The CoachAccountable Blog

The source file for this image is the first PhotoShop document that I could ever count as a 6+ year work in progress.

What a year!

What a delightful year.  When I reflect on the last 12 months of playing the CoachAccountable game, what’s most strongly there for me is a sense of calm effectiveness.

Morgan and I have forged a really strong stride of GETTING. THINGS. DONE.  Morgan’s expert handling of customer love and support, coupled with the elevated focus on heads-down work that I’ve taken on (it’s a little harder–though not too hard–these days to get access to me these days, sorry!) has led a lot of meaningful and creative output this year.  Fun things like:

• The monthly Webinar series, with which we’re teaching powerful distinctions around how to be a better coach (with the aid of CoachAccountable, of course) that you won’t find anywhere else.  The growing repository of webinar recordings (available in-app) is proving a valuable resource for many.
• Video riffs: me on camera riffing about a few topics around and behind the scenes of CoachAccountable, of interest to CA users old and new.
• Interviews: we produced a few in depth interviews exploring ways CA elevates coaching work (and other topics), including Greg Bennett (“I close deals thanks to this thing”) and Joe Arioto (“I wish I had this a decade ago”).
• Being an exhibitor at the St. Thomas Executive Coaching conference and a sponsor of the ACTO conference.
• Some exercises in copy writing our marketing website pages that seem by and large responsible for nearly doubling our signups (seriously).
• We’ve amassed a lot of love in the reviews posted about CA (big thanks to those who have so generously shared about their experiences with us and CA over there).

Plenty of new goodies to the app itself, as well.  Many expanded CA’s capacity to help you run a better business, but still also plenty of other features that make the coaching itself better (and give your clients more):

• Engagements, CA’s system for managing coaching packages that entail appointment allocations and/or recurring billing.
• Client Agreements, CA’s way to let you issue and manage formal agreements (legal and otherwise) with your clients (including collecting signatures, allowing you to drop services like DocuSign).
• Full-fledged sync with Microsoft Outlook calendars.
• New reports: Coach Touchpoints and ICF-style logging of coaching hours.
• Group Whiteboards, Group Action Projects, Group Files area, and Group member profiles.

Plus the usual bevvy of other tweaks, enhancements, little additions, and bits of polish as we continue our usual march towards a more perfect CoachAccountable (and my usual thanks go out to the many CA users to continue to share their insight and perspectives to inform that march!).

It’s all been (and continues to be) a lot of fun as we fire creatively on most or all cylinders.  On top of that, it’s been very calm as we’ve gone along doing so much, even amid doubled sign ups.

I know I say this every year (but in my defense it always turns out to be true, per subsequent year-in-reviews like this), but there’s still plenty more up our sleeves as we continue to build the best darn coaching platform we can.

Thank you to all who have joined us on the journey.  That you’ve done the work to find your way around CA and wield it in your work means the world to me.  Onward we go!

Cheers,

Joe Arioto of MetaGrowth Ventures has done 16,000 coaching hours and has at times coached 90+ individuals on a rolling basis.

Early on as a user of CoachAccountable he reached out to let me know he was pleased with the system, and wish he’d had it a decade ago.

Given that, you can imagine I was quite keen to talk more, figuring Joe’s insights and perspective from such a seasoned career would be worth sharing.  He did not disappoint!

Some of the topics we covered:

• Challenges with coaching 90+ individuals (1:52)
• On charging a higher fee (15:15)
• Goal Setting and Planning (22:18)
• Why accountability & tracking is important (29:02)
• What makes a compelling coaching offer(34:20)
• Better client rapport with personality profiling (46:10)
• The difference CoachAccountable makes (52:42)

Thanks Joe for meeting with me in the studio and sharing your expertise!

Every week we hear a few requests for some sort of users group, some opportunity to connect with other coaches.

While our monthly webinar series has proven a successful time for education and group contribution, there’s still more room for community.

So we’re trying something new: an in-person coaches meetup in Los Angeles, California.

» Continue reading “Join Us: In-Person Coach Meetups in Los Angeles”

Wondering if there’s a CoachAccountable app, or if we’re gonna make one and get it all up in the app stores?

The answer is no, and here’s why. » Continue reading “Why there is no CoachAccountable app in any app store, and probably never will be”

It was back in 2013 when I publicly declared my policy of maintaining oblivion around other coaching platforms, and here in 2019 I’m happy to say that policy still holds.

These six years later folks still ask us how CoachAccountable stacks up against other platforms, and we remain unable to give any substantive answer to the question.

This may seem a flippant (if not outright ignorant!) position, but this 2-minute video riff explains:

As I say in the video, there are a lot other people doing great work in the space, each working to forward the institution of coaching through platforms that might operate in ways comparable to CoachAccountable.  We hear now and then someone’s comparing us to CoachLogix, or that they’re looking for an alternative to FinishAgent, or someone will ask “Hey have you heard of Coachmetrix… or Coaching Lobby… or…”.  We used to hear some folks preferred Satori (though much less since we released Offerings).

These are all just glancing understandings of the competitive landscape, and that’s good enough.  We remain content to stay out of any features arms race, and are happy instead to continue taking our lead from our customers when it comes to insight and direction on how to better CoachAccountable.

We get hints often enough that we’re on the right track.  People seem to like us enough on Capterra and just this morning ago I got an email that mentioned “Upon first glance your software seems to be the most comprehensive for coaching that I have seen”.

But ultimately it’s up to you to explore and come to your own conclusion: the choice of platform that powers your coaching practice is important enough to get right.

Be it with CoachAccountable or something else, we hope you find what will best serve your coaching!

Last week we had the pleasure of being an exhibitor at the 3rd annual St. Thomas Executive Coaching in Organizations Conference.

DeAnne Aussem gave a great opening keynote.  Among many gems covered was the topic of relevance as a coach: how well you and your coaching offering stack up as being worthwhile.

For me in the audience it was a wonderful window into a challenge area that coaches face, and as she presented a 3-part framework for boosting relevance I was struck by how well CoachAccountable was already poised to help coaches to be more relevant.

If you’re already using CoachAccountable (or even just considering it), it’s worth being familiar with all the ways it can serve you.  Making you more relevant is no exception.  So with that in mind, let’s look at that framework and consider how CA can fit in to each part:

» Continue reading “On Being a Relevant Coach”

I got a great question in my inbox yesterday:

I might’ve just answered right back, but this is a worthy concern that’s really at the heart of what it is to fully embrace any new system and make it a part one’s process.  So I’ll answer it here, for the benefit of Matthew and everyone else.

» Continue reading “On Asking Clients to Use CoachAccountable”

Working at CoachAccountable is pretty great. We are truly a high-performing team (we both separately get a chuckle when people are surprised there are just two of us), and our mutual coaching background allows us to coach each other, deal with the rare breakdown in a matter of minutes, and make sure we’re both constantly present to our big goal (elevating the coaching industry).

Know what else is cool? We get to do whatever we want. Meaning we get to flip the script on software companies, startups, working remotely, and pretty much whatever else we want. We get to do things like not having a bug log (no need, no accumulation), avoiding a feature request list (we’re in touch daily with the din of what people are asking for), and creating “Morgan’s the Boss” (MtB).

What’s Morgan’s the Boss, you ask?  That’s our weekly ritual, Thursday mornings for a block of 3 hours, when we invert the power structure of CoachAccountable.  Morgan gets to tell John what he should do, rather than the other way around.  It’s Morgan’s chance to call the shots and prioritize what she sees to prioritize, and John’s at her disposal to execute on those ideas.

Here’s how MtB time occurs for each of us.

» Continue reading “For Three Hours Each Week, Morgan’s the Boss”

5 years of doing it has me quite proficient at Photoshopping on another candle.

What a year it has been!

Version 3 launched.  That by itself is enough to mark CoachAccountable’s 6th year a powerful one.  I keep hearing of other platforms whose efforts to upgrade or release a new version end up being largely, ahem, a bug-ridden shit show.  No such problem here.

And what a relief to have that done.  Much of the time I was working on V3 my wife and I had a new baby around.  Suffice it to say that building a major revision to a system as complex as CoachAccountable when you have a new baby is challenging.

But that’s all done!  And young James, our second, is now 19 months old: largely done with teething and sleeping beautifully through the night.

With that lovely foundation of well restedness restored, plenty of other good things have happened in CoachAccountable land during this 6th year.

Since Version 3’s launch a lot of the progress on the platform has centered around a theme of letting you guys run the more nuts-and-bolts aspects of your business more smoothly, and by “business” I mean selling your services and getting paid.

We added support for automatic subscription billing.  We made it so that you could accept payments via Square.  Most importantly, we launched Offerings and Offering Bundles which allow you to sell your coaching services right from your own website.

On the more human side of things, the talented and charismatic Morgan joined as CoachAccountable’s Director of Customer Love and Hand Holding.  She and I represented at the Association of Coach Training Organizations’ annual conference whereat I gave a talk on using technology in coaching.

Beyond that sort of outreach, we made some lovely strides in making CoachAccountable itself more approachable for you, your colleagues, and your clients.  A beautifully animated 2 minute video explains the gist of CoachAccountable like never before, we finally made it super clear how everyone can install CA as an app on their smartphone through a groovy simple trick, and we got all our privacy-respecting bits in order for full compliance with the GDPR (spoiler alert: we were never doing anything nasty with anyone’s data to begin with, we just wrote up the paperwork to make it official :).

And we had the usual bevvy of technical improvements to make CA just plain run better for everyone: direct sync with Google calendars, bulk client uploads, a new thing called “Calculated Form Inputs” (which we haven’t even had time to write up yet!), and a steady stream of other enhancements and polish that make their way into CA most every week.

In summary, with all that covert work on Version 3 done and launched, this year has been a delightful and swift march towards a more perfect coaching platform.

It has been (and continues to be!) our joy to grow CoachAccountable into all the lovely things it can be in service of you guys as coaches.  We hope you love these improvements and that they’re serving you well: empowering you to do your best, most difference-making coaching.

AND I’m happy to say here and now that we STILL have plenty up our sleeves.  As always, can’t wait to show you when it’s ready.

Thank you to everyone who’s been along with us for so long (and to those of you who have just joined!).  Together we’re forwarding a most worthy industry, making it more effective and more approachable.

Here’s to the game!
John & Morgan

With the advent of our much-anticipated, oft-requested Offerings, you can now sell coaching directly from your own website. Offerings set up a seamless experience for your clients and prospective clients, with options to schedule an Appointment directly into your calendar, be automatically enrolled in a Course (such as an onboarding Course), and/or participate in a Group.

One of the great things about Offerings is that they eliminate the need to have a separate account with ScheduleOnce, Acuity, Calendly, or other such online scheduling systems.  This is because CA Offerings give you the ability to let prospective clients book intro calls with you directly online.

But Offerings allow you to give much more than just a way for those new clients to schedule themselves into your calendar:

» Continue reading “Prospective Clients are Full-Fledged Clients, and that’s a Good Thing”