275 How To Build A Membership That Members Never Cancel

Alicia Katz Pollock built something most course creators never think to build. She took QuickBooks training, a topic most people assume is dry and functional, and turned it into a tiered membership with over 50 courses, live community calls, a coaching program, five books, a podcast, and CPE accreditation that accounting firms actually require their staff to complete.

Dominik sat down with Alicia to trace how that happened. She started with a single beginner bootcamp, then kept adding courses every time a client asked about something new. Banking feeds, reconciliation, payroll, sales tax. Eventually she had enough that selling them one at a time felt expensive for the buyer, so she built a membership instead.

One thing Alicia said that stuck with Dominik: she fully expected members to stay one year and then leave once they'd worked through the curriculum. That didn't happen. People have been in the community for years, and when she asked why, the answer wasn't the 50 courses. It was the twice-monthly round-robin calls where members bring their real client problems and work through them together.

There's also a fascinating section on the four years she spent earning NASBA accreditation for CPE credits, what it took, and how it eventually opened the door to selling seats directly to accounting firms.

Alicia is honest, specific, and genuinely fun to listen to. I think you'll enjoy this one.

Check out Alicia's work:
🌐 https://royalwise.com/

Transcript

The Hook And Big Promise

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I have people who have been there from the very beginning who are like, I'm not leaving. This is my favorite part of what I did. I have to admit that it absolutely surprised me. When I first started my membership, I thought memberships would be one year one and done. They would go through the curriculum and then they would drop out. And that's turning out not to be true. Like I said, people are in there for years.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Hello and welcome to the Art of Selling Online Course. We are here to share winning strategies and secret acts from top performance the online course industry. My name is Donald Dragon and today's guest is Alicia Fala. Most course creators sell one, a course, a video library, behind a paywall. Today's guest look to that model and build something completely different. It's just QuickBooks, which is turned into a membership, a lifeless calendar, a community, a coaching program, five books, and a podcast all stacked on top of each other. And here is the part that should make every creator listening to sit up. Her customers can't expensive. They needed to keep their license. And they also have a business reason to never cancel. She's also the first one to tell you that she has been charging too little for years and that the business she built can be sold because the business is her. Today we are going to figure out how you build a course business that runs on more than one engine and what it takes to stop being done. Alicia, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Hey, thank you. That was a great intro. I'm interested in learning from her as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

Thank you very much. You are definitely an interesting person.

From Apple Database To Teaching

SPEAKER_00 1:31

So I want to start way before QuickBooks. Um you got your first Apple computer when you were basically 13, and you didn't play games with it. You built something for your dad's dental practice. What did you build exactly?

SPEAKER_02 1:45

The very first thing I did on the computer was open up Apple Works and I built a database for all of his patients when it came time for their cleanings. And you know, this is back in the early 70s. They would have to call all the patients to schedule them for their cleanings. My dad wanted to send out postcards, so we needed to run mailing labels. So I literally went to his entire wall of paper files, built the probably one of the first commercial databases, like public databases, and literally typed in everybody's name. And that was their mailing label system for decades after that.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Wow, that's nice. So um that instinct shows up at 13. And then there is a gap between this and royal-wise. So how did you actually end up teaching QuickBooks for a living?

SPEAKER_02 2:33

So I started with Microsoft Office. I became Microsoft Office certified and was teaching uh computer application classes at um at junior, well, community colleges and and uh business colleges. I got a master's in teaching, actually. Um and I was so I was teaching computers while I was working on my master's, but my master's was in seventh grade English. And I lasted, I don't know, about six months in the schools before I realized that seventh graders didn't want to be there and they really did not want to be studying Chaucer. So I went with my first love over to Santa Fe Community College where I was teaching teaching computer applications in GED and built another database over there for their GED in English as a second language program. Um, but I was always an Apple person at heart, and so I became an Apple, an Apple consultant and would go around to people's homes and businesses, either doing Microsoft Word and Excel and PowerPoint for them or helping them with their Apple computers and their networking and all of that. So fast forward about 10 years of that, I met my now husband who was doing web design. And he would, and I taught him all the Apple stuff that I knew. And so we formed a company together for my computer consulting and his web design, and he named it RoyalWise. And when calls would come in, at first it was just whoever was first available would take the appointment. But then that that's about 2012 or so, and that's when QuickBooks Online really started exploding in popularity. And people would start asking me, Well, can you help me with my QuickBooks since you can do Excel? And my first answer was, Well, no, I don't, I'm not a bookkeeper. And then I realized that QuickBooks actually wasn't that hard for me, and I actually really enjoyed doing it. And I ran the work that I was doing past a couple bookkeepers to find out if I was like just making things up or if I was really onto something. And they said, Yeah, your books are really solid. So I really started doing a lot of QuickBooks work. And then a couple years in after that, my husband decided that he would do all the Apple and I would do all the QuickBooks. And that's when our company, we kind of split the company into two departments, and that's when things really started exploding.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Well, well, that's a nice story. And here's the thing that I think makes you different from a lot of people who teach software. So, as you mentioned, you have a master's in teaching, and most QuickBooks experts are accountants who happen to explain things, but you are a teacher who happens to know accounting. So, how does that change the way you build a course?

SPEAKER_02 5:14

That

Teaching Skills That Shape Courses

SPEAKER_02 5:15

is actually one of the things that makes me different from all the other courses out there is that I have that pedagogy behind the scenes. I I know how to explain things. We joke, I'm a good explainer. And uh, in addition to being able to express complex topics in a way that beginners can understand, I also realized that I needed to structure the courses, you know, things that you know seemed obvious to me but aren't obvious to everybody, but getting the the curriculum in an order that works and makes sense. And then getting the quiz questions and the reinforcement activities, those kinds of things are directly because I had this master's in teaching.

Channels That Bring New Members

SPEAKER_00 5:55

Right now you are kind of everywhere. You have a podcast, YouTube, LinkedIn, where you post this genuinely useful QBO tips, five books on Amazon, the conference stages. That's a lot of front doors. So which one of those actually bring you the most members? What would you think?

SPEAKER_02 6:13

That is a great question. Um I I'd say the public speaking brings me the most. You know, I just came off of three different conferences. I just finished the first wave of my conference season. And it's one thing to be standing in my sponsor booth where people are just walking by and they may or may not be interested. But the moment you get me on a stage, I light people up that I make QuickBooks and accounting fun. And when I speak at a conference, then you know I'll get there'll be a hundred people in the room and I'll get 20 people come and mob me afterwards. And so that's really where a lot of my business was built.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Nice. Um let me ask you then a question underneath that one. So someone listens to your full podcast, for example, or uh watches a LinkedIn tip, for example, and they think, okay, yeah, she's great. So what's the very next thing you want them to do after that?

SPEAKER_02 7:06

Click click the subscribe button or click through the link to the class that I'm talking about. I try to always have a topic that's specific enough that I can send them directly to one of my courses. And I have over 50 at this point that I started with a bootcamp class that was basically a beginner's class. And then people would say, Well, I need to know more about the banking feed. And so I developed a banking feeds class. And then at the end of the month, you need to reconcile your bank account. So I made a reconciling class, and then you need to know the reports. So I built a reports class. And then I just started building the curriculum from there: sales tax, payroll, merchant services, literally every single part of what it takes to run a business in QuickBooks has its own course. Perfect.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

So um what would you say with all that reach? Um I want to know where the email list sits in the middle of it. So how big is your email list at the moment?

SPEAKER_02 8:01

Oh, you know, I've delegated most of my marketing. Um I think my email list is probably around 20,000, but I could be wildly off and my marketing guy is is hand is slapping right now. I don't even I'm not even sure. Um but we do send out course announcements for all the upcoming courses. Um, generally about 10 days out. We were trying to give longer lead time and we found that nobody was signing up before that 10-day mark. So instead of inundating them with more emails, we went down to last.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

And um let's talk about more uh of owls, owls, because I think it's basically the most interesting thing that you built. So

Building The OWLS Membership Model

SPEAKER_00 8:44

most people um in your spot would have just made one course, called it Learn QuickBooks, sold it for I don't know, 200 bucks and called it a day. But you actually turned software training into um recurring membership instead. So when did it click for you that this should be a membership and not just like a one-time course?

SPEAKER_02 9:04

Well, after that point where I found that I had more than five courses, like the ones that I just named are my core courses, but then I had all of these deep dive topics. And I realized that for people to buy them one-off, it was getting kind of expensive for them. And community really is kind of the nature of the industry. Everybody wants to belong somewhere, everybody wants to have a place where they can go to ask questions. So I realized that basically they could subscribe to my library, and then not only could they take the live webinars when the live webinars came out, or take the one on-demand class when they wanted that one class, but then they could log in and fill in the gaps. If they were working with a client who had a car loan and they weren't sure how to do the car loan in QuickBooks, they could go over to my library and just go look up car loans and pull up those videos.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

Nice, nice. So um walk us through uh how it stands now. So what does someone actually get that they that they join?

unknown 10:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:04

So so you mentioned the owls. I want to point out that owls is actually an acronym for on-demand web-based learning solutions. And so our mascots are owls, and we have owls all over the place. And we use those owls to make a little bit of levity. We have uh now fortunately with AI, we can like make an owl that's a construction worker or make an owl that's uh that's a a massage therapist, you know. So we we have some fun with that. All right. So at this point we have over 50 different classes, and the people who tend attend the classes, some of them are small business owners who are just using QuickBooks for themselves, and some of them are the bookkeepers that are supporting these clients. So what we did is we made different packages, different memberships for the different roles. So a business owner really doesn't care about diving in on everything, they just want their immediate questions answered. And so we made a business level membership. That's pretty much the classes that I just described. And then we have a community membership that is in addition to all the basic classes, it's full access to all the uh all the on-demand classes. And then because it's QuickBooks and it's changing all the time, I teach um but somewhere between one and four classes every single month to keep the content updated. And we say that our content is evergreen inside the system. So once you buy one course, you always you always have the most up-to-date information. But for our members in the community, we automatically invite them to be the kind of the live studio audience for the recordings. So that way I have uh a few dozen people in the class when I'm recording it live, and then I have feedback and questions that I build into the class. And then after the webinar is done, we edit it and put it in the on-demand library. And the community members also get um an office hours and a mastermind. And so sometimes I call them Ask Alicia Anything. And so twice a month, all the members come together, and instead of me presenting my agenda, I they just we round rob in the room and they ask questions about anything that they're struggling with. And one more thing. And then I had people who wanted more individual help, and so we added a third tier to the membership that's the coaching program, where in addition to all of that, you also get an hour with me every single month. And I got creative with my LMS. I record those sessions and I make a custom class for that coaching person, and then I load it with all of the recordings of our sessions and any of the resources that they need so they get their own custom course.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

That's a great idea. That's actually a great idea.

Why Community Beats More Content

SPEAKER_00 12:47

And um you said um we touch point on the mastermind, and you said before that the round robin, where everyone gets to pick your brain, basically, is the part members tell you that they value the most. So not the 70 courses, the hour with each other and with you. So um why do you think that is? Why do they appreciate the membership so much?

SPEAKER_02 13:09

Well, I have to admit that it absolutely surprised me. I didn't think that that was going to be the hallmark of the Royal Wise Owls. But people like realizing that they're not alone. And everybody brings something to the table that in the accounting industry, you know, people just think it's crunching numbers, but really what you're doing is that you're advising businesses and every business is different. No two are the same. Everyone is like its own little puzzle. And when you're part of the Royal Wise community, you have a board where when you have a question about how to handle something on one of your clients, you can go in and ask that question. And somebody else that it I, you know, I answer probably 80 or 90% of the questions, but I love it when other people come in and lend their expertise to the room. And the membership has been going on now for probably three or five years. And I have people who have been there from the very beginning who are like, I'm not leaving. This is my favorite part of what I do.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

Well, that's that sounds perfect.

The NASBA Accreditation Grind

SPEAKER_00 14:12

And um here's something almost nobody who sells online courses can say. Um you are accredited, right? So they count for CPE credit, they the continuing education professionals are actually required to keep earning. And that's not easy to get. So, how did you get approved to offer credit in the first place?

SPEAKER_02 14:33

It actually took me four years to earn my NASBA certification. So, with NASBA, um CPAs are required to have these continuing education credits, and they have to be related to the tax and accounting industry. The information has to be vetted by another CPA, so I have to have every single course peer-reviewed, and then you have to have assessments that directly address the objectives of the class, and you have to have three review questions for every hour of content, and each of those has to have uh feedback. If you get the answer wrong, you have to explain why. And then in addition to all of those, you have to have five questions per hour of content as a final quiz. So for every hour of content, I needed eight questions, and of and three of them needed additional information on every single answer. And, you know, that it took me years to for 70 classes to write all of these, and these aren't one-hour classes, some of these are three-hour classes, six-hour classes. And so it was literally four years on my couch writing feedback answers to questions that nobody was ever going to get wrong. And, you know, so for all I know, you know, some of these answers nobody will ever see. Now, this was all before AI. Now I can go in and I can feed in a transcript and it can give me the questions and the feedback and what was a 10-hour project is now a one-hour project. But I've been doing this long enough that I literally had to write every single question and answer by hand.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

Wow. Wow. So um I want to understand why it was worth the hassle because it sounds like a lot of paperwork for just some kind of checkbox, right? So what did being accredited actually change about your business today?

SPEAKER_02 16:28

Aaron Powell Being NASBA accredited opened me up to s the CPAs and the accounting firms that when I started 15 years ago, my courses were literally for the small business owners that I was teaching. And and the first book that I wrote was literally the handouts for that class. Uh but then the social media algorithm started pushing me towards bookkeepers and bookkeeper training. And the bookkeepers needed just a little bit more of the the detail. But then I realized that in a one-to-many relationship, bookkeepers were one person and they had uh several clients, but accounting firms would have five, ten, a hundred, two hundred uh bookkeepers, or the the term now is uh client adversary uh client advisory service or CAS, but they would have, you know, hundreds of people that could take my classes. So I wanted to upscale to the accounting firms, and in order to do that, I had to A, legitimize the content by saying, okay, NASBA has approved and certified this, and B, that would allow me to scale because for instance, I just had a firm buy 20 seats to my sales tax class. So they bought the seats and now they can distribute them out to the different people in the company.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Nice.

Serving Owners And Bookkeepers Together

SPEAKER_00 17:44

So um you basically teach two very different people, right? So a bookkeeper doing this professionally, four clients all day, and also a small business owner who just wants their own books uh to stop being scary. So those are not the same learners. So how do you build for both without watering it down for uh for either of them?

SPEAKER_02 18:06

I try and keep my approach practical, that it's about the software and using the software. And bookkeeping itself has its own set of information, but what I do is I weave it into the learning as we're going. So I'm focusing on the QuickBooks part. You know, if somebody says, Well, do you teach bookkeeping? I say, Well, no, I teach QuickBooks because using QuickBooks is not the same thing as doing bookkeeping. But while I'm teaching you QuickBooks, I'm talking about the scenario and the compliance and the debits and credits behind the scenes so that there's a little bit of something for everybody. Sometimes I'll say, Okay, um, business owners cover your ears and go la la la la la, and then I'll just talk to the bookkeepers about something. Um, but uh uh I like to joke that my classes are kind of like watching Disney movies that the kids, the whole family can watch because the kids think some things are hilarious and the adults are getting all the inside jokes. And so my classes are a lot like that too. When you take it the first time, you get out of it what you came there to get, but then there's re-watch value over time, and then you can get more and more and more out of each class. Um, in fact, when I first started my membership, I thought memberships would be one year, one and done. They would go through the curriculum and then they would drop out. And that's turning out not to be true. Like I said, people are in there for years, and the reasons why they're staying are because, first of all, QuickBooks changes all the time. So I'm on a recording cycle. Once I get to the end of the classes, I just go and I record the classes again to keep up with the interface and how it looks. And so they come in and they can always get the fresh content. And then the other piece is because their expertise has leveled up year over year, over year over year. They see new things that they didn't see the first time because they weren't ready for that depth of information.

Pricing Choices And Premium Offers

SPEAKER_00 20:03

Um You were candid uh in the past about something most people never admit out loud. So you realize that you have been underpricing yourself for years, that your value wasn't untangling uh complicated books, that's just what you do, and um but it isn't the value. So how uh or have you actually raised your prices uh since that realization? What would you say?

SPEAKER_02 20:29

Aaron Ross Powell We actually lowered our prices about a year ago coming up this fall. And part of that was because small business owners are struggling and begin beginning bookkeepers don't have a lot of resources. And I didn't want people to be locked out of the opportunity to get my training because they couldn't afford it. So I wanted to make sure that the classes were affordable. So I mean, to me, sometimes they still feel expensive, but like a one-hour class is $40, and a two-hour class is $70, and three-hour class is $90. But they were $120 a year ago, and I just didn't want to go over that three-digit number. So the other thing that we did is I developed a new course, and I'm actually teaching it um this coming July through October, where I made a really intensive big training course. It's like a college-style class. That one does have a big price tag and a big time commitment. So that way I could have the higher-end trainings as well as the lower end trainings.

SPEAKER_00 21:30

And um when you want to fill a live class or push a membership, what do you actually do to make the sales happen?

SPEAKER_02 21:37

Um the email list is one of the primaries. We do social media campaigns and get it out on all of the socials. Uh but I also reach out to some of my colleagues in the industry that are related to whatever that particular topic is, and I ask them to uh help me promote it. And I give them an affiliate code, and so they get 10% of all sales. And so I really do lean on my community to help get the word out with uh when there's a particular class that I

Growth Plateaus And AI Pressure

SPEAKER_02 22:06

want to push.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

Aaron Powell Perfect. So um ten years in, um what would you do differently if you were starting Royal Wise tomorrow? Is there anything that you would do different, or do you think all of the things that you've done so far is basically the best you can do?

SPEAKER_02 22:20

Aaron Powell I think w mostly we did it right. I'd say that if I chose if I was to do anything differently, it's not because I did something wrong, but because the technology has evolved that if I had started this company now, we would be on a different LMS and approaching things a little bit differently. But we did the best that we could with the best that was out there in 2017 when when we started this library.

SPEAKER_00 22:43

Okay. Okay. That sounds about right. Uh let's go over two quick ones before we wrap this up. So, first for someone who has the expertise, like you, they really know their software, their craft, uh, whatever it is, but they haven't built anything around it yet. So, what's the first thing they should do, in your opinion?

SPEAKER_02 23:02

Write it like a story. Write down the the essentials, like make that outline list of the the big topics of what somebody should know, and then go into each of those and then break each one down into the 10 things that they need to know about that. And by the time you get, you know, 10 topics with uh five or ten sub-categories, you've got a pretty good outline uh for material to develop.

SPEAKER_00 23:28

Aaron Powell Nice. And um the other end. So someone who's uh been at it for a couple of years and they have plateaued and the content is good, the audience is there, but their revenue is just flat. Uh what would you tell them where to look?

SPEAKER_02 23:44

Aaron Powell Well, I think right now the challenge is where the world is at right now is that everybody's kind of tightening their belts and holding still and not making any big moves. That if you had asked me that question back in COVID years, you know, there was all kinds of opportunity for people who were making big life changes. And right now, nobody wants to move, nobody wants to spend. And so I would say just you know, keep the faith and keep developing and hang on because the the world will shift again. That right now AI is is changing things and we need to kind of figure out well, where do our courses fit in with the ability to just look things up and get an explanation? Because probably those AI explanations are probably built on the your content. And so right now I would say kind of just hang code the line, maybe find some creative ways of getting the word out there. I've started giving away my books instead of selling them because what I did in my QuickBooks books is I point people to the different classes for more information. So instead of focusing on book sales, I'm now looking at my book as a promo item so that when they read the book and they're on the page about um about payroll, they go, Oh, I should go take her payroll class. So that's my creative strategy right now.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Beautiful.

Where To Find RoyalWise

SPEAKER_00 25:07

Uh Alicia, this has been great. So please tell people where to find you and what you'd most like them to check out.

SPEAKER_02 25:15

My website is royalwise.com. That's Royal Like a Queen and Wise Like an Owl. Um, and I'm also the host of the unofficial QuickBooks Accountants podcast that you can find on your favorite podcasting channels. So that's the easiest place to find me. And coming up this fall, I'm doing a hands-on training class, but I'm also beginning to do some new additional content. We're going to be talking about Intuit Enterprise Suite, which is their new software, Intuit Accountant Suite, which are their new QuickBooks' new tools for accountant management. And we're going to start diving into all the new features that they've been building into the software. So there's, like I said, even my regulars are going to have all brand new content. And this is a great time for anybody to join the OWLS.

SPEAKER_00 26:01

Perfect. Alicia, thank you very much. Uh, if you got something out of this one, please subscribe so we don't miss the next episode and head over to data drivenmarketing.co for the free resources. I'm Dominic. This is the Art of Selling Online Courses, and I'll see you in the next one.