Baby Kira, sporting promotional gear.
In fairness I drew this on a plain white onesie a few weeks before she was born.
Turns out demand for CA merch for newborns is really low. :)
Amid a tendency in business for smaller operations to portray themselves as larger ones to appear more successful or be taken more seriously, I submit to the world a proudly defiant confession:
CoachAccountable is indeed a one-man operation.
I’m delighted by how often that surprises people when they learn this, from long time customers to first time visitors to the site.
This setup works remarkably well. Having marketing, customer support, UI design, copy writing, and actual building of the system all come from the same brain affords delightful efficiency. Just the other week when creating a tutorial video I found places wherein it would be more logical to teach and more pretty to present with a few modifications. So I just made those modifications to the software, and continued on with my screen captures (in a larger organization the marketer would usually have to propose those changes to the product manager, and if the marketer was lucky enough to have those changes accepted and prioritized, the product manager would have to schedule in those changes to with the development team, and then those changes would be made and released days if not weeks or months later).
But that I am just one person causes concern for some people, and understandably so. One coach who was at the time a prospective customer summed it up beautifully:
…It concerns me a little that you are a one man shop. Though obviously a very gifted, committed, and responsive one man (in fact I don’t like people like you who can make me – a mere mortal – feel like a sluff…haha) but there is inherent exposure for all of us there. How will you keep up with supporting the system as it grows? What happens if you (heaven forbid) were to get hit by the proverbial beer truck? For those of us who could be staking our coaching livelihoods on a system like this, it leaves one concerned about the exposure and need for a continuity plan.
Very fair questions indeed.
Yesterday I had a fun chat come in to me from the website. A fellow from Poland started it off by writing:
I just found your web software
are you really founder of this?
To which I replied “I am indeed.”
wow
can I be frankly?
To which I replied “Please do.”
sound like: hmm is they have so SMALL about of business, that founder can spend time to chat ??
because for example I am founder of my own company and its hard to talk with me – only via coaching session :)
To that I chuckled. That’s a fair assessment, and since I have no hang up about CoachAccountable being a tidy, one-man operation realized then and there just how comfortable I am with projecting that appearance. I replied the truth, the last line of which was an insight which came to me on the spot:
Yep. For the time being I’m going to enjoy for as long as I can the luxury of being able to talk directly with the community I’m serving.
It makes a huge difference for me to be able to do so,
you might think of it as the best sort of market research one could possibly do.
That about says it all. Being available to chat keeps causing great conversations. These conversations bring super useful insights to me and helpful answers to people who chat me (to say nothing of the sense of connection to this being a real thing made by a real guy and not just some faceless company).
So THAT’s why, yes, you can still chat with the founder of CoachAccountable.
I’m gonna ride this train for as long as I can.
No, seriously.
After explaining in detail the reasoning behind why I charge $50/month for white-labeling, I was delighted to receive a comment containing most thorough dissent from Michael Leahy, one of the newer customers of CoachAccountable, and one of my favorite for his high level of engagement and input.
I believe it’s the first real criticism ever to be expressed in the comments of this humble blog, and while the always-positive environment of the community’s feedback is a delightful boon to my morale, it does pose within it the chance of this devolving into a sort of rosy echo chamber. By contrast, Michael’s strong opposition brings forth the chance for a lively exchange and exploration of ideas (if you haven’t read it yet, go check it out first before continuing), and affords me the chance to get off my laurels and work through a thoughtful response.
This is good stuff, so I’ve opted to move this more center stage into a post of its own rather than have it languish in the comments section.
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Have you ever thought about what coaching looks like? Or, more to the point, what YOUR coaching looks like?
It’s more worth pondering than you might imagine.
Coaching by its very nature is a rather abstract process: you would be hard pressed to fill a box with “coaching”, point to it and say “Here, this is what coaching looks like.” It’s more elusive than that. Most coaching relationships (even the really good ones), appear on the surface to be a jumble of documents, a few email exchanges, and memories of some good sessions (plus notes about them, maybe).
They appear that way because that’s what they are.
This poses a problem of presentation for any given coach, and for coaching in general. To the people who hire you, external appearances often form a huge basis for choosing a coach, and even choosing whether to be coached at all. It’s hard to show off something that is inherently so abstract, and smooth glossy brochures (and their digital analogs) are generally met with at least some skepticism. You might not trust them to mean anything more than a good design budget, and the same applies for your would-be clients.
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I’ve several times been asked what I was thinking to inspire the functional design of CoachAccountable. I find it easiest to answer in terms of certain tendencies I’ve noticed over the course of coaching relationships, drawn from both coaching and being coached. I’ll share those tendencies and how they pertain to CoachAccountable’s design, and I invite you to read along and see for yourself which ones you recognize from your own experiences, both of coaching and being coached.
» Continue reading “Tendencies I’ve Noticed in Coaching Relationships”
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And I have an update on what is happening with CoachAccountable.
But first it seems fitting to take a little time to introduce myself and share with you a little about who I am, in particular concerning my role and relationship to this fine and waylaid endeavor. A lot has changed in the two and a half years since anyone last posted here on the CoachAccountable blog, and I believe the most personal tidbit about me that one can find in our archives thus far is a passing mention of my fondness for Dance Dance Revolution (still true, by the way).
I’ll begin with some back story: when our team was last on the trail in any publicly visible way back in the fall of ’09, it was myself, Lee Robinson, and Rob Fieldhouse giving it our all, bootstrapped but proud. A few months of trying to approach the market unsuccessfully revealed that we three didn’t have what it would apparently take to make it work, and we put things all on an indefinite pause. We were over being poor chasing the dream.
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Yesterday I wrote a piece about transparency of coaching, or how accessible the coaching industry is (or is not) to the more general public. Now I want to take a look at transparency in coaching, or said another way, how easy it is for a client to perceive the progress and process over time.
Clearly we can agree that any coach worth their salt will be providing perceptible value for their client whenever they are interfacing. It’s industry standard, you could say, that during a coaching session a client is realizing valuable insights, solid direction, and a more or less immediate experience that “yes, I am more clear/focused/ready for what’s next”. But what about such clarity over the duration of the coaching engagement, whether weeks, months or years?
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One of the things I’ve run into time and time again during the course of CoachAccountable’s development is having to explain coaching (in the personal development sense) to friends who have never heard the word used outside the sports context. Even despite many opportunities to practice giving my explanation, I seldom have it resonate with my listener. The best response I can usually hope for goes something along the lines of “Ah, that sounds kinda cool for those people that need that.”
Those people that need that.
People generally understand that athletes do well to have someone who is not them looking at how they’re playing and offering guidance from an external perspective. To score more points and win the big game, this makes perfect sense to most people. But somehow when you apply that same concept to living one’s dreams, career advancement, and quality of life the concept goes sour in people’s minds. Somehow a concept that enjoys “of-course-you-do-that-to-be-the-best” status in sports becomes far less obvious when applied to the grander scope of life.
What if we consider how transparency of coaching impacts this?
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The four of us had a most excellent experience this weekend, and that was attending the Big Omaha conference: a gathering of entrepreneurial-minded tech folk. Attendance covered the gamut from established thought leaders in the field to freelancers who just quit their job eager to create something themselves.
As a group of creatives on the verge of launching our first web app, we felt right at home.
Jeffrey Kalmikoff’s presentation on transparency was a real hit with all of us. He posited the big question: “what does it take to be so genuine and authentically connected with your customers that you could screw up big time and have them still love you?” There are a couple of things that jumped out at me when looking at that:
It may go without saying given all the above, but for the record I’ll say it plain:
We want to have that kind of relationship with the Coaching community.
While sitting out at the wine tasting rap party at the Big Omaha we came up with a few ideas on how to cultivate just that. Stay tuned. In the mean time I invite you to do the same: take a little time sitting outdoors (possibly with a glass of wine) and think about how you could foster such relationship with your clients and the communities you serve. I’d love to hear what you come up with.
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