give your team the resources they need to do the work that makes them happy. plus eight key takeaways.
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the disruptors
with liz farr
“alicia katz pollock proves that you don’t need to begin with an accounting degree or formal bookkeeping training to be a hugely helpful resource for the quickbooks community.”
more podcasts and videos: nancy mcclelland: be the one your clients ask first |alan whitman: stop accepting the status quo | sean duncan: discover your own genius | ingrid edstrom: true wealth is not financial | caleb jenkins: firm growth requires owners to shift roles | chris hervochon: be the leader you want to work for | ira rosenbloom: don’t merge for the money | adam lean: get out of the accountant’s trap |
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pollock started teaching computers and microsoft products and used quickbooks in her business. then, people started asking her to teach them quickbooks. she ran her quickbooks set-up and methodology past a few bookkeepers, who told her, “alicia, you have a knack for this.” so she dove in to learn as much as she could and is today one of the go-to experts for quickbooks.
while cpas may often think in debits and credits, pollock says that quickbooks is designed around workflows like invoicing, so it “will debit and credit to all the correct accounts behind the scenes.”
quickbooks gives you “the intelligence that you need for the two main purposes, which is paying your taxes and being able to grow your business,” she says. “and when you’re using quickbooks properly, you have both.”
accountants can exercise creativity when they intentionally set up a new quickbooks file. pollock suggests “sitting down with the client and finding out what they want to know about their business.” by starting with the kinds of reports a client will need “to see the reality of what’s happening,” you can go backward and figure out how to set up quickbooks to provide that information. sometimes, it’s in the chart of accounts, or sometimes, it requires classes, locations, or tags. every one of the thousands of businesses alicia has worked with has a “personality, like a fingerprint,” and “no two are remotely alike.”
eight more takeaways:
- you have better results when you work with quickbooks the way quickbooks likes to work rather than making journal entries to fix things in the wrong spots. instead of making journal entries to fix miscategorized transactions, a better approach is to use the reclassify tool.
- evolution in accounting means that instead of doing after-the-fact accounting, we’ll have the time to be more human-centric instead of data-centric.
- automation will free us up to bring more than rudimentary bookkeeping.
- accounting firms need to shift to a staff-centric model and away from a focus on clients and shareholders. foster what’s special about your people and help them thrive. giving your staff what they need to learn and grow will bring loyalty.
- start with non-traditional learners instead of people with brand new accounting degrees and help them develop as human beings.
- if you want people to work for you and if you want to avoid the repeated expense of training new people, you have to find out what makes people happy and give that to them.
- invest in quality tech training for your teams instead of doing it on an ad hoc basis. you’ll save time when you’re not repeating the same training whenever someone has the same question.
- it takes six times longer to figure something out for yourself than to find the right training mechanism for it.
more about alicia katz pollock
alicia katz pollock is the “qbo rock star” at learn.royalwise.com. pollock’s royalwise owls (on-demand web-based learning solutions) provides quickbooks online training and coaching to accounting firms, bookkeepers, and small business owners. as a top 50 women in accounting, top 10 proadvisor, and intuit trainer/writer network member, alicia is a top-rated conference speaker. alicia’s podcast with hector garcia, the unofficial quickbooks accountants podcast, hovers in the top 50 for us business news. she has a master of arts in teaching, with several quickbooks textbooks on amazon. through her signature q.u.e.s.t. training portal, pollock provides scalable training accounting firms, reducing turnover, enhancing staff productivity, and value-add for clients.
books and videos by pollock include:
transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
liz farr
welcome to accounting disruptor conversations. i’m your host liz farr from 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. and in this series, i’m talking to owners of businesses who are doing things a little bit differently. my guest today certainly fits that. she is alicia katz pollock, co owner of royalwise solutions qbo training, host of qb talks, co host of the unofficial quickbooks accountants podcast, and author of multiple books on quickbooks. glad to have you here. alicia, how are you doing?
alicia katz pollock
thanks for having me. i’m doing great.
liz farr
can you tell listeners just a little bit about your business, where you’re located, and what services you offer? and how long have you been in existence? that kind of stuff?
alicia katz pollock
so we’re in portland, ore., and the company name is royalwise solutions incorporated. but our website is royalwise.com. and what we have is a giant learning portal, a learning management system at learn.royalwise.com. my personal focus is on quickbooks training. but, we also have a whole department for apple training. so macs, iphones, ipads, as well.
liz farr
i’m so glad to have apple and quickbooks in the same place. when i when i left public accounting, i was so glad that i no longer had to use pcs.
alicia katz pollock
yeah, and other than a couple of pieces of proprietary software at this point, you can do almost everything bilingually. and so it’s it’s actually been interesting to us because we originally compartmentalized the apple training and the quickbooks training, but all of us in the last year, we’ve had so much crossover, people who came to me for quickbooks, oh, you do macs too. and our apple side is all my husband, jamie. we’re a husband and wife. and so my partner is my partner.
liz farr
that’s fantastic. now, your path to accounting was not the traditional path. can you tell listeners how you became one of the top quickbooks trainers? yeah,
alicia katz pollock
i have a master’s in teaching. originally, i was trained to teach seventh-grade english. and i graduated from my master’s program. and i started in the public schools. and you know, when you’re 13 years old, reading literature is the last thing that you want to be doing. and so it was really hard to teach the kids. and i was also 22 years old. and the kids i was teaching were 14, which when we lived in santa fe, was like practically the same age. and so i would like to go out to a club, and my students would be there. it was like, oh, that’s not gonna work. so, i moved over to the community college and the ged program. and i started teaching computers. and i’ve been a computer geek since the first apple computers came out. and so computers have always been my biggest passion, not teaching english. and i started teaching people how to use computers, starting with the students there, but then it moved over to business. and so i started teaching microsoft office word, excel, powerpoint, and built a consulting firm. and as that continued to grow, and blossom, people would say, well, can you help me with my quickbooks? and at first, i was like, well, i use it myself. but i, you know, i can teach you how to use the software. but i can’t teach you anything about bookkeeping or accounting. but so people kept asking, and when qbo really came forward, intuit started really pushing people over to it. so we’re talking like 15 years, i realized, okay, i have to actually learn the accounting components so that i’m not just making things up as i’m going. and when i first started, i had impostor syndrome, because i was not a trained bookkeeper. but when i ran my setups, and my what i was doing past bookkeepers, they’re like, actually, alicia, you have a knack for this. this is pretty good. and i just started learning absolutely as much as i could. and so i kind of came into it from the software training as opposed to the bookkeeping training end, which is definitely not the normal path. but here i am top 50 women in accounting so i must be doing something right.
liz farr
well, you certainly are, you know, and in my time in in accounting, i ran into probably an equal number of self taught brilliant bookkeepers, and accountants, ones who had zero formal training, as well as some people who had all the degrees and all the letters who couldn’t reconcile their way out of a paper bag, right? they were just horrible, horrible. and also, in my time in public accounting, any kind of software training, especially quickbooks was completely ignored. i mean, i was basically told, okay, you know, the clients books are in quickbooks. so you need to pull out the trial balance and make sure everything looks good. and i’m like, well, how do i do that? and so somebody kind of walked me through that, but everything i have to do myself. now, how can investing in high quality training make a difference for a firm.
alicia katz pollock
but it’s really fascinating to me on a regular basis, that when you go through an accounting, accounting program, or a bookkeeping training program, it’s all about the debits and credits, and the you know, equity and liabilities and all of the flow of the money, but they almost never teach software because they want to stay agnostic. and when people who have been formally trained come over to quickbooks, it’s like it, it doesn’t make any sense to them, because they’re naturally thinking about debits and credits. the software, what quickbooks does is, you make an invoice, and it will debit and credit, the, all the correct accounts behind the scenes. and, you know, it’s funny to me when i’m working with a cpa, and they’re like, yeah, but i have to put accounts receivable in this field here. it’s like, no, you put the product there. and that moves, the money, it where it needs to go. so i really enjoy working with cpas. because it’s a whole different way of thinking about it. and it’s that same elegance of the software, which is what’s helping bookkeepers who are new to the field who might not have formal training, why they can still succeed in what they’re doing. because you can still go look at a transaction journal and see the debits and the credits. but it’s not necessary to process it with that same thing.
liz farr
i ould agree. and i would say that it really wasn’t until i started poking around in somebody’s quickbooks file, and started following how the transactions flowed, that i really understood accounting. yeah,
alicia katz pollock
i mean, what i like about quickbooks is that what it’s doing is it’s really representing the business activity that for every one real life action, there’s a form in quickbooks that does that thing. and it mirrors real life, while at the same time giving you the intelligence that you need for the two main purposes, which is paying your taxes and being able to grow your business. and when you’re using quickbooks properly, you have both, as opposed to just working in a general ledger, where you’re doing everything in journal entries that will give you your numbers for taxes, but it won’t tell you how many of what products sold. so that you can figure out where your turn is and where you, you know which products you should buy more of, and which customers you should engage with, based on your transaction history. and so that’s one of the things that i really love about quickbooks is that you get to really analyze your business on multiple dimensions and slice and dice it.
liz farr
exactly. you know, and in my experience, you know, as i mentioned before, i worked with a bunch of bookkeepers who were self taught as you were. and, you know, it seems to me that if you could bring in if firms could bring in people who are not degreed accountants, but get them up to speed on what they need to do, that could help a lot. you know, what, what do you have to say about that?
alicia katz pollock
so you’re really touching on what’s happening in the industry with this dearth of of accounting, accountants that accounting is not sexy, the young people anymore they don’t they they go, okay, well, that’s good for job security, but i have to work these insane hours and numbers are boring. and, you know, if you’ve ever been to accounting conference, at least the ones that i’ve been to accountants are not boring. and so we really have this mission to make accounting accessible to a younger generation. and because there’s fewer people entering the programs, and then staying in the programs and graduating, and then they graduate, and they’re like, oh, i don’t, i don’t want big four. so i’m not worth anything anymore. and not only starting their own firms, they’re just going into finance and going into investing and going into other avenues other than public accounting. and that has to change. and i actually think that if your clients are using quickbooks or xero, or freshbooks, then you need to know how to use them too. and if you take the perspective that, okay, they might not have been through a formal training program, but i can sure teach them how to use the software so that i can get the numbers that i need to do my job as the cpa and advisor, then you’ve got a win win situation, you’ve got a new opportunity for non traditional students to come in and work for you in the firm and solve your staffing shortage.
liz farr
yeah, and and you just mentioned, you know, working the way that clients work. today, with cloud accounting, there is just so much technology are round. and that’s what our clients are using. so can you talk a little bit about how expertise in technology can really help you become a better adviser?
alicia katz pollock
yeah, absolutely. i mean, because i came into his from the training perspective, i have always really enjoyed teaching people how to use the software. and that’s where i’ve developed all of these courses that originally. excuse me. originally, i started teaching business owners, but then the social media is what pushed me into the, to the training of bookkeepers and now cpas. and it was originally just teaching people basic workflows. and then it became teaching about the meaning and the intent behind the purpose of those transactions. and i just started building courses. you know, i started with what i called my fundamentals class, which we now call the boot camp, which actually we now call quickbooks from setup to tax time. and then i was like, okay, but they need to know, the bank feeds. so i started teaching class on how to use bank feeds. and then i was like, okay, well, if you’re going to use the bank feeds now, when you reconcile, it’s not just tracking off the things that are on the statement. it’s what about what do you do about the things that are not on the statement and all the troubleshooting involved? and so i made a class about that. and okay, now there’s the sales tax module. how do you do sales tax on quickbooks? okay, let’s make a class about that. and then okay, payroll, more technology, more software? how do i use the software to run payroll? and so i just started plugging every training gap that i could find, and i’m focused mostly on quickbooks, i’m not doing other software, but i mean, quickbooks changes so often, how could i, you know, there’s, i am committed that i shouldn’t be committed, i am committed, i’m kind of all in on training on this one software platform. and it’s just gotten really expensive. so in order to be able to provide this technology training to accounting firms, i realized that i needed to, like, make sure what i was doing was completely legit. and so i spent four years dialing in my curriculum so that i was nasba cpe approved. and so not just my webinars, but my on demand training, which is really challenging to get approval for. because you have to have, you know, five quiz questions per hour. and then are three quick three questions per hour for content and then a quiz of five questions per hour at the end. and all the questions have to have feedback. so if you get it wrong, you have feedback for why it’s wrong and which means literally, literally 1000s of assessment questions to make sure that you’re using your technology right and why not? and so it’s kind of been a labor of love that fortunately i enjoy this. i enjoy all the everything coming in from the teaching end of it and that’s what really makes royal wise unique is that you’re getting top notch software to train mean, you’re getting top notch quickbooks training, it’s practical. and i like to think that it’s fun. like, i don’t think i’m that boring. so, you know, i like to kind of entertain people, as we’re learning tons of software demos, i’m not just like talking with a powerpoint, i’m actually showing you what to do. and you can have it up on one screen while you follow step by step on another screen. and i can take somebody who’s never seen quickbooks online before, diehard desktop user, especially the ones that are like, i don’t wanna use quickbooks online, i hear terrible things about it. right? i looked at it 10 years ago, and it was terrible. well, 10, many years ago, it wasn’t that great. but now, it’s actually pretty spectacular. and taking somebody who’s resistant, and giving them the tools that they need to learn quickly, easily. be able to apply the knowledge immediately. and that helps the cpa firm with their efficiency that you know, you’re onboard somebody and they say they know quickbooks, but they get in and they start using it and you find out that they don’t know what to do in this situation, and they don’t know what to do in this situation. so that’s where i come in. because i fill in those gaps.
liz farr
yeah. and that’s, it’s, it’s important to be able to do that, and to also understand how the tech that our clients use, interacts, and how to diagnose when something is going wrong. you know, we have the accountants, ability to say, those balances look really weird. something is wrong, and the technicians ability to go in and go, oh, well, that’s because you got to double import of these feeds.
alicia katz pollock
but you really touched on something i mean, my passion myself is what i like to do in my business is cleanups, i love looking at what’s wrong, and figuring out why it’s wrong and fixing it and telling the person showing the person responsible how to do it properly. i in particular, really enjoy working with cpas. because in a situation like you described when you know that numbers aren’t right. and you know what the numbers should be? what do you do? you make a journal entry button. but quickbooks online does not love journal entries. they have the purpose, they’re great for depreciation. they’re great for allocating job costs and allocating payroll to classes. sure, fine on all of that. but if you discover that the owner has been putting all of their food in meals and entertainment, and its really owner, draw it up most cpas are going to just make a journal entry and take that $1,000 and move it from one to the other. but the business owner is gonna go, oh, what did i do last time? oh, last time i put it in meals and entertainment. so what are they going to do? again, there’s still gonna put it in meals and entertainment. and so i love working with cpas to show them, you know, the reclassify tool that there’s a tool that just allows you to, to check off all of these, click this one shift, click this one, move them all to owner draw. and then the transaction actually says owner draw. and then when the business owner goes, oh, these meals are supposed to be owner draw. they put them there.
liz farr
dang, i wish i had known that back when i was giving aje’s to our internal bookkeeper to put them into the accountants copy and or to record them in quickbooks. i wish i felt guilty as charged.
alicia katz pollock
and so just any of you who are listening to this going, well, what is she talking about? if you go up to your accountants, briefcase in your qbo a, and drop it down, there’s a tool that says reclassify. and that’s like my favorite thing is just picking them all up and moving them where they belong. doesn’t take much longer than making the journal entries.
liz farr
no, no, not that probably would have been easier than going through in adding up, you know, getting a pdf of the detail, adding up all the ones that were wrong. and then saying, okay, here’s my aj e to reclassify some of that stuff.
alicia katz pollock
absolutely. one of the services that i provide is i actually work with clients right before tax time before their cpa goes over to their quickbooks. i’ll meet with him, i’m generally an hour and a half. and i sit there with the with the business owner. and we use the reclassify tool and we go through all the categories, and they say, oh, no, that’s a utility. that’s supposed to be an owner draw, oh, that’s in the wrong place. and we just pick up all the transactions and move them. and it’s not opening and editing and changing the transaction. it’s just using reclassify. and by the time they’re done, their books are like, gorgeous, they’re all excited, because now they can actually run the reports and they’re meaningful. and so that’s kind of, i shouldn’t be the only person that can do this and wants to do this. i want everybody to be able to do this, then that’s why i’m a trainer.
liz farr
yeah, yeah. and more people would benefit definitely. now, now, another podcast, i’ve heard you talk about accounting as a creative endeavor. but accountants rarely see themselves as creative. we think of ourselves as you know, buck up and very, very rigid, you know, color between the lines. oh, can accountants access this creativity that all of us really do have?
alicia katz pollock
yeah. and to be clear, when i’m talking about creativity, i’m not talking about like creative classifications. i’m not talking about creative use of the software. and when i talk about being creative, it’s more like, sitting down with the client, and finding out what they want to know about their business. what’s important to them? are they? or is this particular person more focused on the products that they’re selling, or the services that they’re providing, or the people that they’re assisting? and being able to pull out the reports that allow them to see the reality of what’s happening? so i always start from the report and go backwards. okay, so this is what you want to see. all right? how are we going to set up your quickbooks that it gives you that information? is it how we name things on the chart of accounts? is it how we arrange your products and services? is it has to do with what workflow choice do we make for the level of detail that you collect? you know, some people don’t need classes, and some people use classes and locations and tags to analyze on three different dimensions. so which is the tool that we are going to implement? and then i love just kind of refining the quickbooks file. so it represents that personally, like a fingerprint, you know, i’ve worked with probably 1000s of individual businesses and no two are remotely alike.
liz farr
no, no. and i think that that, that is so useful. and having, having somebody like that, in the very setup would have made it so much easier for me to do my job at times, you know, where i had to figure out exactly what the costs were related to different rental properties that somebody had. that was sometimes a huge challenge to pull out of their detail. and then on the on the other extreme, i remember one company, it was a beef jerky manufacturer and seller, and they had incredible detail in their quickbooks about each different variety of beef jerky they made and whether they were selling it at their store or online, or at some festival. and, you know, for for tax prep purposes. this made us completely bonkers. because all we really needed was revenue, expenses, done.
alicia katz pollock
ingredients, right? that’s, that’s all we needed.
liz farr
right? but for them, that was really crucial to help them make decisions about which things were profitable and which things were not.
alicia katz pollock
exactly, exactly. and a lot of that went if you start by setting up your quickbooks file with all of that in mind that you have a much better experience than you do just trying to figure it out by yourself. and so i always recommend that every business owner has a bookkeeper or an accountant or are consultants in their back pocket to help them dial it in. and i love working with cpas. i like being in communication with the cpa that, especially if i’m beginning to do this work for somebody who has not been using quickbooks properly, we have to clean it up. that’s the very first thing is cleaning it up. and so then the conversation is always with the cpa of, okay, their books have been all wrong. the whole time? what do you want to do about the past taxes? i can leave all your tax information, exactly as it was, and make all my adjustments on january 1? or do you want me to go in and just, like fix the whole file to put everything in the right place? and then we’ll look at it and decide if we’re going if it’s material, and if we’re going to amend taxes or not. and i love it when they say, oh, yeah, please, can you just make this the way the business owner needs it, and make the information accurate? and we’ll go ahead and amend if necessary. and, you know, i love being able to like discover, oh, they’ve been duplicating their revenue since 2021. and they refund money back, and i’ve paid for myself dozens and dozens of times over.
liz farr
now, i’m gonna switch gear and ask you a few questions about the future. now, you and jamie are both tech geeks, and tech trainers. how do you think technology and especially ai is going to impact the future of work?
alicia katz pollock
i know that that’s the big buzzword conversation. but not knowing not being a developer, i can’t say exactly what it is that they want to do. i mean, there’s been the hopes of being able to automate all the classification of the bank transactions, but they haven’t been able to do it yet. maybe they will be able to some day. but if you go to office depot, you still can’t tell if you’ve bought office supplies, a printer furniture or your kids office supplies, and there’s no way for them to know that. so kids school supplies, but there’s no way for them to know that. so i’m kind of i don’t, i think we’ve got job security for definitely for the near future. i myself have been able to use ai in some fun ways. one way is it’s been able to, i’ve been able to repurpose my content, and move it from a webinar to an article to books, you know, i have you mentioned, i have a whole stack of books that i’ve written. and it’s not like i’ve used ai to do these books. but i can take the content from my quickbooks desktop book, which is literally step by step and click by click, and then modify that and turn it into an article that i can put on my blog without having to write it all from scratch. and so a lot of that has been really super helpful. i’m not sure if i’m supposed to say this out loud. but we’ve been using a voice emulator for the sponsor spots on my podcast. so when you hear me giving a sponsor shout out, that was just them running the script through my ai voice emulator. and so it sounds like me. but there’s a little bit of speed up or slow down, or it just sounds a little bit stilted. and that the you’re probably gonna be like, holy shit. you’re not supposed to tell people that but you asked about ai. and that’s how i’m using it.
liz farr
good for you. i mean, i think that uses like that are perfectly acceptable, because it’s not like anybody is really hanging on your words, when it’s one of those sponsor spots, right, or something like that. yeah. and now now, something else that i have been asking lots of accountants about, is, you know, if ai and technology can automate a lot of the debits and credits and really make it so it’s it just kind of, so the bookkeeping just kind of happen. how are we going to teach the next generation of accountants and bookkeepers how this works? how, how are they how are they going to learn accounting in the future?
alicia katz pollock
well, i think that there’s always going to be the place for traditional education that you do still have to know what’s happening behind the scenes you do still, even if you’re using quickbooks, you still should be running transaction journal so that you can actually eyeball what’s happening, and make sure that it’s doing what you think it should be doing. but, you know, when i, when i talked to other instructors, you know, we’re learning ways of using ai, the big fear was, oh, no, if there’s ai, then students will never write papers ever again. and while that’s true, it then becomes the responsibility of the instructor to say, okay, now, here’s a methodology of incorporating ai that i approve of, and then teach the students to do it that way, then they’re still the students still doing the learning, they’re not just regurgitating the, they’re still learning modern technology, which is going to be important for us to stay on top of, and ideally, you get an even better result. but you know, we have ipads, but people still want to hold the book in their hands, you know, they still want to have something that they can just pick up and leave through and find the page that has the thing on it and follow the steps on the page. you know, as i do webinars, i talk for hours and hours and hours, but scrubbing through it to find that thing that i said, is challenging. whereas you can pick up a book, and it’s, you know, right there for you to argue and take notes on and remind yourself and keep track easily of the pages, you know, there’s something about holding it in your hand that helps retention. and so i don’t think education is going to go away, i don’t think books are gonna go away, i think there’s still a place for analog.
liz farr
in your in the way that i sometimes think about it is, when you think about the first cars, or the first computers, you had to know an awful lot about how they worked to get them to work to do what you want it. but you don’t have to do that anymore. but we still get in our cars when we drive and we sit in front of our computers, and we get them to more or less do what we want them to. and so i kind of think it’s that education in accounting will be something like that, though, that it’ll happen, the debits and credits will happen. we may not be the ones doing the actual numeric data entry, which we shouldn’t be doing anymore anyways. but it’ll still end up in the right places somehow. and, and that’s okay.
alicia katz pollock
yeah, i mean, evolution is important. i mean, who of us wants to go back to writing down numbers in columns, and then adding them up? nobody. and 50 years from now, we’re gonna look back at what we’re doing now. and go, god, you had to actually still like work a bank feed, you know, who knows where it’s all going. but what it’s going to do is really changed the nature of what we’re doing that instead of all, instead of after the fact and real, after the fact accounting and real life data analysis, it’s going to be able to just go in and be able to run the reports and do the analysis and make recommendations and have some of those recommendations be a little more human centric, and not just data centric. you know, if this is going to free up our time, you know, bookkeeping takes a fraction of the time it did when we were putting writing stuff in ledger’s or in spreadsheets. it just it’s going to free us up to do different things. and ideally, those different things are going to be things that source us as human beings and make us you know, going back to what you said like it kind of that creative endeavor, like what is it that i enjoy? what am i good at? what do i bring to the table and do more of that so that we don’t have to do the rudimentary bookkeeping and accounting element of it.
liz farr
i agree completely. and shift gears a little bit again, in talking about leadership. you know, and this isn’t just specific to accounting firms, but it feels like we’re we’re at a transition point between this old top down very hierarchical, pyramid shaped model of leadership. and we’re moving into a more collaborative and humane version of leadership. so what what advice do you have for leaders who want to be better leaders in this new model of leadership? well,
alicia katz pollock
covid changed everything. because people realize once, once they had a short period of time, where they didn’t, where they couldn’t work, they kind of realized, well, wait, maybe i don’t have to work. or maybe i don’t have to work at that job i didn’t like anymore. now that i’ve had three months of doing what i like doing, i don’t stop doing what i like doing. and so for accounting firm leaders in, you absolutely have to have a worker centric model. now, you have to have a staff centric model, where it’s not about the clients or the shareholders. it’s about fostering what’s special about the people who work for you and make them thrive. and then if they thrive, they’re going to want to do good work and do good work for you. and that way, you’ve got retention as well. and that’s one of the things that i think is a benefit of our royalwise portals, which i haven’t even mentioned yet. but my goal is to have your staff enjoy what they’re doing, and enjoy learning how to do it, so that they’re appreciative of you for giving them that opportunity to learn and grow. and then you’ll get loyalty. and so, you know, like i said, you get to start with some non traditional learners instead of people who just graduated from accounting programs. and you get to help people develop as human beings. and so my leadership advice is that your staff are people, and you have to be people centric. first, in this day and age, it’s no longer about numbers and metrics. it’s no longer about shareholder i mean, yeah, it’s about shareholder value. we live in a capitalistic society, i’m not being like we will idealistic. but if you want people to work for you, and not have to keep training and retraining and retraining and retraining and retraining new people over and over and over again, if you want them to stick, and you want them to succeed, you got to make people happy. and that means finding out what makes them happy. and inevitably, what makes people happy is endorphin rush, right. and we all play everything from wordle, to to angry birds, or whatever the games, whatever game it is, we want that initial feeling of success and joy. and people now expect that all through the day because they’re on their phones all day. so they want that from their work as well. and that’s one of the reasons why we built our learning management system as well so that people can dive in and like what’s the one topic that they need to learn about right now? oh, they need how to use quickbooks banking feeds successfully, because they just mucked a bunch bunch of stuff up, they can go in and watch that question go, oh, my god, i get it. i can do this. this is awesome. oh, my god, we this is now fun, because i know how to do it right. and now i get the enjoyment out of doing it. and so people actually enjoy their work. when they’re not struggling with using the software, or not knowing how to do something once you take away all those uncertainties, and all the struggle or the frustration and people can actually have fun doing their daily tasks. you’ve got something there.
liz farr
yeah. and i think you know, what you said about making your people happy. that is so important. i do quite a bit of writing for a tech company called floqast. and the ceo always says that well, leadership is helping your people become better at being human beings. and he operates his his company that way.
alicia katz pollock
yeah, that’s it’s absolutely in today’s age. it you have to kind of lead from the bottom up. not from the top. yeah. yeah.
liz farr
yeah. now, often when we operate a business, we make mistakes. but it’s sometimes the big mistakes that we make that we learned
the most from. would you be willing to share a mistake you made that was the most valuable for you in terms of what you learn?
alicia katz pollock
but we’ve always been family based and slow growing. and i’ve always been self funded. we’ve never taken out a business loan. i mean, other than like the line of credit, we’ve never had external funding. and i would actually say that probably my mistake has been not understanding the financing component of running a business. still guilty of that, because our growth has been limited by my knowledge, and by our sole funding. so you know, if we, when people enroll in our classes, and we have some money, now we can invest in the next course or the next employee. and so our staff has been like lean and lean and mighty because we’re not over hiring, we’re staying real tight. but i think i have, therefore limited our growth potential because i haven’t been willing to leverage debt in order to grow, you know, i want to run my business so that if i stopped it right, this minute, i don’t, i’m not like, oh, no, we’re not going to how am i going to pay off these loans, i just want to be able to enjoy what i’m doing and grow because people like what i’m doing and appreciate it and find value in it. that’s where i want to grow. so it’s kind of a mistake, because i’m not doing it the normal way. i’m not doing i’m not starting a business or fail starts in business. so it’s a mistake in that but for me, it’s the right mistake.
liz farr
that, and i think that it’s not so much a mistake as a decision, a choice that you’ve made an intentional choice that you’ve made. yeah. and so i don’t see that as a mistake. you know, i think a mistake might be, you know, trying to grow more than you can. finance.
alicia katz pollock
right. but
liz farr
i don’t think you and you and jamie are guilty of that.
licia katz pollock
so it’s kind of a hard question to ask, because i’ve been so intentional along the way, i don’t think i’ve made any big missteps. there was one time where i brought in a consultant, and she wasn’t doing a good job. and i wasn’t able to come to one of the meetings and they made some decisions that changed the scope of the project when i wasn’t there, and they didn’t tell me because i was in charge of the project. so i didn’t know that there was like, i would have been the person to send the information on. so there was a mistake in that particular one. but i’ve been pretty good about not doing anything that that has harmed anybody or, or the company that you know, slow, unintentional.
liz farr
that’s often the best way to grow. yeah. now, you work with accountants a lot. and you see a lot of the things that they do that are not so good things that are good. what should accountants stop doing immediately?
alicia katz pollock
making journal entries to fix miscategorizations.
liz farr
guilty.
alicia katz pollock
that’s like, my biggest thing. that’s my one of my absolutely biggest soap boxes. i don’t other than that, i don’t really have oh, one thing they should stop doing is self training. that’s one of the reasons. if you’re self training, and you’re providing training services, you’re having to constantly spin your wheels, updating the content and answering the same questions over and over again and providing repeated training either to different employees as you get new employees or different clients answering the same questions. so one thing that accountants can stop doing is trying to piecemeal their training and stop recreating that, whether it’s our royal lized platform or some of the other trainers that are out there, but really, we’re in a position to train accounting firms like we have the the curriculum, we have the organization we have these training portals to the point that you can even custom brand, our training portal so it looks like your website. and then you can send your own employees through your own training. that’s videos of me but you’re still in control of it. you can assign them you can track the cpe you can even upload your own videos. i want thing ways that people use our platform is let’s say you have a client and you’re recording your sops like you’re actually like recording, you can record videos of what you do for this client and how to handle this situation. and then you can store that in that clients course in our lms. and then you can refer back to it, if you assign new staff to the engagement, they can just watch it so that they know exactly how to do it. and then you can even invite the client in so that they have their own procedure steps. and it’s been really kind of fun. offering this new process to firms and seeing them thrive with being able to actually make video sops and using a learning management system as the mechanism for it.
liz farr
that is really cool. that that would be so helpful would have been really helpful for me at the last firm i was at and if i could have just recorded while this is our you do this for this client.
alicia katz pollock
yeah, i mean, the the reason why we’re able to do this is because technology has changed, and evolve the fact that we can zoom like we’re doing right now, and then have these calls and then record what we’re doing and screenshare how we’re doing it has absolutely transformed our training much less how we work with clients in a bookkeeping capacity, that when i started teaching classes 15 years ago, it was on tuesday at 12 o’clock, at this location, and the only people who could be there were the people who lived right nearby and happened to be available at that time. and i remember sitting in my classroom, god, god, if i could just like find a way to make this available to people. and i recorded my first video about using using a mac, i think was 15 years ago now. wow. and we distributed on cds, and we actually sold them on amazon. and then like people could buy it and learn it on their own time at their own place. and they were like, i wish there was a way that we could like video tape this and, and and stream it so other people could could watch it. and like then came youtube and zoom. and we started using zoom back in 2017, like long before the pandemic, we finally went, hey, wait. even though i’m giving this class live in portland, we’re also going to invite other people. and so there was a good five year period where we were still teaching live with people in the room. and i had a giant green screen behind me and my laptop up on a stand. so you’re not looking at my nose. and i would have students in from different places and the live classroom. that’s why this mic, i still have my classroom here to remind me of those days when these seats were full, and i had a national audience. then with covid, when we stopped being in person, we dropped the portland part of it. and now it’s just everybody everywhere. and then by being able to make it on demand for cpe. now we don’t even have a time issue. it’s just at your convenience.
liz farr
so perfect. you know, and and i love the ability for asynchronous learning that you don’t have to be in the room at the time to get the benefit.
alicia katz pollock
now the next step will be the ai where we make an avatar of me. and we have my voice recorded already. and then i just write, they have to say and i go teach a class and i’m not even there.
liz farr
it’s coming. i think i think i think jason staats may have actually done a little bit of that already.
alicia katz pollock
yeah, it’s out there. like i said, we’ve already started with the voice part. but we haven’t started with the avatar yet. i have too much fun doing this. i don’t want to give it all up.
liz farr
we should do what makes you happy.
alicia katz pollock
and what’s actually making what’s making me happiest at the moment is actually writing the book series that i’ve been in this book right here is one that was actually the text for the my fundamentals class that i used to teach and i would print out the handouts and i would hole punch them and put them in binders and i would hand them to the people in the room. and then i realized that like i could publish it on amazon for like three bucks instead of $15 producing it myself. so i rewrote the book to make it a standalone public book and now it’s we just re released a new version of it from the new edition from 2015 and i also have a whole step by step series where it’s not just like this is what an invoice is. it’s literally like typing the name here, press tab, type, putting the date right here, click down here, put in this product. and we actually like walk you through how to use all of the features. and those books are 650 pages each. and i have to keep them up to date all the time. so i’m kind of married to the book, and i’m constantly going in and refreshing it every single year. that’s my idea of fun.
liz farr
good thing to do, that’s a good thing to do. well, now now i want you to kind of put on your get out your crystal ball. i think about the future now. client accounting services, cas, client advisory services, whatever we want to call it, some of them even call it client information services. that’s big right now. what do you think will be the next big thing and accounting?
alicia katz pollock
well, hopefully, training resources for how to use that they’re there for everybody to use. the, just like i was saying, with the employees being that if leadership is people centric and bottom up, it still all has to come from your clients as well, that capitalism is all based on like, our economic system in our country is supposed to be that the workers build the products and the they and the the owners pay the people. and then the people use the money, they got paid by the owners to buy the product. and then the owner, hires more staff and makes more product and pays more people. and that the funds cycle over and over and over again, and every dollar gets infinite uses. and our capitalistic system is broken, because all of a sudden being the owner, all the money is going up, and it’s not coming back down again. and i don’t believe in trickle up economics, trickle down economics, i believe in trickle up economics, i believe everything that we can do to get funds in people’s hands, they’re going to pay off their credit cards, and the banks get the money back, and they’re going to pay off their education loans, and the schools get the money back and they pay off their health insurance, health bills, and hospitals get the money again, i believe that we have to even have an economy that is people based to put money in people’s hands so that they can spend it and then we all make more money because people have more money to spend, but we can’t have more money to spend if we don’t pay our people a living wage and give them discretionary income. so whatever happens with cas, that’s what i want to be the goal.
liz farr
that’s a great goal. and you know, and i even think back to henry ford, when he built his first factories and his first assembly lines, he paid his workers, i think twice or three times the going rate for workers, because he wanted to create a class of people who would go out and buy his cars.
alicia katz pollock
exactly, exactly. and you know, because he was who invented the assembly line, he was the first person responsible for mass production and efficiency. and so he was exactly right on that. that’s the only way any of this can work is if the funds cycle, and it’s people first and so, you know, because we have a culture of shopping, you know, we’re, the economy is capitalistic, but the culture is consumer consumerism. and so if we want to be able to continue with consumerism, we need capitalism to still have an ism to it. we need capital.
liz farr
that’s right. that’s right. and now, it’s just been so great talking to you. and i think, you know, rather than then go into politics and economics, because i could share theories with you, but, but we’ve been talking for almost an hour now. and so i just want to thank you so much for sharing your intellectual capital, with the audience here. now if people want to find you, where is the best place to find, you know,
alicia katz pollock
the website is royalwise.com. and you can go on any of the socials, socials and look for there it is for royal wise. or you look for my name, alicia katz pollock, if you go into amazon and want to look up my books, that’s the easiest way to find it is look up my name. and the learning management system. that is what we’re trying to bring to you, all of you out there is that learn.royalwise.com. and so there you can go see what it is that we do. and, again, our training mechanisms are so flexible, that we literally can fit whatever model that you have. and whatever model you need for your particular situation, whether it’s that custom branded portal, or maybe you just have a bookkeeper that’s coming on, that just needs a deep dive, and they can become a member and get access to the full library and just binge watch, whatever, binge watch all of our topics, and they’re immediately going to come back to you a better employee. and so taking advantage of our memberships is another way of going without, like the big commitment of making a portal, you can absolutely still whether it’s one class, or a membership, get your people trained, the gold memberships the you even get to meet with me every single every single month for an hour. and so like i’ll help bookkeepers with whatever they’re struggling with. and of course, it’s totally under nda. it the whole goal is that you get the most efficient training and expertise that fits your needs and fits your model. and so whatever we can do to help you that’s absolutely why i’m here.
liz farr
well, it’s just amazing what you and jamie are doing. and you know, i wish so much that the people i worked with had known about you and would have been willing to invest in some training. so that so that i wouldn’t be making those journal entries to fix reclassifications.
alicia katz pollock
it takes it takes literally six times longer to figure something out yourself than it does to find the right training mechanism for it. and so you know, if you take a look at how much it costs you to not be productive, versus how much it costs to take a class. it’s kind of a no-brainer.
liz farr
absolutely. and now i think with that, we’re going to wrap things up. thank you so much, alicia, for taking the time out of your incredibly busy, busy schedule and talking to us. well,
alicia katz pollock
i’m delighted that you invited me. i big fan of everything that you do. and you know, thank you for including me.
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