The CoachAccountable Blog

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”.

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! :)