As I’ve alluded to in recent updates, the development of CoachAccountable 2.0 is being done with the benefit of live coaching relationships taking full advantage of the system.  This allows for practical use that really guides the process and ensures it remains on the right track.  These relationships are with a few friends who have graciously volunteered to be the guinea pigs for CoachAccountable 2.0.

I’d like to now introduce one of them, Tim.

Tim is the owner of BTDenver, a one-man shop that provides computer maintenance, setup, and support services for small businesses.  To put it in readily familiar terms: he’s essentially in the same business as the Best Buy Geek Squad.  But he’ll tell you there’s a real and important difference between a deeply savvy specialist (like he is) and commodity-grade technician proffered up by large service shops like the Geek Squad (in his words, “there are a lot of talented members working there, but the average one working on your problem is basically a high schooler following a flowchart”).

Tim is good at what he does.  He’s managed to sustain himself as a solo entrepreneur for over three years, has a boatload of client testimonials swearing he’s the bees knees, and has the expertise and conversational chops around all things technical to back it up.

Tim and I have been friends for about two years, and as fellow solo entrepreneurs we have a lot in common to talk about.  It was February that he told me he was wanting to up his business game.  Indeed, no matter how good you are at the service you actually sell people, in our position there’s also the “running a business” side of things which calls for a completely different set of skills.  I would begin coaching him informally a month later, and more regularly once the alpha version of CA2.0 was ready (the end of April).

As a way to have Tim introduce himself and share a little about our coaching relationship and using CoachAccountable, I gave him a few questions to answer.  Here’s what he said:

 In March business was good enough to pay my bills but wasn’t growing and fluctuated from dead to too much work on a week to week basis.  I was often frustrated by the situations that arose and either took my unpaid time or caused conflict.

My goal was to transform from a mediocre business that had good and bad days of both income and satisfaction into a rock star level that did more than just pay my bills and was emotionally rewarding much more often than not.

Three factors drew me to CoachAccountable: 1) John, as a coach, had accomplished what I wanted to in a very similar industry recently enough to have relevant insights, 2) CoachAccountable brought a smooth and engaging online interface that realized many of the tools I had wished for in my own attempts at improvement, and 3) being a guinea pig hit the perfect price point for where I was at.

The coaching structure is roughly the following cycle: talk about was is and isn’t working right now, create a plan with actions and metrics as appropriate, receive intermediate feedback if something isn’t working, evaluate and start over.  Some of the “create a plan” step is really just immediate feedback and ideas, the rest is more structured battle plans.

I can see movement toward the models that I want to be using.  My overall satisfaction is higher and I have productive ways of transforming frustrating experiences.  Revenue is already increased too.  I’m not where I want to be, and not even as far as I was hoping to be, but the progress is clear and invigorating.

CA is a great way of connecting the battle plan with daily life.  The online medium is accessible, and the intelligence of the application guides the minutia in a way that a coach couldn’t have time for.  There are limitations to what can be done that probably affect the approaches to problems, but nothing that I’ve been able to notice or regretted.

Without CA it would be much easier to procrastinate on tracking important actions and metrics and more time during coaching sessions would be spent talking about what did and did not happen from last week’s plan.

Even with CA, it’s easy to get caught up in a fire and stop paying attention to the coaching plan for a few days.  It still falls to your own accountability to keep checking in every day and stay focused on the goals.