The CoachAccountable Blog

Here are some problems that coaches sometimes have, that they often don’t like to admit that they have (because one might understandably worry that it doesn’t look good to have those problems), and which CoachAccountable (happily) solves.

1. Vague platitudes like “living powerfully” and “getting clarity” aren’t that appealing

If you aren’t quite sure what common thread unites the people you are (genuinely!) capable of helping, retreating to non-specific generalities for your marketing copy, elevator pitch, and other forms of tooting your own horn feels like the best move to make.  This problem applies to seasoned coaches almost as much as it does beginners.

But vague generalities and flowery language about living one’s “best life” are hard to appreciate, especially for an uninitiated would-be client.  So they don’t get excited to work with you (and maybe their eyes visibly glaze over when you try to explain what you do).

CoachAccountable solves this by turning the work you do into a tangible record of what happened and what got accomplished.  By making and managing action plans with CoachAccountable, a tidy record of accomplishment grows.  By tracking important measures over time with CoachAccountable Metrics, the arc of performance and change becomes clear to see, especially when coupled with the story behind it.  By capturing Key Insights as part of the session notes you take and share via CoachAccountable, those accumulated gems represent a powerful distillation of those many profound conversations.

All of these turn the abstract (“We have conversations and good things tend to happen.”), into the tangible (“Here, you can see the sort of work I do and the results we get.”).  Properly anonymized, or fairly contrived, this all becomes a shareable window into your process, one that speaks volumes more than rosy platitudes.

2. Clients aren’t saying YES to what I offer

The typical offering of coaches is inherently abstract and hard to accurately envision.  Whether we like to admit it or not, it essentially boils down to “You’ll pay me some money, we’ll have some conversations, stuff will happen, and hopefully at the end your life will be better, because of our having worked together.”

That might be a pretty accurate description of what is, in fact, a supremely worthwhile endeavor.  But your prospective client doesn’t know that.

CoachAccountable solves this by giving you the chance to showcase the way you work.  By replacing vague platitudes with a clear window into typical client results, yes, but also by letting prospects explore the actual process of working with you on their own, even before the discovery call.  This leaves far less to the imagination, and far more to see and ultimately get excited for.  (See Wowing Prospects into Clients if you want to learn how.)

This process delights way more than hopping on that discovery call cold and hoping for the best.

3. Sessions chock full of feel-good insights don’t translate into results

You’re a good coach, so you know the feeling of when your client is lit up and inspired, clear-headed and full of possibility.  They are brimming with excitement over what you’ve created together in the session, and can hardly wait to get out there and create some magic in their life.

But after you part ways, and leave them to it until next time?  Life gets in the way.  They might have forgot.  Those sterling insights faded into the humdrum of the every day; the glimmer of new possibility got buried under the slightest setback.  Not every time, mind you, but often enough for you to know a sobering truth: an excited client at the end of one session doesn’t guarantee proud results to speak of in the next one.

CoachAccountable solves this by being THE PLACE for you and your client to capture those gems (for later reference) and make a specific plan of action.  Out with forgetting.  In with timely reminders and a way for you, as coach, to stay aware of what’s done and what’s not.  You make a deal that they actually take the steps you’ve created together, and you in turn will be watching and cheering them on.

4. Clients drag their heels around actually doing the work

You know that, even as good as you are, you can’t cause the results for them: to get the results, your clients have to show up themselves and do the work.  So you make a plan, make sure they’re truly on board and ready to follow through, and after you say goodbye you hope for the best.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes there’s confusion over whether they actually said they were gonna do X at all, and “by when” is even more nebulous.  Sometimes the notion of doing something bold to move forward is silently swept under the rug.  “Nah, really?  I don’t remember saying that.  Let’s talk about something else.”  That part is never said out loud.  So it’s two steps forward, one step back.  You might wonder how you got here, playing babysitter to another adult’s to-do list.  And no one would fault you for shying away from that role.

CoachAccountable solves this by making those action plans super concrete, with definitive due dates and the option for “Hey, this is now late” notifications to go out automatically.  Timely reminders move things along, while providing your clients the palpable sensation that “my coach is paying attention and genuinely rooting for me”.  And yeah, with notifications sent your way, notifications that let you post a comment to your client via reply (e.g. “Hey, don’t let this slip!” or “Nice work, keep it up!”), you can be.  And those will be some of the most satisfying moments of your week.

You make them a deal: their job is to get this done and keep it green (i.e. on time), and you’ll be watching and cheering them on.

5. Companies wonder what they got from hiring me

What an awesome endorsement and act of trust it is when a company hires you to work with like a dozen of their staff.  You take that responsibility seriously, and naturally want to make it clear, to even the one in Accounts Payable who cuts your check, that the company’s investment in their people via you was absolutely worth it.

But what happened as you did that work?  As you made meaningful change through conversations with those people, was it anything that the one who’s ultimately signing the check is able to see?  If the change in their office culture is apparent today, will it be in six months?  In six weeks?  Tales abound of companies that do the “ooh-rah-rah!” 2-day seminar that left everyone pumped, yet amounted to a sugar pill with nothing to show for it once the memories faded and business-as-usual set back in.

CoachAccountable solves this by giving those key parties in the company a live window into the work you’re doing, at both the individual and group levels.  “What did we get?”, they might ask?  They can log in and see, or consult the exported records that you gave them as a souvenir of the whole thing.  They can even get a digest of what’s new in their inbox, sent automatically at whatever schedule they like.

A tidy digest of activity can be sent to the company personnel of choice at a fitting cadence.

6. I don’t know what’s going on with my clients

It’s your job to care, and knowing where someone is and what they’re committed to is essential to demonstrating that care.  It gives you a lot more on-point things to say in your sessions, which is good, because being a blank slate isn’t actually good customer service.

Once you get beyond about 5 clients, as attentive and caring a coach as you are, it gets tough to keep straight all the ins-and-outs of the people you’re serving. If you’re not able to get up to speed quickly prior to a session, you’re either not actually up to speed (so you’re going to be winging it on your call), or you’re spending a lot of time getting there.  And often times it’s not even possible to know what’s new with your client, because there’s simply nowhere to look.  So you’re going to burn some session time to ask ’em, and roll with whatever they say.

CoachAccountable solves this by serving as both a growing record of the work to date, and a live scoreboard of how things are going within that coaching work.  The action plans are color coded by timeliness with items that are easy to mark complete via simple reply (so they will).  The Metrics are easy to report via text or email throughout the week (so they will).  The Session Notes and Key Insights are all just right there, alone with whatever creative works have accrued (such as a Whiteboard as a living document of the Big Picture).  All of this makes for a record you can easily peruse in the 5 minutes leading up to your sessions, leaving you fully up to date (including what’s new since last time), and allowing you to show up like a genius who’s truly in their world.

7. Things are scattered in a bunch of places

You of course want to be organized, having strong situational awareness and generally on top of things.  Nothing falling through the cracks, nothing important that can’t be found.

Ever run a business?  It’s hard right?  Tons of ins and outs.  A lot going on.  A lot of communications between various parties (and that’s especially important here, because as a coach those communications are part of the product you’re offering!).  If the operations of your outfit consist of just a telephone and a notebook, you’re not keeping much.  Add in email and some spreadsheets, you’re getting somewhere but then scattering sets in.  Add a scheduler and an invoicing platform, and things are getting comprehensive, but also unwieldy.

CoachAccountable solves this by being not only the hub for documenting, tracking and managing the work you do with clients, companies and coaching groups, but also by handling the business side of things, serving as a full fledged scheduler, invoicing platform, and place to issue and manage your contractual agreements.  At last count it functions as 9 apps in one, all harmoniously and seamlessly integrated.  It’s not a unicorn, all-in-one platform for everyone, but it sure is close.

It covers a lot!

8. I don’t look as buttoned-up and professional as others

You want to make a solid impression.  Make it clear that you’re a competent professional who’s worth trusting to actually deliver meaningful, lasting results.

Comparison is the thief of joy, but yes, especially when you’re getting started who could blame you for looking out to see how others do it, and wondering if and how well you stack up in the eyes of prospective clients who are checking you out?  When selling something so intangible, there’s got to be a better way to demonstrate one’s bona fides than tacking on another acronym to the end of your name.

CoachAccountable solves this by giving you a polished and comprehensive system to work from.  You get to invite your clients into an experience that demonstrates clearly that you’re not just here to have conversations; you’re here to work with them to set clear goals and clear plans, and work those to fulfillment with a eye towards actually measuring the outcomes that matter.  Branded your way and looking sharp on any device, it is the hub for your coaching work and place for them to review their results and focus on what’s next.  With templates and structured Courses you’ll be able to demonstrate that yours is a thoughtfully crafted process.

You and your clients can add this as an app to the home screen of any device, branded your way.

And there you have them, 8 problems that coaches don’t like to admit that they have.

And if you have any of these, there’s no shame in it, for you’re in good company.  Coach training seldom says anything about these problems, let alone how to address them.

Fortunately, CoachAccountable has been growing and evolving over the last 14 years in order to be a tidy solution to all of ’em. :)

CoachAccountable has had a rich API for most of its life (the API was originally released in 2015, over 11 years ago!).  For most of that time, using that API was largely limited to larger firms, which makes sense.  Those have traditionally been the ones with operational scale to really benefit from the sort of automations possible by an API, coupled with the resources to actually get something built.

But here in the advent of AI with myriad agents capable of transacting on behalf of users via publicly exposed APIs, the presence of CA’s API is now meaningfully useful for a much broader audience.  And it shows!  There’s been a tidy but quite noticeable surge of requests for additions and enhancements to that API, to suit workflows that are suddenly coming into view as useful.

For example, last week we got this request:

Here’s another thing that would be really nice: the ability to send `isDraft` when I call Session.add so that I can leave session notes in a drafted state, not have them automatically completed.

Here’s my use case: when I complete client sessions, my assistant processes the transcript to get my follow up notes and action items using a private GPT, which gets me to about 75% of the way to a solid follow-up. Then later in the day, I log in to review action items and session notes.

So it would be incredibly helpful to have the draft that I’m still responsible for reviewing and approving, and so helpful if action items would be ready and waiting for me as the coach as well.

This sort of thoughtful request warms my heart, especially because I’m leery of AI crowding out the personalized magic that I, speaking as a coaching client (and by extension, speaking on behalf of some non-zero swathe of coaching clients in general) enjoy receiving from a thoughtful, caring coach.  It speaks to using AI as a leg up towards, rather than a substitute for, the delivery of thoughtful work product to clients.  So I am all too happy to ensure the CoachAccountable API supports such use cases.

As another example, I’ve heard interest in piping session notes in from numerous note-taking AIs.  Because those products are in flux with new ones coming out regularly, it doesn’t make sense for me to build full-on integrations with each one.  But because AI knows how to AI, session notes from whichever source can readily post whatever into CA via the Session.add API function, or one of the ClientFile add functions.

The CA API makes it especially easy to post things to a given client’s file using it’s support for email addresses as user ID aliases: rather than needing a separate step to figure out the internal ID for a given client as a separate step, for example, an external AI agent can use what it probably already knows about your client in an external context (namely their email address), and use that to post some notes or a file for them.

It remains the case as much today as it did back in 2015 that I’m happy to add API functionality to suit use cases that aren’t already supported.  Some things aren’t as practical to do via API as they are in-app (I’m looking at you, Course Builder!), but other, more transactional bits are certainly worth bringing towards feature parity with the app itself as they prove useful.  Now that the coding part to interact with it can be trivially cooked up by AI, we may as well ensure CA API is up to the job of supporting the automations that users seek!

I launched CoachAccountable in September 2012.  I’d like to share a funny thing that happens when a software product has been around and been evolving for a good long while:

What you add in the later years is almost certainly less important than what you added in earlier years.

And this of course makes sense when you stop to think about it: amid continuous work (and assuming a competent and coherent vision for the product), you will prioritize and complete whatever matters most in the moment.  Meaning the next feature you ship will matter less.

Again, and again, and again.

After a decade plus of this, whatever remains to add is pretty niche: of use to only a rather small minority, or of increasingly narrow marginal benefit, or both¹.

There are more whiz-bang features that fall under the banner of being more “advanced”, and those have a certain sizzle!  We like what’s new, and what’s fancy.  Many of my long-term customers like to ask me what’s new or what’s coming in CA.  These days when they do, I ask ’em if they’ve played with any of the features of Version 5.1, released 18 months ago.  Almost 100% of the time the answer is no.  And not because those features wouldn’t be useful; it’s a failure of awareness.  When I talk ’em through those features, they usually land as valuable new goodies worth at least trying out.

So pursuing more whiz-bang features is sort of a dead end at this stage.  Running now contrary to my 12-year-old missive titled Ode to Squeaky Wheels, where in the early days their feedback was invaluable to push the platform to be ever better, the squeaky wheels these days generally want the platform to go down niche paths; paths that would be super great (or at least handy) for their needs, but that nevertheless stray from the core of what CA is meant to do and already does well².

It is that core of what CA is meant to do that I find worth re-focusing on.  These are the raison d’être for this platform, and for good reason!  Many other “coaching” platforms are comprised largely of commodity business management tools (think scheduling, invoicing, signing documents, etc.) with the word “coaching” slapped on it.  They’ll save you clicks running admin, but they won’t materially influence the results your clients ultimately get working with you.

CoachAccountable is different.  It is deliberately built around how your clients show up and get results working with you.

As I wrote last week in The CoachAccountable Perspective (“More than Just Conversations“), the coaching industry and training programs largely consider your job to be little more than having good conversations.  Yet the experience of being coached CAN (and should!) include much more, namely: elements that support real execution and better outcomes.

Without a proper system, those elements are cumbersome and hard to manage.  But with a proper system, it’s another story entirely.

CoachAccountable is that system.

Its foundation consists of four straightforward (but powerful) tools:

• Action Plans for intentional execution
• Metrics to measure and track what matters
• Session Notes to capture and re-presence the key insights
• Worksheets to cause more than passive consumption

They are not whiz-bang features.  They are not complicated to set up.  They simply turn what was cumbersome and impractical into something elegant and practical.

Skillfully weaving these basics into your style will do more for your clients’ results, and thus your efficacy as a coach, than the pursuit of the “fancy” or “advanced”.

It’s never easy to say goodbye to a colleague, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it with a bang.

After a good run of 8 months, Noah is wrapping up his tenure here at CoachAccountable to run operations with a new venture started with a few good friends in his own town.  And frankly, while his leaving CA bums me out and the news hit kinda hard, I’m delighted and I daresay even proud of what he’s got for himself next.

And why is that?

As Noah explained when he first said hello in these parts, it was not easy for him to leave a stable, even if slightly life-draining career for a new opportunity with our merry little band, doing our thing in the coaching world.  Doubly so because that coaching world was, for him at the time, merely the stuff of “hobby” (however passionate).  He left the ranks of 299,999+ other employees of his last company to be with little ol’ me and Jaclyn.

If you’ve ever been a family man with two young children, you of course know that’s a real leap!

What makes me proud is that his departure is NOT back into the warm, pillowy bosom of corporate America, but into a real entrepreneurial adventure, being again part of a small team, and doing it with friends who will get to see and work together face-to-face on the daily.

Because for as awesome and flexible as remote work is, what Noah’s going to makes me more than a little wistful and nostalgic for those days of having colleagues to laugh and lunch with in real life.  Zoom is okay, but it’s not the same.

Noah rocked support and the sort of hand holding calls we like to avail ourselves for.  Just today during my Office Hours an attendee mentioned having had a great call with Noah, and I was not surprised in the least to hear it.

Beyond this, though, Noah created “CA Coffee”, a thrice a week institution of a standing date held on a Google Meet link.  It was a clearing for Noah, Jaclyn, and indeed sometimes I to just show up and hang out for water cooler chat.  Revolutionary?  No.  But it was a stand for having that sort of friendly banter and camaraderie for us staffers, one that is just as easy to NOT have if you didn’t think to do it (and before Noah, we indeed did not).

We’ll miss you, sir!

Thanks Noah, for your service.  You leave in your wake many coaches who were touched by your intelligence, patience and caring during your time here.  I think I speak for many more than just Jaclyn and I when I say: we all wish you good times and great success with your new endeavor!

Webhook are one of those things where if you have to ask what they are, you probably don’t need to worry about ’em. :)

But if you’re looking for Webhooks for the purpose of e.g. integrating CoachAccountable with some other system, we’ve now got you covered on this front!

A Webhook is essentially you giving marching orders to CoachAccountable along the lines of “Hey, anytime _____ happens in my account, please send data about that event to this other place on the web (so that I can have an automated process listening for when that happens and take whatever appropriate action in response)”.

From your Settings >> API Access >> Webhooks area you’ll be able to define one or more Webhooks.

When you create/define a webhook, you give it a name (whatever is handy for your own reference), and the URL to which CA should post data about the event.

Ostensibly scary and technical, turns out there’s not too much to it!

Beyond that, you can add any authorization and custom headers that will be expected on the receiving URL.

Once those key bits are set, you can choose which events you’d like CoachAccountable to send to that URL. Check or uncheck whichever are relevant for your purposes (i.e. which events you’d like to “subscribe” to), and you’re set!

You can easily test your Webhook to see:

1. the exact format of data that CA will send for each type of event, and
2. what CA gets when it posts that data to your URL (with whatever headers)

Do this by clicking the “Test this Webhook URL…” link, as found towards the bottom of that Webhook editor pop up:

Choose the type of event you’re interested from that pop up.

Upon hitting “Send test”, CA will pack up that data and POST it to the URL of choice, and you’ll see the result (i.e. the response that CA got back) immediately.

All green? You can be pretty assured things are set as they need to be:

See red? Chances are you’ll have to adjust something on one end or the other:

And that’s all there is to it! You can create as many Webhooks as you need, and have CA report whichever event types to each respective URL set by a Webhook. These can double up, too, in that you can have more than one Webhook listening for the same event.

You can see the full lowdown on Webhooks here in the CoachAccountable Knowledge Base.

For this initial release a fair number of in-app events are supported, but certainly there are more that could be.  If you need others, just ask!

Okay, so… biz dev.

If you’re like a lot of coaches, that’s the last thing you want to have to work on.  You got into coaching to coach people, not to worry about the business stuff.

But it’s a necessary evil.  And it turns out such efforts can be a little more fun and effective than it might otherwise appear!

How?  Because you’re using CoachAccountable, and therefore you’re offering clients a coaching experience that is more than the conversations themselves.

Predicated on that fact (and thus the stand-out things you’re able to say about what you offer), the CoachAccountable Webinar Series has episodes under the “Running a Better Business” section, and each is full of highly actionable things you can do to shore up your business and win more clients.

This video riff explains how to take advantage of this, and fit these efforts into your week as a series of one-off projects that can each be implemented in a single afternoon:

Much like when we here at CoachAccountable heard early murmurs of Practice.do shutting down from soon-to-be coaching platform refugees, we’re now getting word that Profi.io is in the process of shutting down for good.

I suppose the glaring lack of any “Sign up now!” button is public enough of a smoke signal!

That sinking feeling you get when you learn the coaching platform you chose is closing its doors for good.

(For those of you keeping score at home, this make now THREE coaching platforms that shut down in 2025, Nudge Coach being the first.  This might be a good time to check the funding model and employee count of your platform.  If it’s dumb money itching to get theirs investors who might get impatient, and/or a payroll headcount of anything north of 50, well…¹)

Last time, with Practice.do, we kept it classy and kept our ostensibly insider knowledge close to the vest, and therefore didn’t break the news before they did.  And then they pulled the rug out from under their broader customer base with short notice (our tells came from their larger customers, who presumably merited the courtesy of getting ASAP notice unlike the rest), leaving them precious little time to export data and find a new home (and even then, the final day when their login simply no longer worked was unannounced in advance²).

Our automated mechanism for importing a Practice.do accounts from the export file was ready for prime time exactly one day after they bolted the doors on November 3rd.

So… this time around?  We’re gonna do better for this next wave of coaching platform refugees to be set in motion by Profi’s imminent collapse.

If you’ve been using Profi.io and need an alternative, stat?  Based on those key features named on their home page, here’s what we’ve got for you with CoachAccountable:

Client Portal – Oh yeah.  Sessions, Notifications, Messaging, Programs, Forms?  You’ll find you’re able to do all of that in CA, PLUS bits that are (to us) conspicuously missing from Profi, Actions and Metrics (namely the stuff client participation and tangibly getting results).

Scheduling – Yep!  CA is a full stack scheduler that hangs with the best of ’em.  There is NOT an in-app calendar UI, though.  The idea with CA is you connect your usual calendar that you already know and love (Google, Outlook, or Apple), and CA can thusly sync with that.

Video & Telehealth – Nah, CA never tried to reinvent the wheel of building its own video conferencing platform.  But it integrates REAL NICELY with the ones most coaches already have: Zoom, MS Teams, and Google Meet.  Connect any of those, and CA will create those meeting rooms automatically for your scheduled appointments with similarly easy ways to find and click those join links for you and your clients.

Programs – Yep, in CA we call those “Courses”.  Forms, videos, content, and indeed more than that.  Super comparable.  Agreements and scheduling live outside of the flow of Courses but are indeed supported, and CA Courses have a number of features Profi Programs don’t (e.g. Courses that progress by either timed dispatch OR self-paced completion, Action items with reminders).

Multi-Provider – CA’s Team Edition allows you to add as many coaches (or admin staff) as you like, no extra charge.

Profile Directory – Okay, Profi’s got that one over CA.  Still, there are ways to cook that up with CA Offerings and/or Offering Collections as embedded into whatever page you like on your website.

Reports – Yeah, CA has a lot of reports covering a lot of things.  They’re different and less dash-boardy, so they might bum you out.  On the bright side, though, most all of ’em are downloadable as spreadsheets, meaning the raw data is easy to export out to do with whatever you like with little fuss.

Memberships – Yep, that’s the stuff of Engagements (which can entail automatic recurring billing with a card on file when you connect either Stripe or Square) and/or membership and participation in a CA Group (which is the stuff of doing coaching things at the level of group, completely analogous to 1-on-1).

And those are the broad strokes, again, as taken from their home page, banner features.

Will you be happy with CoachAccountable coming from Profi?  Possibly!  It’s gonna be different.  With some things, Profi probably does it better.  Others, CA has the advantage (and not just the whole “continuing to exist” thing).  And if you’re open to it, you might find a lot of good stuff you didn’t know to want.

To help you find your way and figure out if CoachAccountable could be a viable alternative to Profi, grab a time with one of us and we’ll be happy to help.

Grab a 1-on-1 time with a CA staffer here.

No sales pitch, just a chance to put our minds together to see if CA’s the right place for you to land, so that you may continue to manage your coaching operations.  AND if you’d like some white glove service to get yourself moved over and trained in how to do the things you’re used to doing in CA, the CoachAccountable Experts are available for hire for that very sort of thing.

Getting Your Data Over to CoachAccountable

So, here it seems is where things get awkward.  It seems there is NO WAY TO EXPORT YOUR DATA out of Profi.  No existing functionality, no API for scraping programmatically, not even a “Hey, sorry we’re shutting our doors, sorry…. here’s a big clumsy dump that mebby you can use somewhere else.”

This to us is borderline criminal negligence.  I mean, we’re not even going anywhere, but there are already myriad ways to get your data instantly out of CA with a few clicks, in nice-to-read HTML files, CSV files, and even a machine-readable JSON dump.

I hope we’re wrong.  Maybe we just missed it.  But until we learn otherwise, that means we can’t whip up an automatic import mechanism to get your Profi data into CoachAccountable, like we did for Practice.do.

This might merit asking Profi nicely for such an export³.  Even a big, clumsy dump is better than nothing.

The Practice.do refugees could move their stuff in real easily. We’re hoping we can make such a thing for the Profi refugees.

Any which way, if you do have a sort of export file, send it on over to us with a note about it and we’ll see what we can do.

Wrapping Up

We really feel for all the Profi users who are soon to be left in the lurch.  If we can help make that transition any more workable and less jarring, we humbly submit CoachAccountable as a viable alternative for your needs, and we’ll do what we can to help you make that determination.

“I’m pretty sure some of what I’ve got to say here is going to ruffle some feathers.”
  – from the About page, I Come in Peace.

I’ve been at this CoachAccountable thing a good long while now, having recently celebrated the 13th birthday of the endeavor.  I’ve also spent years + tens of thousands of dollars being coached myself.

And on account both of these things, there are some nuanced, not-quite conventional viewpoints that inform the design of the platform that have been fomenting all along the way.

I’ve been writing these viewpoints up for a while now, and have published them on an all new companion site called The CoachAccountable Perspective.

Think of me as a fellow coach who’s been there, yes, but also think of me as the advocate for your most earnest client who desperately wants the difference that working with you is capable of making.

I’m here to whisper in your ear what they wish you would do, telling you things they don’t specifically know to want, informed by years of powerful and not-so-powerful coaching experiences they don’t yet have.

A shortcut in you knowing how to give them the best possible chance at thriving and becoming your biggest fan.

There are presently 37 essays all ready to go, and with more to come.

37 is a lot, so here are some that I suggest as worthy starting points:

• Openly Willing to Fire Clients
• Harness The Power of Your Client’s Desire to Look Good
• Being a Blank Slate Isn’t Good Customer Service, It’s Lazy
• Coaches, you’re in the Caring-as-a-Service Business
• AI is Either Good Enough for Your Client, Or It Isn’t
• We Don’t Need You to Have More Certifications, We Need You to Hold Us as Big

Find it all at https://perspective.coachaccountable.com/

Subscribe to it here.

Whether you use CoachAccountable or not, I’m good either way.  The ideas presented in these essays (of what us coaching clients wish you coaches would know and do) are generally applicable, and should ring true and worth trying.  I just want to help coaches to help their clients get bananas good results like I’ve been fortunate enough to get.  AND I want coaches to thrive by fomenting those results.

Here’s to your success in 2026, and beyond. :)

Yesterday, November 3rd, Practice.do closed its doors for good, abruptly locking out all users from their accounts.

It was about two weeks earlier that folks logged into their Practice.do accounts were greeted with this banner at the top:

Red is nature’s danger color!

So if you were a Practice customer, you are probably looking for an alternative platform for managing your coaching. CoachAccountable might be a fitting new home for you.

And if you did manage to export your data prior to that final shut down, you might have a very elegant transition indeed!

CoachAccountable can take the ZIP file you got from Practice and automatically import its contents in seconds.  This includes:

• Clients
• Families (as Companies)
• Package Templates (as Engagement Templates)
• Package Instances (as Engagements)
• Appointments
• Client Notes
• Client Worksheets
• Client Files
• Library Files
• Worksheet Templates
• Invoices
• Payment Cards (from Stripe, when you’ve connected the same Stripe account)

And you can do this all on your own, no need to email us and wait to hear back, no need to make any sort of pre-paid commitment.  You can grab an account, run the export, and see how your business could look within CoachAccountable with no waiting involved.

You’ll find the friendly prompt to do this when logged in, under your My Account >> Import Data area.

Just choose that ZIP file from practice and you’re on your way.

After clicking the “Upload it!” button, you’ll be presented with a summary of what CA found that is ready for importing, like so:

Choices, choices!

From there, choose which types of items you wish to import and you’ll be on your way.

In seconds.

There are a few limitations (for example, the Practice.do export file simply doesn’t contain key information for e.g. multiple choice questions, meaning those will have to be manually typed back in), but all in all, it’s a GREAT head start on getting your existing setup from Practice.do all ready to go in a new platform.

My heart goes out to everyone who was left in a lurch amid the Practice.do shut down.  Again, if you’re looking for a Practice.do alternative, grab a CoachAccountable account and give that import a whirl, and see how quickly you might once again be all set to continue on.

Update: For the next few days, we’re offering live sessions to acquaint yourself CoachAccountable and explore how it stacks up as a Practice.do alternative.

No pitch. No pressure. Just help getting you re-grounded and back to doing what you love…coaching.

If you’re feeling at all stuck, we’ve got you covered.

Sign up to join an upcoming session here.

It’s a real simple theme with today’s new version of CoachAccountable: the addition of TWO new integrations, MS Teams and Google Meet.

These virtual meeting platforms join the ranks of (long-supported) Zoom, enabling CA to now create virtual meeting rooms for your Appointments within these two in the exact same fashion.

The setup for all of this lives in the new Settings >> Appointment Config >> Virtual Meetings area:

You can go down the line, connecting (or not!) like 1-2-3.

Here you can connect any or all of the now-supported virtual meeting providers: Zoom, MS Teams and Google Meet.

Connecting works like connecting the respective calendars: a quick bounce over to either the Microsoft or Google side of things (to be told CA wishes to have permission to create these meetings on your behalf), and you clicking to grant as much.  Takes less than 60 seconds, closer to 5 if you’re already logged in and a quick reader.

(Important caveat: the MS Teams API is ONLY supported for Work and Business accounts with Microsoft.  If you have a Personal account, neither CoachAccountable nor any other app is allowed to create MS Teams meetings for you.)

Once connected, you’ll find suitable options for each of your Appointment Types in the Preferences tab:

You can also set these preferences for a given Appointment Type when editing that type.

When scheduling an Appointment of a type that supports several choices, you (and your clients!) will be given the option to choose the preferred one:

Same deal when clients schedule as part of an Offering, too!

Like with Zoom meetings, the join link for MS Teams meetings and Google Meets display in-app with Appointments, automatically when it’s upcoming and soon to be relevant, or with a click of the calendar icon when looking further ahead:

Sharing Connections

This one goes out to all the CA power users in the house, namely those who maintain multiple accounts for operating in different contexts.  I see you!

There’s… let’s charitably call it a “quirky” thing about connections between one app and another (such as connecting Zoom to a CoachAccountable account): Zoom (and some, but not all others) will go out of its way to prevent multiple connections to the same app.  Namely if you connect to a second account, Zoom will immediately and deliberately sever/invalidate the first connection.  This is well-documented for Zoom, but this is not unique to Zoom nor to CoachAccountable.

To get around any such issue for all three providers, there’s now a way for the owner of a given connection to share that single connection with others (including him- or herself in a separate account).

To do this, click the “Connection sharing…” button for a given connected provider and you’ll see the following:

Click that copy button and you’re on your way!

The share token is the key: with it, another user (or yourself in another account) will be able to add and use that connection too.

And for you as the owner, if the share token ever falls into the wrong hands, you can click the “Change this share token…” link to rotate it to something else.  You will also see a list of any users with whom your connection is presently shared, with controls to rescind that sharing whenever desired.

And that’s all there is to it!  Connect your providers, choose which Appointment Types should have which types of meetings, and schedule as usual.  CA does the rest by setting them up, and making it super easy for both you and your clients to find the join link in notifications, reminders, synced calendar events, and in-app displays.

Usually I’d pack more into a .point release, but with this pair of integrations being far and away the most consistently requested integrations, I’m delighted to honor these requests sooner rather than later.

Enjoy!