There’s a new accounting conference in town.
Advisory Amplified, organized by creative consulting agency Fearless Foundry, is a series of small events across six cities from September 23 to October 9, 2025, looking to break the mold. The tour aims to be more accessible — offering tickets at a lower price and closer to home — and emphasizes its women-led speaker lineup and handpicked technology vendors.
The idea for the conference came from seeing a lack of growth in the conversations around advisory.
“I was back at some of the main industry conferences for the first time in a few years, and it surprised me how little had shifted, both in terms of the topics that were being discussed, as well as the format for a lot of the events,” Madeline Reeves, founder and CEO of Fearless Foundry, told Accounting Today.
Reeves talked with attendees at conferences and heard the same sentiment — there are plenty of great ideas and inspiration, but they struggled to actually apply those ideas to their firms.
“Between that and the fact that they were spending all of these resources to show up at these events but weren’t really getting an opportunity to truly connect with people and knowledge share,” Reeves said. “It just got my gears turning and I started having some conversations with a few of our friends in industry, and that’s what really led to the ideation that brought forth the Advisory Amplified concept.”
“This is a day of hands-on workshop activities that are being led by core thought leaders in industry,” she said. “All of the teaching is being done in tandem with leading accounting professionals.”
The conference tour stops in Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, Atlanta and Boston, and each event will have roughly 100 to 150 attendees. The limited size is intentional to prompt better, region-specific conversations.
“I think that when you go to larger events, there is a hesitation to take the hood off and showcase what is and isn’t working. Whereas when you get into more intimate settings, I feel like people are willing to be a lot more candid about what’s really going on inside their firms,” Reeves said. “So it’s really designed to not just be a moment where people are sitting in their seats and just hearing people talk at them, but instead being a moment where they’re working alongside the work that is being led from the main stage.”
“Most firms are not each other’s competitors. They’re typically better peers or better collaborators that they can learn from,” she added. “And to me, I think it would be really powerful if people walk away from the event, not just with tactical work to do that they can improve their firm, but actually with peers that are also doing that work, that they can compare notes with and learn from and grow with.”
The conference is prioritizing a women-led lineup of speakers. In 2018, Reeves attended an event and wondered why there was only one woman keynote speaker, especially when women make up more than half of the profession. To this, an event organizer told her it was because they “couldn’t find women of main-stage caliber.” Reeves sought to prove that statement wrong.
Thus far, the speaker list includes Reeves, Twyla Verhelst, Ian Vacin, Valerie Heckman, Geni Whitehouse, Keila Trawick-Hill, Kenji Kuramoto, Jason Blumer, Ryan Embree, Wesley McDonald and Nichole Porter. More speakers are still to be announced.
The conference is also selective in the tech vendors it invites, rather than inviting a host of vendors into a vast room which can be overwhelming and result in fewer genuine interactions.
“In the spirit of keeping these events intimate and not having them be a space where people are just getting sales pitched at, I really wanted to select category exclusive partners that I feel like are leading the conversation in their sector,” Reeves said.
The final piece is accessibility. “In the same way, vendors are reevaluating their participation in large conferences, so are people in the industry,” Reeves said. “It was more important to us to keep the tickets as accessible as possible, so that everybody could say yes. … I also think there’s an experience in industry where only a select few get to attend events, so my hope is that we get to meet people who have never been to an event like this.”
Advisory Amplified intends to be an annual conference, with 10 cities already slated for next year.
