Here at CoachAccountable, we’re often asked how much time it takes to set up a coaching management system with us. It’s sort of like asking “How long will it take to get new carpet?” Lots of factors affect that one – how many rooms are you carpeting? Have you already chosen the color and style, and is it a specialty brand? Are you doing it yourself or hiring a professional installer? Does other carpet need to be removed first? Is your subfloor in good shape? Do you live in the middle of nowhere? You get the idea.

Our answer to “How long does CA setup take?” is inevitably a version of “Well, it depends. What do your clients need and what do you want the system to do?”

While that’s certainly accurate, we decided to give it a shot for fun and see how fast we could get a brand new account up and running to sell coaching online.

We used just four parts of CoachAccountable (Appointment Configuration, Calendar Sync, Payments, and Offerings) and took just 2:14 to get it completely up and running.

With just a couple minutes, you too can sell your coaching online. Watch this video to see how!

Transcript below.

Hiya! I’m John. I’m the dude who made this whole thing. Today I want to show you something kind of cool and that is how fast you can get up and running with CoachAccountable to start actually selling your coaching services from your very own website.

For this demonstration, I’m going to dust off my own website from way back in the day, when I used to do consulting. I offered coaching and part of that was offering a 20 dollar introductory coaching call. There’s a PayPal button as you can see right here that allows people to pay. But it didn’t do anything with scheduling or really much of anything else. So we’re going to replace that with a much better setup, done the CoachAccountable way.

We’re going to start here in CoachAccountable with a brand new account and let’s see how fast we can do it.

Our first stop in doing this setup is visiting the Appointments Configuration. Here we’ve got three tasks. First, we’re going to create a new appointment type, which basically defines what exactly people are booking themselves for. A name, the duration 30 minutes, we’ll even set some reminders for both parties to make sure everyone comes well-prepared.

That should be good. OK. Next up, let’s set our availability, which is basically our way of saying, “When are we taking these calls?” For example, let’s do Monday mornings and maybe afternoons, have a nice little lunch break, and then we could also do, say, Wednesdays, maybe just the afternoon, one to four.

Final step. Let’s sync up with our calendar. We have Google Calendar and we’re already logged in. This is super quick. This allows any appointments that get scheduled via CoachAccountable to also appear in our calendar as well as read from the calendar to know when we’re busy. This avoids double booking. Okay, all set.

Next up, we’re going to go set ourselves up to be able to accept payments online. We’re going to use Stripe, but you can use Square as well. If you’re already logged in and have a stripe account this goes really fast.

You can see here that I’m already logged in so it’s just a matter of clicking, “Yep, let’s connect these things.” And done! OK. We’re all set now to have CoachAccountable process payments on our behalf. By the way, CoachAccountable doesn’t take any fees.

Next up let’s create the actual Offering. So, we give it a name. We’re going to tell CoachAccountable what information should be collected for people who sign up for this. I think cell phone is a good one; name and e-mail are always there. We’re going to say that an appointment is part of this offering, and here’s our introductory call appointment type we created earlier.

Give it a price, 20 bucks, and then we could take as much or as little time as we want to customize things like the welcome message and the confirmation e-mail. This is a great opportunity to sort of give a little bit of personality and style – let people sort of get excited about what they’re getting themselves into. All right. This is all set.

Let’s get the embed code. I’m working in WordPress so I’m going to do an iframe, grab that little snippet. This is a little task for your webmaster or if you’re savvy you can do a quick cut and paste job basically put this snippet of HTML right in place (for WordPress it’s a little weird with iframes; we’re going to give it an alternate syntax and maybe a little bit styling to make it look pretty). And then once we hit the update button here, we are done.

Two minutes 14 seconds.

Let’s go see our work over here – hit refresh, and there we have it. Our sign-up widget right in place. Three simple steps. Pick a date and time based on your rules and when you’re free. Enter in some basic info and your clients can pay right online. Appointments made this way appear right in your calendar and the money paid goes right into your merchant account. Nice action!

Not bad for just over 2 minutes worth of work, right? But here’s the cool thing. As nice as it is to have a scheduling system that works right from your own website and integrates with your calendar and even takes payments for ya… The real magic comes in the fact that you can let your new signups actually access their client portal with you right at the get-go. When you do this, you can actually have certain things set up automatically and waiting for them that are going to get them sort of started before they even talk to you.

Maybe a little action plan that allows them to, you know, make progress and getting set up on the kind of work you’re going to do; maybe share some videos or articles, get them excited for your brilliance. Maybe a little worksheet that lets them noodle on things and share in advance as a proper onboarding form.

Play around with these elements and you’ll find that you can actually give people a really nice experience that lets them know they’re going to get so much more than just getting a couple conversations with you. They’re going to have a system of accountability and support that will make it real and results-based ensuring that they’re going to get their money’s worth out of working with you.

Do you have just a few minutes to find and set up the right coaching software? Give it a shot and sign up for your free trial today.

And, if you’d like to set up even more than the basics, check out our Essentials guide over on the left here or use the Getting Started guide inside CoachAccountable!