The CoachAccountable Blog

The other week I had the delightful experience of riffing with Patrick Healy of The Learning and Performance Podcast.  Patrick comes from a background in a field that was new to me, Learning Design.

Though I’m apt to botch the nuance in my layperson’s description of it, Learning Design means creatively and intentionally crafting a learning experience (including the materials, pacing, presentation and overall delivery method), and do so in a way that best gets the target audience to effectively engage and ultimately learn what there is to learn.

In other words, it’s the stuff of going well beyond throwing a textbook at someone and telling ’em to get cracking.

This perspective that Patrick comes from made for an exploration of coaching from a nuanced lens which is novel to me, namely how coaching maps on to learning and ultimately performance.  We open with a hearty survey of what coaches do and how coaching compares to ostensibly similar activities, like training and mentorship.

Some of my favorite parts:

• How accountability is often the missing magic in coaching and why execution matters (17:30)
• A big success of my own self being coached, and why it worked so well (37:02)
• Advice for coaches starting out: get specific about your pitch (42:38)
• My leeriness around AI’s growing presence in coaching (featuring reasoning beyond the mere fist shaking of a Luddite!) (47:47)
• The 3 skills that make one stand out as an exceptional coach (in this definition, competence from training is mere table stakes) (53:15)
• CoachAccountable as a long form love letter to the practice which has given me so much (1:12:18)
• Why, if I had to pick, “Baller” would be the one word I’d get tattooed on me (1:16:54)

Enjoy!

There’s something new today for CA Courses!  This one’s a niche feature, but it nevertheless further closes the gap between CoachAccountable and how things work in other course platforms, and does so in a way that is important for many coaches.

Course Availabilities allow you to make one or more of your Courses available to whichever clients you like, meaning they’re not yet actively participating on the Course, BUT they’ve got it available to them to commence whenever they’re ready to.

Why is this cool?

If you’re the kind of coach (or coaching organization) that has a stock of Courses that your clients would get value from, this allows you to make those available to them as part of whatever program or package they’ve signed up for.  Then, rather than being immediately put into those Courses (and potentially overwhelmed with all that’s going on), or relying on coach (or some other member of the team) to set those clients up in a given course (or courses) when fitting, clients simply have them at their disposal, ready to commence and access whenever THEY would like.

It’s like you can now set your client up with their very own learning lobby, the hub from which they can choose their own adventure of whatever they’d like to start in on.

Three inviting options, and a forth coming soon!

Note the “You Getting the Best Results” card: the Courses you make available can be available immediately, or scheduled for release on a later date.

When a client clicks to commence a Course, they’ll be greeted with whatever descriptive bits you have set for it.  This is your chance to brief them on what to expect, and get them excited for what lies store.

It’s nice to give them a sense for time commitment, too!

Making Courses Available

You can manually make Courses available to your clients at any time.  You might, for example, cover a particular topic in one of your sessions that inspires you to say to them something like

“Ah, sounds like you’re dealing with delegation issues!  If you like, I’ve got a great mini lesson on how to do that powerfully with the people you manage.  I’ll add that to your Courses area, and you can go through that whenever you like.  If you do, I’m sure we’ll have some fun things to talk about next session.”

With a few clicks, you can make your delegation course available to your client and, having done so, given them another bit of value in their working with you.

You can also make Courses available as part of an Offering sign up, meaning new (or established!) clients would have a way to purchase access to one or more Courses, which they can then access and work through in whatever order and whenever they’re ready.

A way to make a collection Courses available for purchase with the client in control? Check.

The CA Knowledge Base article on Course Availabilities gives the the full and illustrated lowdown on setup and how these work.

I’m excited to have this in place, for it puts CA one step closer to being a suitable replacement for other LMS’s and course platforms, allowing even more coaches to have EVERYTHING they want in a single platform.  Couple that with CA Course’s emphasis on active participation (rather than mere content consumption), and it can be a very big step up indeed.

Enjoy!

Alright, so CoachAccountable is now entering the tween years, so it might start to get a little awkward celebrating its birthday as it grows up and starts wanting to get more out of the house.

But like any bordering-on-obnoxiously proud parent, I’m gonna enjoy doing so while I still can.

Got a new ribbon this year to go with the Version 5 redesign. #6c9c31 is out, #68a921 is in!

Certainly the primary stride forward of CoachAccountable this past year is Version 5, a full-on aesthetic overhaul and major remix to make things both more beautiful and intuitive.  Judging by the overwhelmingly positive response, I’d say it worked.

I took my sweet time to build, polish, and perfect Version 5 before even mentioning it to anyone (with very few exceptions, one’s first awareness that I was even working on Version 5 came the very day it was launched and fully ready to go).  So while it may have looked from the outside like I was coasting or asleep at the wheel during that year long process, if that was all that got done in CA land this past year I’d call it a rousing success.

But Version 5 WASN’T the only thing to ship!  All told, the release notes reveal 111 entries from the last 365 days, detailing new features, enhancements and UI tweaks.  And that number swells to 168 entries if you include bug fixes¹.

Speaking of which, one of those releases was Release Notes themselves: a detailed, publicly visible account of CA’s continued progression that can be seen in-app from the top right user menu under About >> Release Notes.  You can even subscribe to email updates, if you’d like to follow along.

This past year saw a growing both interest in and availability of what I affectionately call CoachAccountable experts, folks independently available for hire to help you go as far down the “do it for me” route as you like when it comes to setting up and even managing things in your CA account.  It has been nice on sales calls, especially with larger organizations having more complex needs, to be able to point to the existence of these CA experts to give comfort and a clear path to getting going fast.  You can find those experts here.

I only did one webinar this past year, but it might be my favorite.  “Sessions Where Things Get Created” is the distillation of LOTS of experience around the difference having a platform makes, namely making coaching more impactful.  If you’re already using CoachAccountable but haven’t seen this one yet, 30 minutes spent watching it might have you get a LOT more bang for your buck.

Oh man: the difference between sessions where things get created versus not? Formidable.

Now that Version 5 is out and done and I’ve had a good rest, I’m excited to circle back to projects that AREN’T months-long affairs.  Last week I launched an enhancement to Appointments, and I’ve got another spiffy new feature that’s nearly done (one that I’d hoped to get out before CA’s 11th, but it’ll have to wait a few days more!).  All of which is to say it’s nice to be back on a more regular clip.

And there you have it!  A shiny new version, a burgeoning community of experts, and a whole lot of polish towards my aim of making some coaches’ definition of the Perfect.  Coaching.  Platform.

Eleven years in, it remains an honor and delight to help you coaches do the difference-making work that you do.  Here’s to the year and road ahead!

Another fun thing about being done with Version 5 is coming up for air and circling back to invitations I had previously declined on grounds of the need to focus.  To that end, it was my pleasure recently to sit with and be interviewed by Jaclyn Stripling, CoachAccountable staff alum, for the ANBRWY Podcast.

It was a fun recap of the long arc of CoachAccountable’s existence and way of doing things, doubly so as mediated and probed by a third party who herself was there for two years of it.  If you’re curious about what motivates the way and workings of CoachAccountable as a business, including why I run it the way I do and the ostensibly curious decision to run solo of late, you’ll find that and more.

Specific to the CA story, this includes:

• Going from contract work to making a product
• Humble beginnings of growing one customer at a time
• The slow, relaxed pace by which I made Version 5
• CA’s destiny if I die or get bored or otherwise go away
• Experiences of being coached that led to CA as a way to make those better

We also covered more universal themes of entrepreneurship, including:

• Letting customer interactions be the guide
• Empowerment through betting on yourself as able to figure things out
• Overcoming “should” and the tyranny of goals
• Sidestepping the hustle by favoring and focusing on creative output

Enjoy!

Now that Version 5 is done and launched, I’ve been having fun getting down with programming projects that AREN’T a massive, under-wraps operation!  To that end, earlier this week I got a support question asking:

A pet peeve of mine is clients cancel an appointment by deleting the calendar invite you send via CA.com.

Is there a configuration I’m overlooking to integrate a “cancel / reschedule” link into the calendar invite?

A fine question!  Because all parties to an Appointment in CoachAccountable have their own login (which is not typically the case while a general purpose scheduler), the usual way to cancel or reschedule is from within the app, while logged in.

But by that very same token, general purpose schedulers offer, out of necessity, something like “Need to cancel this?  Click here.  Need to reschedule this?  Click here.”

These allow easy to access to modify an already-scheduled Appointment, and though they’re certainly not needed with CA (wherein everyone can log in to handle all their business, including appointment modifications), I figure that’s a nice addition for two reasons:

1. This will indeed make it more likely that clients will cancel or reschedule in a way that will be picked up by CA for all the beyond-mere-event setting functionality that that entails¹ (meaning coach won’t have to do it as a separate step).
2. This makes it possible for a client’s assistant, who may be charged with managing their appointments, to make those changes (and WITHOUT requiring the full login credentials of that client, which would reveal potentially sensitive information about the coaching itself).

So, these sorts of links for managing appointments are now a thing!

To take advantage, on can include [cancelLink] and [rescheduleLink] magic tags in both Appointment Notification and Appointment Reminder email templates:

When a client (or their assistant, or indeed anyone else!) clicks the cancel link, they find themselves on a page that looks like this:

Clicking a reschedule link takes one to a place like this:

Simple as that.

The beauty of these is that one is NOT necessarily logged in when on one of those pages, and one is ONLY allowed to see and modify the one, single Appointment that is implied by the magic link that got one here.

It’s a nice measure of allowing an assistant to manage those calendar details for a busy client, and further closes the already narrow gap between CoachAccountable scheduling and other, more general purpose scheduling apps.

CoachAccountable Version 5 has now been out for a few weeks, and it’s been quite heartening how overwhelmingly positive the response has been.

A lot of folks have kindly shared their feedback in the comments of the announcement, and I’ve had the delight of getting even more through other channels.

For anyone feeling still on the fence around making the switch, I’d like to share a few of my favorites:

It’s so great! The searchable library files have already saved me so much time today!! Thank you for all the continued improvements. I’ve recommended CA to about a million other coaches, and this is why.

I love it, John! I can’t wait to mess around with it and get acquainted with this new beautiful version. Well done!

Version 5 looks really great John. Clean and much easier to see the big picture, having items intuitively grouped together. LOVE the widgets! Nice to see and experience the fruits of your refocused creativity.

It seems as though the intention of beauty has really come through:

It’s so beautiful and intuitive.

Absolutely beautiful!!!!

Love the new look/feel/vibe of v5.

Version 5 looks beautiful – congratulations on all your hard work. Love CA!

I’m definitely tickled to see the “L” word thrown around, in all caps no less!

Thanks a million, John! I’ve been slammed with new client season activity and having this simplified was fantastic! BTW – LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the new GUI!

I can only imagine the work you put into these changes. Looking forward to exploring and making the conversion. LOVE the business dashboard by the way. 🙏🏽

Hey, John, the updated style is fantastic and I LOVE that the appointment scheduling isn’t buried any more. Great Job!!!!

One theme that is especially meaningful to me is the implications for giving clients a better experience:

Wow! Congratulations 🎉 This looks amazing. I have just signed a new client and look forward to providing an upgraded experience.

Wow, well done, well done! This is such an incredible enhancement for us coaches and for our clients. Glad we all get to benefit from your creative journey in the studio!!!

I love it! It’s way more intuitive, elegant, and easy to use. I can’t wait for my clients to experience this!

This one in particular I’m touched by…

Now that I’ve started to use Version 5.0, I’m very impressed. :) I usually take a while to adapt to a new interface, but this one felt even more intuitive, streamlined, and efficient than before. It works well with my brain immediately, without any adjustment period.

…for it captures the more subtle level of what I was going for: a system that is just plain easier to use through a combination of right layout and appealing aesthetics.

This one tickled me with it’s nod to my aforementioned return to my studio:

I LOVE the new update. Great job. You should have gone back to creating art a long time ago. :)

Perhaps I should have.  It’s unconventional business advice, but focusing on creative output is a tack I’d happily recommend to any business owner over the more common “hustle” side of running things.

And finally, a play in two acts that really brings home the dilemma of migration.  One longtime user commented within MINUTES of Version 5’s launch:

“Ah! I’m scared!  LOL  I’m so used to this version.”

And that’s quite understandable, change can be scary!  Especially for the prevalence of botched launches of new versions to be found out in the wild, wherein it’s (far too often) safer to sit back and wait a few weeks while significant kinks and other artifacts of sloppiness and rushing get worked out.  So I was very glad when, 16 days later and from said user, I got this:

I did it. I pulled the trigger finally.  My jaw hit the floor.  It’s GORGEOUS!!!!

All of which is to say:

1. Thank you all for the kind words, it is delightful to be of service to you in making art, and
2. If you haven’t yet pulled the trigger to experience the new, you might find yourself well rewarded for your bravery in doing so. :)

It’s here, it’s ready!

(Not that anyone knew to want or expect it; I’m just not much of a hype man and, like in the past, I’ve kept this project very much on the down low.)

So what’s Version 5 all about?

Beauty and joy of using.

And if we’re talking of beauty, I suppose I’ve beaten this drum before in this very space: I just finished rereading the blog posts around the release of 2017’s Version 3, 2020’s Version 4, and 2021’s more modern design.  And in each there’s a sort of “Check out how slick it looks now!” proclamation, carrying with it an undertone of throwing shade on the old.

Now to my sensibilities, four rounds of that that feels like some sort of climbing of MC Escher’s endless staircase.  Can’t help but feel a little sheepish over what a common refrain this ostensibly is becoming, even if spread out over nearly 7 years.

But DANG, I really do like the pretty pixels of Version 5!  Steven Bannachan of Putty Design has done a fab job of defining the aesthetics this time around.  And I don’t mean to throw shade on the previous design yet again, but I can’t deny: the look of the last incarnation of CA just doesn’t look so hot under comparison¹.

Such is the nature of sustained progress, I suppose.  May we all be proud of what we create today, and slightly embarrassed by it a year or two down the road. :)

But enough of waxing philosophical, let me show you the broad stokes of what’s new in Version 5!

What’s New in Version 5

Aesthetics Galore

New font, new icons, news styles, new UI elements.  There’s no shortage of changes to find, big and small, which add up to a gorgeous look and feel.

Here is the main screen, Clients listing, in Version 4:

And here it is in Version 5:

Layouts for mobile and tablet sizes have been extensively polished for pixel perfect flowing of elements, and dark mode is looking mighty fine as well:

I kinda dig the lilac color scheme.

After switching you may have reason to revisit your Branding page, for you now have 4 options for styling the app frame to get the look and feel that perfectly suits your branding:

Named Original, Bold, Satin, and Satin Light, respectively. I’m bullish on Satin myself.

More Cohesive Navigation

The settings menu has been moved and remixed.

That gear at the bottom left toggles it in and out.

You might notice there’s a lot less going on in this menu.  Business elements of setup have been moved to the new Business Center (more on that below).

My apologies to all the long term CA users who are already super familiar with CA’s menu layout, for breaking their muscle memory!  A temporary slog for sure, but I’m betting you’ll find the change up to be, on balance, more than worth the effort to relearn the new.

My Style and Team Style

The new “My Style” and “Team Style” pages consolidate many areas of setup that previously had to be visited and configured one by one.  The Team Style page allows authorized team members to manage setup for other coaches, including never before possible parts like Notifications and Happenings Reports.

All sorts of stuff that can be centrally managed for other team members.

Business Center

The new Business Center allows you to view and manage all aspects of your business from one area: Invoices, Engagements, Agreements and Offerings.

Being able to configure Offerings with the configuration of Engagements and Agreements living right next door on the same page is, I daresay, rather nice.

Fully customizable widgets in the new Business Center Offerings area give you a nice overview of how things are going in your business:

Drag to sort, add or remove whichever you like.

Better Drop Down Menus

Have a ton of Worksheet Templates or Files in your Library?  You’ll now find it easier to find the right one with a search-enabled drop down menu, which supports filtering by folder and fuzzy, partial matching for ease of use.

Got a ton of files or templates? No problem!

In select places, when picking a coach or client, you’ll now see avatars next to the names.

Remixed Client Page Appointments

The Appointments on a Client Page are no longer relegated to a separate tab in the Overview section.  Instead they now live in the left sidebar itself, like so:

Click on Appointments and…

…the next one shows. Click “view all upcoming” and…

…you’ll see all upcoming Appointment with this client.

Also contact info of the coach or client there has been tucked away, accessible by clicking the contact card by their avatar:

Click that little white icon that looks like a name badge to reveal.

Branding Colors in the WYSIWYG

This one’s subtle, but a nice way to craft content that is more fully consistent with your branding: the WYSIWYG color chooser now includes your primary and highlight branding colors.

Client Roster Download Options

When downloading a client roster, you’ve got options now on which clients you want included: active, inactive, or all:

Sometimes, you just want one or the other!

And those are the broad strokes of what’s new in Version 5!  Well, that and a completely redesigned marketing website, which does much better justice to the new and improved platform.

Migrating to Version 5

Migrating to Version 5 is easy: click “Enable Version 5…” from the top right user menu, and you’ll be on your way.

Just a few clicks and you’re there, you can even seamlessly preview it!

Fun fact: both before AND after you migrate, you can quickly toggle between the old and the new by hitting Shift + 4 on your keyboard (whenever you’re NOT typing in some text area).  This allows you to do a side-by-side comparison of any part in the system: it’s kind of fun to see the differences woven throughout and, if you’re like me, the look of 5 really makes clear what was lacking in 4.

Summing Up

Last summer I wrote about my return to being a one-man shop after 6 years of having employees, and in those missives I mentioned returning to my studio to focus on creating art.  THIS is what I’ve been working on.  THIS is what I’ve been up to in my studio, taking up the mantle of being artist rather than art teacher.  I’ve had a ton of fun making CoachAccountable Version 5, and I hope you and your clients enjoy the result.

Onward and upward.  I’ll be updating screenshots in the CA Knowledge Base if you need me.

Actually, you know what?  I think I’m gonna take a beat; maybe start a new farm in Stardew Valley.  Then I’ll get to those screenshots. :)

I did a demo recently.  While conveying the range of all that CA does and is capable of, for fun I took a moment and rattled off on my fingers the various usually-separate apps it plays the part of.

I was surprised to find my two hands were nearly insufficient for the task!

Here are the nine I came up with off the top of my head:

1. Invoicing

CA Invoicing lets you issue invoices to customers (the individuals or companies that hired you), and they can pay those invoices online.  Scheduled, recurring, broad currency support, lock out options for unpaid accounts, overdue notices, exportable reports.

 2. Scheduling

CA Appointments give you full-stack scheduling that can take the place of dedicated scheduling apps, like Calendly and Acuity.  Reminders, invites, rules, calendar sync, plus some niche functionality specific to coaching (like pre- and post-appointment worksheets) that commodity schedulers lack.

3. Contract Signing

CA Agreements let you draft documents ready for read and sign, type your name here, your initials here, check here to confirm you understand, etc.  Plus date and IP-address time stamping for a courtroom-grade, unfudge-able record of who agreed to what and when.

4. Habit Tracking

CA’s Metrics gently nudge your clients to report on a routine basis their follow through and KPIs, building tangible results and lending coachable insights.

 5. To-Do List

Tailored specially towards turning coaching insights into real-life results, CA’s Actions for tracking to-dos lend power and accountability to the coaching relationship.

6. LMS

I never set out to build a Learning Management System, but CA Courses have power and functionality that rate with the best of them.  With CA’s slant towards active participation by way of Actions, Worksheets, Metrics and Whiteboards, CA Courses bring more than the usual focus on mere content consumption.

7. Group Platform

CA Groups have allowed many to ditch their Facebook, Mighty Networks, and other community platforms.  It’s nice to have it all in one place, nicer to move your coaching out of the crosshairs of ad-driven content scraping, and even nicer still to weave in the coach-centric participatory aspects like Group Metrics and Group Worksheets.

8. Contact Manager

CA is DEFINITELY not trying to be a full fledged CRM, but for the clients you’re actually working with it certainly serves as one, and for many is all the CRM you need.

9. e-Commerce

CA Offerings allow you to sell your coaching packages, courses, and group memberships to your clients, new and established.  CA Engagements let you manage the number of sessions a client has coming to them and set an invoicing plan for automatic recurring billing.  This isn’t the platform for slinging products, but is often everything a coaching firm needs to be well and truly open for business.

And those are the nine I could think of.

Is CA’s take on each of those 9 necessarily at full feature parity with respective specialized apps?  Nah.  For some purposes CA will fall short (take the scheduler, for instance: it’s for your coaching clients, so if you need folks to book you for coffee dates, you’ll wanna keep an external one!).

But there’s never been a problem with folks being oversold on CA’s capabilities and being disappointed.  Quite the contrary: CA routinely has the problem of folks being undersold, in that they often don’t realize it very much already does the thing they wish it did.

Sometimes folks say that CoachAccountable is complex, that there’s a lot to learn and figure out.  When viewed through the lens of it doing the job of no fewer than nine distinct apps, I figure we should expect nothing less!

The seed of this feature started from a simple enough question posted recently to the CA user’s group:

Is it possible to merge two courses into one in CA?

The person asking this question has six courses that are already great as standalone experiences, and she wanted to combine them all in order to offer a membership experience wherein all of that material could be slow dripped over several months.

It’s a cool idea!  And if one could quickly make this happen on the implementation side of things, without having to do a lot of cumbersome copy-and-pasting, one would be much more free to play and experiment with such ideas.

I could have quickly tossed off a utility for appending one course to another and called it a day.  But from that simple notion of merging courses, I came to realize it might be a lot of fun AND enable a whole new degree of creativity (when it comes to CA Courses as both ready-to-offer coaching products and powerhouses of automation) if there were a way to operate on, combine, and generally mix-and-match course content in a more fluid and flexible way.

Voila, the result: Course Builder Power Tools.

Power Tools are available with just a click when in the Course Builder:

Ooh, what’s this? No harm in clicking it.

There are 5 types of operations available:

Ooh, these could be fun!

Click on one, and some pretty controls with intuitive sliders appear.  Here, for example, is what it looks like to import from another course:

Pick a course, select the part you want import, choose where to put it.

The article on Course Builder Power Tools in the CA Knowledge Base goes into full detail of what you can do and how these controls all work.

I’m excited for what this makes possible.  If building courses is more fluid and allows you to quickly change your mind and remix things, creating courses will not only be easier, but you’ll start to create different kinds of courses, ones that are less hampered by inertia and the need to have it all figured out in advance.  The ability to merge in entire segments of other courses, coupled with Resource Packages (which make it possible to share and install courses made by others coaches) opens up a wide range of creative possibilities, drawing from and cross-pollinating with the work of your previous courses as well as courses made by other coaches willing to share.

Here’s to the joy of creation!

When it comes to cross-promoting outside commercial offerings to the CoachAccountable community (requests I get often), I am generally, as a rule, an immediate and hard “no”.  We’re all of us inundated with marketing, and I aim to always keep the relationship with CA customers respectfully pure.

But when Morgan (CA staff alumnus and my Number 2 of four years) shared with me the program she’s cooked up to help CA coaches build and sell their courses online, I figured letting folks know about it was very much aligned with the mission here in CA land: empowering coaches to have thriving practices by elevating the experience they give their clients.

I keep hearing good things from folks who work with her about how they’re getting more out of CoachAccountable for it, so for that, and her years of expertise, she get the exception to that rule.

Take it away, Morgan!

Greetings, CoachAccountable community!  As many of you know, I’ve created AccountableHero, a boutique setup service exclusively for CoachAccountable users.

Throughout my time at CoachAccountable AND AccountableHero, I’ve learned there’s a real desire in the community for accountability and support around how to build a course.  If you’ve been struggling with building a course, or even where to get started on one, despite all the great CoachAccountable resources available… you’re not alone.

If you’re ready to finally get that course built and launched and making you money, consider joining the small group course building experience I’m offering.  It starts January 18th and we’ll meet weekly for 6 weeks.

We’ll dive into:

• Course Basics (including Metrics)
• Powerful Assignments
• Easy Videos
• Surveys, Feedback, & Testimonials
• Courses Funnel: Upsells & Resources

You also receive a 60-minute deep dive with me, going through all your burning questions and hammering out details one-on-one.

For the first round, I’m offering a one-time discount in exchange for your candid feedback and a testimonial.

This group is open to a maximum of TEN CoachAccountable users, with more opportunities to come.

Will you finally get that course launched in February?  Only one way to be sure: sign up here.