1552 – Training for Employees and Businesses with Royal Wise Solutions’ Alicia Katz Pollock

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0:58with us right now it's alicia katz pollack alicia you are the founder and ceo of royal wise solutions you're found on the web at royal wise.com alicia thank you for joining us oh thanks so much for having me it's a pleasure to be here yeah so tell me what royal wise is so we are a computer technology training company i train on quickbooks online almost exclusively with a little bit of Microsoft Office thrown in. And my husband, Jamie, my business partner, teaches Apple products. And who are you teaching? Each of us have different audiences. I specialize in small business owners who are getting started with QuickBooks Online.

1:39And I also teach bookkeepers all the way up through the certification level. And Jamie's audience actually is mostly seniors or retired professionals who are having trouble with their technology or adopting Apple products for the first time. Yeah. And so your business, are you working through associations, groups, employers, or how do people find you typically? Well, we are anything from one individual person who's seeking training all the way up through corporate. And what we did is we created a learning management system that specializes in video courses. And so it's well beyond like Thinkific or Kajabi where people are just like putting up a training course.

2:26We actually essentially have a school. My QuickBooks trainings are even CPE certified from NASBA for a continuing education for accountants. And so whether it's one person who's just looking for an answer to a question, they can watch that one video. Or if we have somebody who wants to just dive in and learn everything from beginning all the way up through advanced, we have full we have over 100 different courses yeah um so how does one grow a company um like that like obviously you know if we're talking about certification that's one thing but you know in the world today i mean um youtube is just filled with content of every stripe you would think that you could easily learn anything you want you know with youtube but where does your program, like how do you differentiate in that otherwise noisy world?

3:19Sure. And it is a very, very noisy world. What's a little bit different about me is I have a master's in teaching and education. And I like to think that I have a kind of a mildly entertaining style as well. And so people tell me that when they take courses for me, it sticks better. They enjoy it. I'm not eye-gougingly boring as I'm droning on through accounting topics. And in this whole world of YouTube, there's a lot of free stuff out there, but it's piecemeal. You go and you get one little question answered for this one thing right in front of you, but then you don't get any of the larger context of all the other ramifications that if you do it this way, what happens down the pike over here?

4:02And so my approach is a little bit more holistic where I give you the specific answer to your question, but then I also give you the background that's going to ease your life in ways that you didn't even know about. Yeah. And tell me about, you know, maybe specifically working with maybe larger employers or larger groups, like what that ends up looking like. Like, let's say, so for example, like, you know, folks listening to this podcast right now, they're like, well, hey, if you could provide tech skills for our employees, love to have that conversation. How does that engagement typically look?

4:39We have different ways that you can approach our library. We have a la carte courses where you can just take one course for a little piece of training that's missing for that employee. We have memberships that give you full access to all of the courses. And then we also have a corporate custom branded portal where any business can come and actually pick which of our courses they want their staff to have. And then they get their own portal with their own logo, their own branding. They choose the courses and we just kind of support them on the back end. Yeah. And then so you're doing individual one-on-one training as well.

5:20When is that appropriate and where does that usually show up? The one-on-one training is great when somebody's got a specific problem in front of them that is related to the data or the situation where just the generic how to use a feature isn't going to come in play. like they're looking at a report and they can't figure out why one particular number is off or they're working on their iPhone and it's doing something a little glitchy. That's where the one-on-one trainings come in. Yeah. And how did you get into that? What were you doing before and where did Royal Wise come from? Well, way back in the beginning, I was a seventh grade English teacher and the kids didn't want to be there.

6:02They weren't really paying attention to the material, they were there because they had to be there. And so I left the public school system and I actually went over to the community college system and started teaching everything from English to computer applications. And then the computer applications became me helping individual people. And then when I met my husband, it turns out we were both kind of doing the same thing. He had a degree in computer information systems and I was helping people. And I had another jewelry company on the side. So I was doing computer training and jewelry. And eventually we went, well, wait, that's silly.

6:36And when about the time we decided to get married, we also realized I should just split off my computer part of my world. And we formed a company together. Well, congratulations. And so, you know, and tell me about the opportunity to work with, you know, maybe folks in their their 50s, 60s on up, because I know that that's a part of what you do? Yeah. I mean, it's a really unique market because their needs are different. I mean, when you're talking about people who are, let's say 60, 65 years old, they didn't grow up with technology. iPhones have only been out there for 15 or 16 years and they're kind of forced to move with the times, even if they don't want to.

7:20And what we really, really, really love to do is help people who are not comfortable with technology learn how to use it so that they can stay in communication with their families. For us, that's the most important thing. And, you know, for instance, back when COVID happened and we had already been using Zoom for years, you know, we had a snowstorm back in 2017 or 2018, and I couldn't get to a very important client. And I was like, okay, what kind of technologies out there that I can hook in? And I discovered Zoom back in. And so we had started using Zoom to teach classes, do individual appointments for years.

7:56And then when the pandemic hit, we were like, okay, we've got all of these senior citizens who are not going to see their family for who knows how long. And so we offered a free Zoom training to our clients at our very, very, very first senior Zoom. We had literally 80 people all over the age of 70 going, is this thing on? Can they hear what's going on? And so we gave them a training on how to actually Zoom. And then we followed that up with how to actually start your own Zoom. And so we like to think that we were able to help our client base stay connected during the pandemic so that they weren't completely lost.

8:36And it's really gratifying to be able to play that role in the world. On the, you know, kind of larger, maybe enterprise level connections or opportunities, you know, who might be, you know, who, you know, if we know somebody that would be a really, really great connection for you, or maybe someone that's listening, like who should be reaching out and connecting and having a conversation about potentially engaging? Right. Well, the big part of our business that we are looking to grow right now is that corporate contract where we can be your training center. So instead of you having to recreate the wheel, so we're talking accounting firms from solopreneurs all the way up through the big four.

9:17I mean, we really want to hit that sweet spot in the top 100, 200 firms, but literally any firm that what we can do is, you know, in the accounting realm, we're actually kind of having a staffing crisis right now where all of the experienced accountants are resigning. You know, they don't want to do this anymore. Technology is changing, but we don't have enough people entering in through traditional school accounting program channels. And so the bookkeeping world right now is like, OK, who can we hire? We're getting stay at home moms. We're getting career switchers. And so what we want to do at Royalize, our very, very specific goal in the next two years, is to become the training portal for firms that when they have new clients who need to learn how to use QuickBooks to support their clients, they don't have to recreate the wheel and create their own training program.

10:18They can just send people to us. and because we're in software which evolves all the time and for those of you who are familiar with quickbooks you know it evolves sometimes day by day by day you log in and it's different than it was the day before you as a firm wouldn't have to recreate your videos over and over and over again as the technology changes because we're already doing that so it's a lot easier for you to not have to support the infrastructure to keep evolving your trainings over time, you can just send your folks to us and keep it easy. Yeah. Your website is royalwise.com. When somebody goes there, what would you recommend that they click on?

11:00What should they do, Alicia? Well, if you're in the Apple vertical, you follow the Apple links. If you're in the QuickBooks realm, you follow the QuickBooks links. But even better, I mean, I don't want to tell anybody to skip the main part of our website, But the classes themselves are at learn.royalwise.com. That's where our training portal lives. And so as soon as you get there, it just starts follow the bouncing ball to get to the trainings that you want to take. And so you say, OK, my Apple or my QuickBooks, and then that takes you to our deliveries. And all of our material is either QAS self-study, meaning like on-demand videos that you can take at your own pace on your own time.

11:40or we have weekly and monthly webinars. And then we also have books and other training sources as well. And what's cool about taking a course with us is it's not just a webinar that you take and you're done. You get the recording, you get access to the class forever. There's quizzes that you can take to reinforce the learning. If it's a CPE eligible course, you can print out your certificate and actually turn it on to your credentialing authority. and the best part of all, I'm sorry, there's also a discussions forum. So you can ask questions later on and it dings us and we answer. And the best part of all is that because it's software and it's evolving, when we teach the class again a year or two years to refresh the content, you get that content for free.

12:29So you pay for the class one time and you have eternal access to all of the software updates as well. Yeah, awesome. All right, Alicia Katz-Pollock, founder and CEO of Royal Wise Solutions. You're found on the web again at royalwise.com. Alicia, thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely, thanks for having me.

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