The CoachAccountable Blog

Last week we had the pleasure of being an exhibitor at the 3rd annual St. Thomas Executive Coaching in Organizations Conference.

DeAnne Aussem gave a great opening keynote.  Among many gems covered was the topic of relevance as a coach: how well you and your coaching offering stack up as being worthwhile.

For me in the audience it was a wonderful window into a challenge area that coaches face, and as she presented a 3-part framework for boosting relevance I was struck by how well CoachAccountable was already poised to help coaches to be more relevant.

If you’re already using CoachAccountable (or even just considering it), it’s worth being familiar with all the ways it can serve you.  Making you more relevant is no exception.  So with that in mind, let’s look at that framework and consider how CA can fit in to each part:

» Continue reading “On Being a Relevant Coach”

I got a great question in my inbox yesterday:

I might’ve just answered right back, but this is a worthy concern that’s really at the heart of what it is to fully embrace any new system and make it a part one’s process.  So I’ll answer it here, for the benefit of Matthew and everyone else.

» Continue reading “On Asking Clients to Use CoachAccountable”

Working at CoachAccountable is pretty great. We are truly a high-performing team (we both separately get a chuckle when people are surprised there are just two of us), and our mutual coaching background allows us to coach each other, deal with the rare breakdown in a matter of minutes, and make sure we’re both constantly present to our big goal (elevating the coaching industry).

Know what else is cool? We get to do whatever we want. Meaning we get to flip the script on software companies, startups, working remotely, and pretty much whatever else we want. We get to do things like not having a bug log (no need, no accumulation), avoiding a feature request list (we’re in touch daily with the din of what people are asking for), and creating “Morgan’s the Boss” (MtB).

What’s Morgan’s the Boss, you ask?  That’s our weekly ritual, Thursday mornings for a block of 3 hours, when we invert the power structure of CoachAccountable.  Morgan gets to tell John what he should do, rather than the other way around.  It’s Morgan’s chance to call the shots and prioritize what she sees to prioritize, and John’s at her disposal to execute on those ideas.

Here’s how MtB time occurs for each of us.

» Continue reading “For Three Hours Each Week, Morgan’s the Boss”

5 years of doing it has me quite proficient at Photoshopping on another candle.

What a year it has been!

Version 3 launched.  That by itself is enough to mark CoachAccountable’s 6th year a powerful one.  I keep hearing of other platforms whose efforts to upgrade or release a new version end up being largely, ahem, a bug-ridden shit show.  No such problem here.

And what a relief to have that done.  Much of the time I was working on V3 my wife and I had a new baby around.  Suffice it to say that building a major revision to a system as complex as CoachAccountable when you have a new baby is challenging.

But that’s all done!  And young James, our second, is now 19 months old: largely done with teething and sleeping beautifully through the night.

With that lovely foundation of well restedness restored, plenty of other good things have happened in CoachAccountable land during this 6th year.

Since Version 3’s launch a lot of the progress on the platform has centered around a theme of letting you guys run the more nuts-and-bolts aspects of your business more smoothly, and by “business” I mean selling your services and getting paid.

We added support for automatic subscription billing.  We made it so that you could accept payments via Square.  Most importantly, we launched Offerings and Offering Bundles which allow you to sell your coaching services right from your own website.

On the more human side of things, the talented and charismatic Morgan joined as CoachAccountable’s Director of Customer Love and Hand Holding.  She and I represented at the Association of Coach Training Organizations’ annual conference whereat I gave a talk on using technology in coaching.

Beyond that sort of outreach, we made some lovely strides in making CoachAccountable itself more approachable for you, your colleagues, and your clients.  A beautifully animated 2 minute video explains the gist of CoachAccountable like never before, we finally made it super clear how everyone can install CA as an app on their smartphone through a groovy simple trick, and we got all our privacy-respecting bits in order for full compliance with the GDPR (spoiler alert: we were never doing anything nasty with anyone’s data to begin with, we just wrote up the paperwork to make it official :).

And we had the usual bevvy of technical improvements to make CA just plain run better for everyone: direct sync with Google calendars, bulk client uploads, a new thing called “Calculated Form Inputs” (which we haven’t even had time to write up yet!), and a steady stream of other enhancements and polish that make their way into CA most every week.

In summary, with all that covert work on Version 3 done and launched, this year has been a delightful and swift march towards a more perfect coaching platform.

It has been (and continues to be!) our joy to grow CoachAccountable into all the lovely things it can be in service of you guys as coaches.  We hope you love these improvements and that they’re serving you well: empowering you to do your best, most difference-making coaching.

AND I’m happy to say here and now that we STILL have plenty up our sleeves.  As always, can’t wait to show you when it’s ready.

Thank you to everyone who’s been along with us for so long (and to those of you who have just joined!).  Together we’re forwarding a most worthy industry, making it more effective and more approachable.

Here’s to the game!
John & Morgan

With the advent of our much-anticipated, oft-requested Offerings, you can now sell coaching directly from your own website. Offerings set up a seamless experience for your clients and prospective clients, with options to schedule an Appointment directly into your calendar, be automatically enrolled in a Course (such as an onboarding Course), and/or participate in a Group.

One of the great things about Offerings is that they eliminate the need to have a separate account with ScheduleOnce, Acuity, Calendly, or other such online scheduling systems.  This is because CA Offerings give you the ability to let prospective clients book intro calls with you directly online.

But Offerings allow you to give much more than just a way for those new clients to schedule themselves into your calendar:

» Continue reading “Prospective Clients are Full-Fledged Clients, and that’s a Good Thing”

This year’s cake is actually vegan and gluten free.  You can hardly taste the difference!

Holy moly, that’s like half a decade!

As I look back over the (now quite long) path of this endeavor I’m struck by how thoroughly CoachAccountable has moved past the “startup” phase, how far beyond that humble “Yeah, I’m going to make a web app to help coaches and see if it takes!” hopeful state.

CoachAccountable has taken.

» Continue reading “Five Years”

I got a note the other week with an interesting ask from Adil of Adil Iman Coaching:

Evening John,

Hope all is well. I love the software and I will be sure to sign up after the trial.  I am shooting a video next week about what happens in a coaching session and there after.

Are you okay for me to mention this software and if so what could I say in a nutshell to sell the idea.

Any suggestions or scripts would be fantastic.

Thank you for creating a great software.

Regards,
Adil

» Continue reading “Helping Your Clients Understand How You’re Going to Use Coaching Software”

You know I can probably fit like 2 or 3 more on there.  Re-gifting might be a sin, but re-caking?  Totally fine.

Oh jeez, someone ordered the wrong sash for Mr. CoachAccountable, it was supposed to say “Happy Birthday”. Oddly he doesn’t seem to mind.

CoachAccountable’s fourth year of existence since the 2.0 release got off to a groovy start with the release of CA Mobile, the appy experience of CoachAccountable for coaches and clients but without the hassle of having to find and download anything from an app store.

Then in January CoachAccountable got a named shout out in the Acknowledgements section at the end of the New York Times best seller book Always Hungry, for which CoachAccountable served as the platform for the pilot program upon which the book is based.

Tambre Leighn and company chose CoachAccountable as the delivery and community platform for their cancer survivors program, Well Beyond This. That CA Groups serve as a support group medium for participants makes this a project for which I am deeply honored to be a part of.

Along the way there has been the usual bevvy of enhancements and expansions to the system, including Course Whiteboards, Unit-Based Courses, Worksheet Image Prompts, and Form-Based Session Notes.

Beyond that it’s been busy times as the platform continues to grow and evolve to serve ever larger organizations and programs, so much so that my days as a one-man shop have come to an end.  The need for assistance to keep up has prompted me to create the new Director of Customer Support and Hand Holding position.  I’ll be introducing him in this space very soon.

Year 5 promises to be the biggest leap forward for CoachAccountable yet.  As usual I have much more up my sleeve to better the platform in order to better forward and serve the industry and the many talented coaches working to produce great results.

My many heartfelt thanks to coaches and organizations who continue to try out CA and find it a win for their work, here’s to another year of great coaching!

Yes, the title of this post is crude and vulgar.

But we all know it when we experience it.  It can be maddening enough that any gentler term would be whitewashing of how it leaves us.

The other day I got an email invoice for my annual service with a company that, to protect the guilty, shall not be called out specifically.  It was for about twice the amount I paid for the previous years of which I’ve been a customer, and invoice contained these friendly words:

Thank you for your purchase! Please contact billing@____.com with questions or concerns.

» Continue reading “On Shitty Customer Service”

A common concern with using a web-based system like CoachAccountable is one of privacy: the information that is captured and stored over the course of a coaching relationship is of course of a highly personal and often sensitive nature.  To use a system like CoachAccountable, wherein that information is stored and managed with a third party, requires confidence that such private matters will stay private.

This is a worthy and well-founded concern, and the expectation of confidentially is most reasonable and in fact should be present.

To address that concern I’d like to first contrast CoachAccountable against web-based companies like Google and Facebook, whose business model is to give away the platform for free and monetize customer relationships by owning and selling the customer data.  CoachAccountable on the other hand is a platform which charges for use of the product itself, and does not traffic in the sale or sharing of data in any way whatsoever.

» Continue reading “Confidentiality and Privacy”