BDO Alliance Evolve 2026 Recap

There may be errors in spelling, grammar, and accuracy in this machine-generated transcript.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Hey there. This is Alicia Pollock from royalties.com and welcome to this edition of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast. I just got back from BDO evolve 2026, the conference from the BDO Alliance, and it was held at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Las Vegas. And oddly enough, I'm actually kind of getting over Las Vegas. It was a huge adventure [00:00:30] many years ago. But now that so many conferences are held there and I've seen all the Cirque shows, and I've been to the sphere five times, and I've been to Meow Wolf four times. Oh, at this point I take it pretty easy. But the conference was really great. I've been a BDO Alliance member now for three years, and I'm in what they call the Burn the Business Resource Network. And for those of you who aren't familiar, [00:01:00] the BDO Alliance is an organization of accounting firms from the big four down to, you know, all different sizes, but usually mid to large sized firms. And the BDO Alliance has a lot of different affinity groups that meet together to talk about all the different things that it takes to run an accounting firm, along with all of the members. They also have what they call burns or the business resource Network, and those are all the vendors and cash team support [00:01:30] apps out there. And Roy was joined a few years ago because one of our delivery methods is what we call a quest portal, where you can actually white label our entire royal.com LMS or learning management system so that you can use it to provide training inside your firm.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So that was why we originally joined the burn a couple years ago. And my experience in going to the BDO Alliance conferences over the last three years was, well, the first year was [00:02:00] challenging because I'm a pretty big fish in the ProAdvisor pool. You know, I'm kind of accounting famous in Intuit's world. But when we joined the BDO Alliance, I was a complete unknown. The first year that I was there and we had our booth in the trade show, people thought I was somebody who worked for the company, not the talent, who actually provided all of the content and the deep training. Well, fast forward a couple years now, I have been active in the BDO Alliance [00:02:30] in their CAS practice round tables and doing a monthly Ask Alicia Anything session where everybody in the BDO can come in and ask me questions about QuickBooks specifically. And so this year was the first year where I showed up and people knew who I was and I was recognized and I had friends. And so it was a very different experience this year. Well, what I want to do in this episode is a little bit of a recap of my experiences, some of the sessions [00:03:00] that I had the privilege of going to, and some of my takeaways from the event. The first thing is that this year we had a brand new booth.

Alicia Katz Pollock: We have graduated beyond just having a table with a bunch of brochures and swag on it, and we now have a backdrop and podiums and swag towers, and it's all featuring Alfred, our mascot. And so I think the booth looks spectacular. It [00:03:30] even has a stand for an iPad where I run videos of my classes so people can get a feel for what participating in our training events looks like. So I absolutely loved the booth. So after getting it set up the first day, the conference actually kicked off. For those of us burns with a burn summit, an opportunity for us to meet the other vendors and to get some training as well. And the person that I was [00:04:00] really taken with myself was their keynote speaker, Ryan O'Sullivan. And Ryan was from Intro Hive and his conversation was called Building Relationships, Navigating the Alliance and Best Practices for success. And here are some of the things that he spoke about in his keynote. So he started with a number of statistics that only 10% of business to business salespeople actually meet the buyer's expectations. 58% [00:04:30] don't trust what they hear, and 75% of buyers would prefer to make a decision without talking to anybody in the organization. And 98% of first meetings never move on to become second meetings. So his question was what? What do the best of the best do? And his focus was on trust and caring and mutual disclosure.

Alicia Katz Pollock: You know, how much do you need to invest in the relationship, in the person, in the individual? [00:05:00] And he emphasized that if you want to sell, the way that you do it is by not selling that, you know, of course you have to have something that they need, but there's a three step process of an initial mapping of the relationships, of knowing who the people are impacted and knowing who the decision makers are, focusing on your engagement strategy and focusing on what their objectives are, and then doing some research and intelligence gathering. But even [00:05:30] more than that, the part that was the big takeaway for me are that, and I quote, relationships are your superpower, that 80% of your clients are happy to make an introduction, and 73% of executives prefer to work with somebody that they know deals, starting with an introduction, are 30% more likely to close, and the first person who engages with the key decision maker with the right solution has a 74% win rate. And then [00:06:00] he mentioned that the if you take two people that have the same sales skill set and one of them has a big network and one of them has a smaller network, the person with the bigger network generates four times more revenue than somebody with the same skills and strategies, but their network is smaller. And he really then started talking about the relationships component of it. And personally, you know, this might surprise you, but I'm actually [00:06:30] a big introvert.

Alicia Katz Pollock: I am don't love big groups and I, I'm good one on one with people, but I'm, you know, I'm a pretty private person. And when faced with an environment like a conference, you know, I try and focus just like on my small little sphere because I'm, you know, I get overwhelmed by the big experiences. But what happens with that is for me, it's a little bit harder to make some of those personal relationships. [00:07:00] So I took what he said to heart. And really this conference to me became about making those relationships and making those inroads. And interestingly, a lot of that was with the other vendors, the other burns even more so than the than the attendees. So there's kind of a mix of both. So to illustrate, the first night we, we had an executive women's session [00:07:30] led by Amy Vedder. That was excellent. And then they had us go out in groups to dinner together. And so we went to a restaurant called Komodo. And the dinner was hosted by Annika Zulch, who's the client growth partner at Sapro. And the people that I got to eat with were just an amazing group of women. I had the privilege of Cathy Souders being one of our people. She's one of the people who runs the the CAS roundtable for the Belle Alliance. [00:08:00] I also had Jennifer Wilson at my table, so that was quite an honor.

Alicia Katz Pollock: One of the people in my group was Jeanine Longphorts from Herzrasen and also her marketing director, Nancy D'Amato. And Jeanine has been one of my conference buddies. I met her, um, last year, maybe the year before. And so she's somebody that I really enjoy working with. And a lot of her cast staff have come to realize trainings. And I also had the pleasure [00:08:30] of meeting Kalisa Moore from Kerber Rose. And it was a fabulous dinner. But what I really, really liked most was that Annika asked us for questions. She asked us to go around the table and introduce herself, saying where we're from, but also where we were born, which for almost all of us was someplace completely different and something interesting about ourselves. And that was a great icebreaker because, you know, we still at conferences tend to make assumptions based [00:09:00] on how somebody looks. And BDO is definitely the BDO Alliance conference or BDO evolve is definitely like a step up because we have business partners or accounting firm partners that, you know, it's a definitely a, a collared shirt and, and fancy dress kind of conference. And so you don't really get to know people's personalities. So this one icebreaker absolutely transformed the table. And I got to hear that Kalisa [00:09:30] collects Halloween, um, decor and actually has a whole garage full of Halloween. Um, everything that you can imagine coffins and spider webs and everything that her town, her fire department actually calls on her for the town's haunted house every single year.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So it's it's these kinds of things that you would never know about a person until you had an opportunity like this. So that was a great dinner. Then [00:10:00] the second night, I went to a dinner sponsored by Aaron Wilson at Human Interest and Jonathan Yim at deal, and we went to a dim sum restaurant called Washington Potato. And I was delighted that I actually got to sit right next to Aaron. I met Aaron at scaling New heights a couple of years ago, and he has been gently, patiently nurturing my change over to human interest, which is the 401 K investment strategy [00:10:30] plan that integrates with QuickBooks online payroll. And, you know, we have a 401 K in place or simple IRA anyway. And so I've been like getting to know him and slowly, slowly, slowly being interested in changing over to his platform. And at their dinner, we sat down with some other people that I didn't know, and the conversation was feeling a little stilted. And so I actually used Annika's. [00:11:00] Question of. Tell me something interesting about yourself. And we went around the table and had this great conversation about like, you know, Aaron traveled to Wembley Stadium to go hear Oasis's favorite band and was so inspired that he started taking up guitar. You know, it's these kinds of stories. And so my takeaway from BDO Alliance Evolve this year for me was that kind of relationship building of making friends, not just getting to know people as representatives [00:11:30] of businesses or representatives of firms, but making a genuine set of friends.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Now, ask me a year from now if that helps. If all of these people that I met have actually joined the Royal Wives community and started taking our QuickBooks trainings, we'll see how it goes. But I can say that I really enjoyed the experience of the conference this year better than I ever have. Okay, so that was my first takeaway was for me. My growth area was relationships. Now, [00:12:00] because I'm a burn and I'm in the trade show, a lot of the time, I can't get away from the booth to go to sessions and I got to stay. I got to stay on the floor. But I did manage to get away for a few minutes to go to a session called Gen Z at Work New Strategies for a New Generation. And that was presented by Amy Beth Kessinger of the Growth Partnership. This one was particularly interesting to me because first of all, I have two Gen Z kids. They are 18 and about [00:12:30] to be 20 years old, and they are employees of Royal Y's, and getting to work with them has been a little bit of a challenge, and it was interesting hearing what she had to say, because you get to see why Gen Z struggles with our world. So with our business world, I should say.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So one of the things that she mentioned is that executive functioning skills development was lost during Covid. And this is something I've been actually telling my kids that because my [00:13:00] kids developmental years in middle school and the first years of high school were online, they didn't get to make the social relationships that they would have if they had been in school full time. And we've all heard that kids who were in school during those years actually backslid on some of their academic development. But what she pointed out was that not only did they miss out on those social skills, but they've also missed [00:13:30] out on the the critical thinking skills and a lot of the communication skills that you and I, as either Gen X or millennials, we take for granted. And the, the, the workplace has changed and they never develop muscles in negotiation and relationship. They are interested. They're self-teaching themselves, business skills online. But then they expect that they're [00:14:00] going to be taught these skills when they get to the job. Whereas in a traditional model, you learned your business skills and your communication skills in high school and in college, and then took them into the workplace. So like a common experience would be that if you weren't going to be able to deliver on a deadline. Gen Z waits until the day of the deadline to tell you that they don't have it ready. They don't tell you initially when they realize [00:14:30] that they're going to miss the deadline and that they're struggling.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So it's those kinds of skills or the fact that they do most of their communication through texting and, um, and discord and, and forums and they don't write letters using email the way we do. And they don't pick up the phone and talk to each other almost ever. Uh, and so skills that we take for granted in getting business done are not done. [00:15:00] If they send an email, it's like two sentences and not formal. And that may get the message across, but it doesn't get the meaning across. And it certainly doesn't give all the information that a business needs in order to make decisions. So there's a lot of skills that that kids coming into the workplace don't have. And it's not just that there's a deficit in skills and like, oh my God, what are we going to do about the fact that kids don't know anything? There's [00:15:30] also the fact that Covid changed work globally, especially in the US. But but for sure globally. And that, for example, in a tax firm, you would get a new hire and you would give them low level work to do for the first couple of years. And then you would look to see who the rising stars are, and then you would start training them and elevating them. But [00:16:00] the kids who have been through Covid, Gen Z realized that life's too short to delay the gratification.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And it's not just about the gratification that they want their lives to have meaning, and they are not sold on on delayed development. So instead of waiting a few years to develop your your junior staff, you know, you're waiting. [00:16:30] You're evaluating them to see who you want to invest in. They're evaluating you to see if you're going to invest in them. So even though it feels sometimes like you're parenting them at work, it's not that you're lowering your standards. You got to adapt to a new generation's needs. That the way our business businesses operate was built for a whole different era and a whole different world. You stayed in one job all your life. You [00:17:00] got job feedback once a year. And the idea is that you sacrifice now because the benefit is going to come later. But that's not Gen Z's model. So, you know, if you hear yourself saying, well, Gen Z just doesn't want to put in the hours. It's that Gen Z doesn't work towards a future payoff. They want a current payoff. And so they need their outcomes now. So what [00:17:30] that means to you as a firm when you're hiring is that, well, there's a couple of things. First of all, is that the the model has to has to change. But that's good. That's not bad. It's just not what you're used to. But there's benefit. They now first of all, with skills, they do need to be shown what a proper email and with tone looks like they need to be taught the job skills because they just flat out never had [00:18:00] the opportunity.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So if you're evaluating them on whether how well they're succeeding with those skills, but you've never taught them what your standards are for that evaluation, then everybody's set up to fail. And so you do need to actually start teaching some more professional norms that you do need to build in training for your new hires, how do you write client emails? How do you prioritize multiple [00:18:30] tasks? What's the appropriate way to show up on a Zoom meeting? How do you behave at client events? What do you how do you dress for work events? When's the right time to try something yourself, and when should you escalate and communicate that there's an issue? How do you update managers? Like all of these things are things that you and I are like, well, isn't that just obvious? And the true answer is, well, no, it's not obvious at all that job skills [00:19:00] are not taught in schools and they are no longer our cultural norms thanks to Covid. And so there isn't any way to gain those skills unless you are the person who trains them. And so what she recommends is doing something, doing some interesting strategies, like intentionally from the get go, Teach them some job skills, and one of Amy Beth's suggestions was to create [00:19:30] a skills passport where they actually see the progression towards their goals, and then you work with them to develop each of those business goals.

Alicia Katz Pollock: Also, bi directional feedback is kind of necessary at this point. Even though you may be a little judgy about these kids don't have any skills. They also have all of the skills of modern technology that you don't have. They adapt to technology [00:20:00] really, really fast. They adapt to new software. They can help create SOPs for the way to do things with automation. And so the, the, the generation gap inside the workplace is actually needs to be bi directional. It should not be judgmental. No single generation has the whole picture. Growth and belonging is a two way street, [00:20:30] and the young people coming into our workplace need to know they're all about their branding. And so if you can bring their branding in as a professional identity, you're going to really foster their, um, how they feel. Gen Z needs to know, do they matter here? Does my work matter here? They also want to see impact as a consequence of their work. Whereas, you know, [00:21:00] so many of us cut our teeth by doing data entry. They and it's separated out from the success of the company. We may do. They may do, you may do the data entry, but it's the advisory where the company grows. And so instead of separating out those two levels, they really do want to see the consequences of their work.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And so if you can encourage experiences that shift them from a task doer to [00:21:30] a professional, that's what they want. Moments of consequence, moments of purpose, of purpose and turning restlessness into range. You know, we've complained that, you know, kids today have a short attention span. Well, that also means that they are more open to a wide range of skills and not just one point of expertise. My takeaway from all of this, and especially having, you know, what my kids say about it, is [00:22:00] they all say to my son at all, wow, you don't have any of these job skills that are needed in the workplace. And he says, well, mom, the workplace has changed and those skills aren't needed anymore. Now, personally, I think that is the perspective of a 19 year old and he is not right about it. And he's going to be rudely awakened when he actually gets into the workplace. But he's not wrong in that the skill sets have have shifted and needed that. You know, with all of the work that's happening [00:22:30] in AI, that's second nature to them. You know, I was in my 30s when iPhones came out, but he was iPhones actually came out the same year as my son, one of my first jobs, Post-pregnancy was teaching iPhones. And so my takeaway for that is, hey, I need to develop a Gen Z course and in business skills and get that added to my library.

Alicia Katz Pollock: But mostly I want I want you to take [00:23:00] away with is that the answer is not just outsourcing overseas. We do need to develop our intellectual capital and our skills capital in the United States. And so don't be shy about hiring a Gen Z kids who are out of high school and out of college. But do know that your training program needs to include the job skills that you want them to express, and not judge them because they don't know how [00:23:30] to do it. They don't see why it's important. You need to actually teach them that part of being in business. Okay, so that's my spiel about Gen Z. The next thing that happened is that Royal Wise actually won an award during the main stage opening presentations they had they have a section where they recognize some of the Burn the business resource network, you know, the vendors for some [00:24:00] of the things that they bring to the table in the BDO Alliance. And the four categories are workforce, culture, innovation, growth strategy, and client experience. And I am honored to announce that Royal Wise won the award for growth strategy. And I'm holding up the the award. But you know, you all can't see it. But it's one of those beautiful glass, um, glass, um awards that says um, presented to royal wise for growth strategy excellence. [00:24:30] And it has this really cool red base that when you look at it from the top down, the whole award just glows red.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So I'm very excited and very proud. Now we won the award and we got the recognition for it, but they didn't really include during the main stage presentation why we won these awards. And so a few people were asking me, well, okay, you won on growth strategy, but what does that mean? So I thought I would share with you the application that we put in, um, for the awards. [00:25:00] So now I am reading it off of a paper, but I will try to make it conversational so it's not boring as heck. All right, so growth strategy over the past year, our growth has been the result of intentional positioning clearer client alignment, and a willingness to refine our offerings based on real world demand. One of the most impactful shifts we made was redefining who we serve best. While we originally focused on individual business owners then evolved into training bookkeepers, we identified a stronger and more [00:25:30] scalable opportunity in working with mid-sized CPA firms and CAS practices. These firms require consistent, high quality training across their teams, and our solutions are uniquely positioned to meet that need. By aligning our efforts towards this audience, we've achieved measurable results, including a 250% increase in revenue and more than double the engagement in our webinars and courses. These outcomes are not just the result of increased marketing, but of better alignment between our services and clients who benefit [00:26:00] most from them.

Alicia Katz Pollock: To support this shift, we also reworked our membership structure aside. That actually meant we lowered our prices, not raise them. We lowered them. Our goal was to make it easier for firms to access training at scale, while ensuring that the value of our offerings was clear and actionable. By refining our tiers and focusing on what our core audience actually uses and needs, we improved both adoption and retention. Our growth strategy is heavily supported by data. We closely [00:26:30] monitor participation, completion rates, engagement metrics, and client feedback to guide our decisions. This allows us to make adjustments quickly, whether that means refining course content, adjusting pricing models, or improving how we communicate our value. Another factor in our growth has been our ability to scale through delivery systems like quest, which allows accounting firms to deploy structured training across their teams efficiently using white labeled portals powered by our content. This has positioned us not just as a training provider, but as [00:27:00] a long term partner in workforce development. Ultimately, our growth is the result of clarity. By understanding who we serve, what they need, and how we can deliver it effectively. We've built a model that continues to expand while maintaining quality and impact. And that, folks, is what earned Royal Wise a BDO Alliance Award this year. The last part of my experience that I'll share with you is that at conferences, we run one or more sessions called [00:27:30] Ask Alicia Anything, and it's a scheduled time when people can come to the booth as kind of an event.

Alicia Katz Pollock: These Ask Alicia Anything sessions are the same as the ones that come with a Royal Wise Owls membership, and that I do for BDO on a monthly basis. But it's always fun to do it live, and when it's live, it actually becomes more of a stump the trainer kind of event where people are trying to find questions that I might not know the answer to. So [00:28:00] this year's winner of Stump The Expert was Janine Fritz of Hirschson, and she came to me with a question where she was trying to figure out if QuickBooks could handle the sales tax situation, or if she had to use a solution like Avalara. And her question was that Connecticut, specifically where she's from, has sales tax nexus. If you have even one employee working virtually in the state, then you all of a sudden now have sales tax nexus [00:28:30] in Connecticut, even if the whole entire company is somewhere else and you just have one employee working virtually now you have to pay sales tax in Connecticut. So she was wondering, well, how does Qbo handle this? Does the Nexus tracker recognize it? And I was like, yeah, no, I am not quite sure. So I'm not one to be stumped for long. I actually went straight up to the source and pinged, um, pinged my folks up in the sales tax module [00:29:00] and asked for some guidance.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And basically what she said Is that QuickBooks online, the way that it handles Nexus is economic Nexus, not physical Nexus. So if your company meets the thresholds for the number of transactions or the dollar amount of the transactions, basically transaction volume, then QuickBooks will say, oh, by the way, you actually have Nexus in this particular state, and then you have to go register [00:29:30] with the state and turn on QuickBooks moving forward or turn on QuickBooks as sales tax moving forward. But if the state is a matter of physical nexus, then Intuit says that the responsibility sits with the business and the tax advisor that they have to evaluate where the physical presence exists, make the decision to activate the relevant sales tax agency in QBO and register with that agency. And [00:30:00] then once you activate it, the system will calculate and report sales tax on transactions sourced to that jurisdiction. And they do recommend that you actually register with the tax authorities first before turning it on inside your QuickBooks. That's the the proper sequence. Now, once you have that on, for example, in this situation where the company is located in one state, but there's an employee in another that if the sale happens in Connecticut [00:30:30] where the employee is, then that will get passed to Connecticut sales tax, and then all the rest of the transactions will go according to the company's nexus or the other states. So it will look at all of the different states and the locations of the sales to determine where to apply the sales tax.

Alicia Katz Pollock: So that was an interesting distinction. Any time I've talked about Nexus before, I personally was not teaching the distinction between physical nexus and economic nexus. [00:31:00] So I thought this was excellent guidance. And so, Janine, thank you very much for your question. Thanks for playing. Whether it's Ask the Owls, ask Anything or stump the expert. I totally appreciate your question. So closing up for my what's going on in your world. I am delighted to announce that I have a new book out the second edition of my converting from QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks online, which is a $10 [00:31:30] book on Amazon that takes you all the way through the process of doing a needs assessment to see which QuickBooks is the best fit to preparing your QuickBooks desktop file for migration, to performing the migration to the set up steps afterwards, all the way out to the concierge experience of making recommendations for to your clients for new features that they could implement, and then building that into the scope of your of your migration. So you [00:32:00] the link to the book is in the show notes, or you can go to Amazon and search for Alicia Katz Pollock. I would love it if people who know me would also put in, uh, would put in reviews of the book. Amazon is not going to promote us until we hit 50 reviews.

Alicia Katz Pollock: And so, um, this is a win win for both of us. You can help me turn my book into a best seller, and I can help you raise the amount of money that you get by doing migrations and have the [00:32:30] biggest bang for the buck with the least amount of frustration. So definitely check out my new book, The Complete Guide to Converting from QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks online. Now, I am also right now in the middle of teaching my section of classes that are all about the distinctions between the different versions of QBO. I have just taught a class on QuickBooks ledger and one on QuickBooks solopreneur, and one on specifically the features that are just in Qbo Advanced. And then coming [00:33:00] up is my class on Intuit Accountant Suite, where I'm actually going to do demos of the accelerate KPI dashboard and of books closed so you can actually see what they do and how they work. So with all of my classes, you can sign up for the live presentation. Or if you missed it, you can still buy the class on demand and watch at your own pace. We have CPE for all of them. Even if it's not live, you can still [00:33:30] get CPE by taking the quizzes. So definitely come check out Royal wise.com. The links are in the show notes. So as always, I want to thank our listeners and welcome to our new listeners who are meeting us at the conferences. This is Alicia Pollock, and I will see you in the next one.