XeroCon 2019 – Our first experience of Xero’s HUGE annual convention. What was it, why did we go, and what did we find? And why was it valuable even for non-Xero users?

Watch this to find out!

Transcript:

Hi and welcome to another episode of BaronovTV, designed to demystify the world of accounts and tax and to help your business grow.

I hope you can hear me. I’m at the ExCeL in London and I’m at Xerocon.

We’ve been here for two and a half days now. It’s a massive convention run by Xero every year. They bring people in from all over the world. There’s a huge contingent of Xero people from Australia and New Zealand. There are delegates like us, they’ve come from all over the place, they’re from South Africa and from Europe, from Manila and all over the place.

And the reason they fly in is because this is such a massive event. We’ve heard from Brad Burton this morning. We’ve got Tim Peake this afternoon.

But also there are stands here from all of the big Apps and there’s over 800 Apps in the marketplace now. They’re not all here by any manner of means, but there are an awful lot here.

It’s been great for us because we’re always looking at ways that we can give more value to clients, find out more about the landscape, the different Apps.

A lot of them do actually also integrate with other packages such as QuickBooks, so it’s not just our Xero clients that are going to benefit from our attendance here for the last few days.

But what we have learned is, yes about the Apps, we’ve learnt a lot about the developments that Xero have got coming.

We were invited to take part in a co-design for a product that they’re bringing out, so we did that first thing on Tuesday morning, which was so interesting and also very enlightening because they had a really good mix of people around the table.

So we were able to compare notes with people with much bigger firms, with smaller firms, with very different firms, from different parts of the country, and it was really interesting to find out what issues that they have and many of them are very similar, but also it was how they address those issues too.

So really, the thrust of this episode is really just to tell you we’ve been here, but also to, I suppose, bang the drum for continuing to keep learning and finding out about your industry and what you can do to differentiate yourself and improve the value of the service that you’re offering to your customers and clients, because that is one way of differentiating yourself and your business.

So, you can see it’s quite busy here behind me. I hope, as I say, this has been actually audible and we’ll be back in the office tomorrow, which is Friday and we’ve got a long list of things that we can start to think about and start to implement and particular clients we’ll be speaking to as well, who may be able to benefit from some of our learnings over the last few days.

I’ll leave you with that and I’ll see you all very soon.