The CoachAccountable Blog

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.

PhotoShopped cakes with a text layer for the candles 4eva.

The number 13 has a bit of a reputation.  But from a longevity standpoint of this enterprise, I’m feeling pretty lucky.  In these last 365 we here at CA got a whiff that, yes, even coaching platforms die.  Meanwhile, CoachAccountable keeps merrily humming along. » Continue reading “Happy 13th Birthday, CoachAccountable!”

As of April 30th, Nudge Coach ceased all operations.  These last few weeks, we’ve had several soon-to-be refugees of another platform approach us, looking for an option to move to on the quick (this is apparently not yet public knowledge, so we’ll keep it classy and not name which one).

Wow.

So, coaching platforms can go out of business, just tell everyone “Sorry folks, show’s over.  We’re not gonna charge you anymore.  You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”

Yeah, y’all remember the late 90’s, right?

To me this is super odd, downright foreign.  From our posture here at CoachAccountable, it is an utterly bizarre decision to close things down and tell all of your paying customers to go away, figure out something else.  To me, such a business has already done the hardest work of (1) getting the platform built, (2) finding the customer, and (3) having them still want to stick around.

Haven’t they already won?

This is of course, a naive take.  In the broader world, of course there are businesses whose operating state is some combination of the following:

• Big staff / high payroll
• High effort to support
• High effort to maintain / keep operational
• Impatient investors
• Low or negative margins

Realizing as much makes me proud of a simple but seldom-guessed fact:

CoachAccountable is a 7-figure business that can be run single-handedly.

To do it at the level of being awesome with our customers that I’m committed to, that person has to be pretty well trained.  But it doesn’t have to be me, the founder.

I share all of this not to brag (though admittedly it is a bit of a flex), but out of sympathy for enterprise buyers, whom we’ve seen a rash of, lately.  (And indeed parties of all sizes, who are looking to find a platform that they can depend on for running their coaching business.)  Because even though I’m tempted to look at someone sideways when they ask questions probing the long-term viability of CoachAccountable (or even roll my eyes: to be fair, they don’t know what I know about the waters we swim in here), they’re trying to make a big decision that will shape so much of the trajectory of their business for the years to come.

So I get and honor the thoughtful care that those questions come from.  And I wish everyone success (and luck!) in choosing the right platform, because it can’t be fun to get the notice that operations will be shutting down and you’ve got X months (or days) to pack it all up and find something else.

For our sake, CoachAccountable has cockroach-like staying power.  It’ll keep on running for so long as anyone is depending on it.

Carla Reeves of the differently podcast has been a long time fan of CoachAccountable and has really used the heck out of it to give her clients great coaching.  So when she invited me to riff with her as a guest on the show, I was delighted by the chance to talk shop in a real “game recognizes game” sort of way.

And what a treat it was!

Consistent with the very name of her show, throughout the conversation I found it instructive (and hopefully you will too) how much CoachAccountable takes a different perspective on how coaching gets done, one that is NOT enmeshed at all in the towering edifices of capital-C Coaching with their entrenched views on “how it is to be done”.  That offers something to coaches looking for an angle to distinguish themselves and give stand out good service.

Some of my favorite parts:

• How and why I got into creating CoachAccountable in the first place, including my first acquaintance with coaching via Landmark Education (2:40)
• CoachAccountable Version 1: Uh oh, turns out our baby is ugly (6:30)
• The philosophy behind CA’s design, tuned for the experience of being on the receiving end of coaching (12:21)
• The magic of journaling (which frankly I didn’t expect when I built such a basic feature) (16:45)
• My desire to infuse a little “yang” energy into coaching and why (26:55)
• Novel perspective to coach better, coming from a guy looking in on coaching from the outside (40:44)
• A little about AI in coaching and how to remain relevant (48:24)

Fun fact: I listened to the first 20 minutes of it last night during snuggle time with my kids, 8 and 10, who got a kick out of seeing that their daddy could be found somewhere on Spotify.  To the fellow parents out there, I confess it was a bit of a giddy thrill to have my little ones hanging on every word of their daddy talking with another grown up about why he does what he does. :)

Find the official episode page with show notes and transcript here:

Coaching Differently with John Larson

Enjoy!

It sounds like a lot when you put it that way, doesn’t it?

And I suppose it is!  Now well past the decade mark (a fine demarcation of the longevity of any software business), CoachAccountable is getting up there.

Of course this year’s biggest news was the release of CoachAccountable 5.1.

Reflections, Metric Templates, Key Insights, Default Landing Pages, pinned Stream items, and new worksheet rules all add to the mix of letting coaches give better and more meaningful experiences for their clients.

But a few other goodies were added to the mix.

Courses got a few enhancements, including new Course Availabilities (which allow you to grant access to Courses and leave it up to your clients to start whenever they choose) and the ability to have Course Content be completable (for greater control of pacing and progress).

Offerings got a few new magic tags and a new type of restriction.

Invoices can now be paid by clients and company personnel without logging in or registering their account, and the history of past sendoffs can now be seen.

Metrics now have the option to show only the most recent data (great for long running tracking).

All told, the release notes of this past year detail 64 releases and 43 bug fixes.

A fine year indeed!

Looking Ahead to CA’s Thirteenth Year

Last December I put out a feeler to all CA users, toying with the idea of offering a group course teaching ways to give better and more results-producing coaching experiences to clients.

The response I got back from this was most encouraging, but I realized quickly that such a live class would not scale, to say nothing of its synchronous nature putting a major damper on who could participate.

So in lieu of that, I’ve been working on something else to fulfill that aim, something that would be fair to call the CoachAccountable perspective on how coaches can be more powerful in their efforts.  (And spoiler: I’m proud to say it ain’t more certifications and it ain’t tacking on even more hours of logged experience.)

It’s nearly ready.  Can’t wait to show you when the time is right.

Onward and upward!
John

For the 3rd year in a row, I’m proud to have CoachAccountable sponsoring the Texas Coaches Coalition (TCC) All Texas Retreat and Conference.  This time I thought it would be fun to move on up to the Diamond sponsorship tier, and for it I get to have a 1-minute video featured on their social media.

It’s a interesting challenge to sum up CoachAccountable in only a minute.  After all, it’s effectively 9 apps in one: that’s a lot of ground to cover.

Having only one minute gave me an excuse to focus on the part of CoachAccountable that I think is most magical.  Yes, yes, it does business and administrative automation galore, but for my tastes the real magic of CA lies in what it brings to the experience of being coached, making already-good coaching much more lasting, results-based and difference making.

In one minute, you (or anyone else) can glimpse how and why it pays to make your coaching more than conversations.

And that’s what CoachAccountable does!  Well, that and scheduling, invoicing, contracts, courses, groups, file sharing, team coordinating, engagement managing, program purchases, and bunch of other things.

It’s all good stuff, but to me, the giving clients more part is what enables you to be a stand-out coach.

My thanks to the TCC for prompting this creative work.  I look forward to actually attending this year, it’s good for me to get out now and then! :)

Here is a parable of two professionals that work to help people.

These two, both of whom work to promote well-being and performance in the physical realm, afford us an understanding of coaching styles that vary in a seldom-considered way.

I regularly see (and am a raving fan of) both The Chiropractor and The Trainer.  In case you’re wondering, they are real people, but for our purposes their real-world identities aren’t important.  What matters in this exploration is they ways in which they work, and the experience of being on the receiving end of their considerable talents.

To see The Chiropractor is a treat: it’s like a mini vacation.  It’s all about hearing you, observing what’s going on with you, and giving you what you need to walk out of there better than you came in.  Tell The Chiropractor what’s wrong, and they can often make it right.  If you have something tweaked or out of order, they’ll do some sort of magic on your body to adjust things back in place and get you on the road to healing.  Just show up, be in communication, and get taken care of.  Even mere maintenance: if you’re generally good but want to keep it that way, a little crack, twist, and/or realignment of this and that will have you feeling great.

I love seeing The Chiropractor.  It’s easy, it’s pleasant, it makes my body work and feel better.  Time and money well spent.

To see The Trainer, by contrast, is decidedly un-vacation-like.  I’m there to work.  The Trainer, too, will hear you, observe you, and give you what you need to walk out of there better than you came in.  But The Trainer’s form of “giving it to you” is more a matter of guiding you through intentionally challenging exercises, and encouraging you, expecting you, sometimes even chiding you to give if your all to do them.  To receive what The Trainer has to give you is to go beyond your usual norms of exhaustion that will leave you feeling like jello at the end, and really feeling it tomorrow (and possibly the next day or days¹).  Speaking of the next days, to get what The Trainer has to give you also means doing the work between those visits, and do so with utmost attention to maintain precisely correct form (which make the work not just physically challenging, but mentally as well).  The Trainer will tell you, unapologetically, that you need to do so in order to build strength, without which you are just spinning your wheels, wasting your time and theirs.

I love seeing The Trainer.  It’s challenging, it kicks my butt and cares nothing for my comfort, and it is building lasting changes in my body that make it less apt to hurt in the first place and more able to show up for life.

Looping Back to Coaching

In these practitioners we see parallels in the ways coaching gets done, and in a way that mercifully sidesteps established definitions for judging coaching competence and holy wars bickering over what is and is not “true” coaching.  Consumers of coaching care not for those things anyway.

What The Chiropractor and The Trainer have in common is power to do genuine good for the people they serve, enabled by deep expertise in their modalities and competent execution.  Both are masterful in their work; in our metaphor here we take that as table stakes for a hire-worthy coach.

Where they vary is the degree to which their clients need to show up.  In that regard, The Chiropractor and The Trainer represent two endpoints defining a spectrum of coaching styles.

In terms of the degree to which client needs to show up, and the degree to which coach has purchase to direct client and hold them accountable to do the work², a given coach’s style sits somewhere along the spectrum between The Chiropractor and The Trainer.  No coach would cop to being The Chiropractor, it’s far too close to coaching’s less trendy cousin, therapy.  This is not to knock therapy: it has its place and is capable of good outcomes, just like physical therapy.  It’s simply not the place where people who are well go to get even better.  Likewise, coaching that resembles therapy is a pale imitation of what coaching is capable of.

The services of The Chiropractor are easier to sell.  The results of The Trainer have greater reach.

The Chiropractor works harder on the client’s body doing those adjustments.  The Trainer works harder to gain the client’s trust and buy-in to do the work themselves.

There is space, and indeed demand, for practitioners all along the spectrum.

As an avid consumer of coaching services³ I’ve ben on the receiving end of a broad range of styles.  I have fondness for the coaches who are more like The Chiropractor.  I have eternal gratitude for the lasting, transformative differences I’ve gotten from those who are more like the Trainer.  My report from the field is that the latter is far harder to find.

If you want to differentiate yourself as a coach, be more like The Trainer.