audio snippet, Shane discusses what his job would look like today if Maxio had consolidated into Rippling IT instead of picking AccessOwl.
Read transcript summary
