The CoachAccountable Blog

Due to popular request (well, that and it’s just a really good idea!) we’re going to be hosting a regular monthly webinar for users of CoachAccountable.

Why’s it a good idea and why’s it popularly requested?

Webinars have traditionally been an occasion for us to show off new things we’ve added to the system, and to teach how to best use this or that for one’s practice or workflows.  We’ve hosted these webinars only very occasionally (2-3 times a year), not wanting to clog people’s inboxes with anything but notices of REALLY BIG stuff.

Certainly, however, things move fast enough and the system is rich enough (full of handy features, old and new, that are easily missed) that we could present on a useful topic at a much more regular clip.

But perhaps even better than that is how, when we’ve done them, webinars invariably turn into a forum of coaches asking insightful questions and sharing best practices based on experiences.  This sort of user community of peers helping peers is where we see the real magic, with attendees leaving grateful that they showed up and excited to up their game by using more of what CA provides.

It’s like a mastermind community that meets once a month to share ideas and everyone’s a better coach for it.

Here’s the structure

A webinar every month.  We’ll lead with a topic of our choosing, announced in advance.  Hopefully something of interest to you specifically, and certainly something that will get the conversation rolling.  The “scripted” portion will last 10-20 minutes, and the rest of the time is open for general conversations, questions, sharing, and learning.

If history is any indication, this Q&A portion is the lively part of the show.  Come with your own questions, or just sit back and learn from others.

Webinars are scheduled for an hour, though we’re happy to go over if the conversation remains lively and folks want to stick around (they always go over, and of course everyone’s welcome to sign off whenever they’ve gotten their fill).

I’m interested!  OR  I’m NOT interested!

Remember what I said about not wanting to clog anyone’s inbox?  With more routine webinars, each entailing a few emails (announcement of one upcoming/notification that the webinar is now open/hey thanks for coming, here’s the recording), we’d run the risk of annoying people if we sent to all active coaches every time, so we’re not going to.

Instead, everyone has the option to get (or not get) those notices as they see fit: either by email, an in-app alert, both, or neither.  To set your preference, simply go to My Account >> Message Preferences.

By default Webinar announcements are set to come to you as an app alert, and notifications of a now-starting webinar are turned off.  So if you want to opt in to getting either or both of those via email, head over to My Account >> Message Preferences.

Can I See Past Recordings?

Yep!  Within your own account, from the top right user menu go to Webinars.  There you’ll see not only a notice of when the next one is coming up, but also the collection of past webinars, ready for viewing and complete with show notes so that you can surf parts of interest.

Right there for your reference at any time.

We’re excited to hang out and share knowledge with the CoachAccountable community more often, and look forward to building this as an early-stage de facto users group.  We hope you’ll join us and have it breathe new life and inspiration into your coaching practice!

Want to play the quality game, not the quantity game, when it comes to your coaching clients? Jennie Cwikla of Valkyrie Athletics graciously offered a peek into how CoachAccountable has helped create a professional, organized experience for her clients. We’ve edited Jennie’s words below for length and clarity.

What’s Valkyrie Athletics All About?

Valkyries are from Nordic mythology: angels that come down, pick up broken or fallen soldiers, and take them to Valhalla, to heaven. Valkyrie for me is myself and my coaches. We are the angels that pick up fallen athletes who have been through broken programs. We put them back together. We mend them and send them off to their Valhalla to be able to compete and to live without feeling like they’re missing massive pieces in their programs. We arm them with the tools and the information they need in order to be able to do it on their own.

[Valkyrie Athletics is] based off my own experience as an athlete and what I felt was massively lacking in the industry. 

When extreme athletes are trying to lose weight, you’ve got one end of the spectrum or the other: [dietitians or personal trainers,] neither of which really specialize in sports performance. I was in that mix of people trying to perform at my optimum capacity. 

Jennie’s Story
As an athlete, I had a lot of obstacles trying to find my sweet spot with my body, my nutrition, and my training.

I’ve been an athlete my entire life. I played soccer, softball, gymnastics. I surfed every day after high school, played water polo, was on the swim team. I was always interested in how to be stronger, how to be faster, how to be the best athlete that I could be.

I was competing in fitness – figure competitions, strongman competitions, and Arizona’s Strongest Woman (I won!). I worked my way all the way up to [the] World’s Strongest Woman [competition] in Scotland in 2013 and took fifth out of 15 countries in the world.

I had a bad experience making weight for [the World’s Strongest Woman] competition. I had used two different coaches along the way, hoping to get a different result with making weight. And every time I was like, “This shouldn’t be this difficult.”

When I came back (December 2013), I [started] Valkyrie Athletics to specialize in working with high-performance athletes who needed to optimize their body composition without sacrificing strength and performance. Since then, I’ve worked with NFL Combine training camps, Olympic athletes, aerial artists that traveled with Motley Crue. I’ve worked with top Crossfit Games teams, triathletes, ultramarathon runners – you name it, as long as it’s high-performance. 

And last year, I was actually inducted into the official Fitness Hall of Fame for contributions I’ve made to my community.

Life Before CoachAccountable

I had paper charts, folders that I stapled legal paper to, and I was writing a ledger. I would document my conversations, when I left a message, when someone didn’t turn their check-in form in, when somebody had a question and what information I gave them. I would document any changes made to their meal plans and why. 

Life With CoachAccountable

When I started Valkyrie, I was in search of a system that could be my EMR: electronic medical record. I use [CoachAccountable] like an EMR.

Daily Usage
Metrics: Normally, I start with uploading weights. I ask the clients to send me photos of their scale. I know they have access to enter their weight into their metric area, but I want to see the scale picture. I write any notes associated with that weigh-in: whether they were on their cycle, didn’t sleep well the night before, or adjustments to their meal plan.

I have my clients rate themselves on how well they follow their meal plan from a one to ten. Then, [if] people start asking why is it so difficult for them to see progress, I take all of their scores from their check-in form and create a new metric. I show them: “See all of these scores under eight? That’s why you’re not getting results.”

Messaging & Commenting: When they’ve filled one out, I get an email saying that they’ve completed their check-in [Worksheet], and I can review those answers. Then I respond to their check-in letting them know how I feel they’re doing. I answer any questions they have or make adjustments. 

I created a support inbox where all my messages from CoachAccountable go to, so I don’t use my personal email. My coaches have access so they can help respond, or my virtual assistant tech team can. [Clients] don’t have to wait more than 12 hours to get a response on their questions, because CoachAccountable forwards that message into an inbox- it’s easy for anybody on my team to respond.

Session Notes: I just found [CoachAccountable] Session Notes three weeks ago. Now I’ve cut out EverNote, and it’s so much easier to find my previous session notes. I have an itinerary on these calls, and I’ve created a [Session Note] template for that call. 

As soon as we go on our call, I open the session notes and start taking minutes of things I want them to start doing. As soon as a call ends, I click complete, write a happy little note, and that gets posted into their stream immediately. I love that! Now my clients get a copy of that note; they weren’t getting a copy before. Now, they really have no excuse for if they didn’t do their assignments.

Library: I create different files in their files area: meal plans, competition protocols, things like that. 

Courses: I use Courses to schedule their check-in form to be completed on their specific day. I schedule those reminders out for the entire length of their contract: 3-, 6-, or 12-month courses. Their worksheet (that they can just click on to fill out) automatically comes into their inbox.

Client Feedback

People are always really impressed. We charge a premium for our services- how you present yourself and your services is a big part in people buying in. So first things first, I believe that [clients] enjoy [CoachAccountable] because it’s professional. They know that they’re in good hands because of how organized everything is; they love the accountability.

Giving them assignments to do, making them check in, having different projects, showing them metrics. All of those things are different links that hold them accountable. 

We’re all about creating an amazing experience. That’s how we get so many referrals and why we don’t waste any money on advertising, Facebook, Instagram – because our clients do it for us. The results speak for themselves. CoachAccountable allows me not to have to play the quantity game; I can play the quality game. And that’s what I’ve always been about: quality. Those are the expectations that I have on my coaches, and I would never give a service to somebody else that I would not want myself.

Bottom Line

Every year I’m growing, automating, systematizing things. And it’s it’s been fun. When you look back at where things were when you started, it’s like, “There’s no way we’d be able to operate like that now.” 

The biggest thing that our clients need is accountability. [CoachAccountable] has so many different ways to hold them accountable. 

It’s been very powerful to be able to use [CoachAccountable] in so many different ways. It’s flexible, easy to switch directions if you need to. I’ve used other things that do bits and pieces of what CoachAccountable does, but not everything in one place.

Are you like Jenny and ready to get started with Metrics, Session Notes, Courses, and more? Sign up for 30 days free. 

CoachAccountable Groups empower you to create a community of your coachees – or, Groups can be secret so that only you, the coach, knows who’s linked together. You can use Groups to send assignments or files to multiple participants at once, keep engagement going even when you’re not there, track progress, and even put Groups through your Courses.

Groups have various privacy settings, including what clients are/aren’t allowed to participate in, and you can now enable personal profiles in Group directories.

Let’s set them up!

For each Group a client (or coach) is in, s/he will have the ability to create a distinct profile (if, of course, you’ve allowed it). That enables clients to tailor their self-descriptions to fit the situation; maybe they’re in one group with you for addiction coaching, where the profile might be more revealing, and one group for general community, where the description might show more fun-loving personality.

How to Set Up Group Coaching Profiles

Inside a given Group, go to Settings. In the Participation tab, select “Enable clients to view and participate in this group.” Without being able to see the Group, clients won’t be able to see each other’s profiles.

Next, click on the Directory tab, then select either “Offer an Opt-in Directory for this Group” or “Offer an All-Inclusive Directory for this Group”. Without a directory, profiles wouldn’t make much sense.

Then, check the box for “Let members set a profile to show in the directory.” When you click Update, an extra tab on the left will appear: My Group Profile.

Here you’ve got the standard CA WYSIWYG editor, where you can add photos, videos, links, and more.

This is a VERY serious group.

Inside the Group, you and the clients can click on the Directory tab. Anyone who has a profile set will have a “view more…” link over on the right. That’ll display the person’s profile. Also, you’ve got “view all ‘more'” at the top of the directory, which will expand all the profiles at once.

Also, “View more” becomes “View less” when a profile’s expanded.

That’s all it takes! Here’s to your Group members learning more about each other and having deeper interactions within the coaching management platform.

Ready to upgrade the group coaching experience by dropping that Facebook group? Sign up for your free 30-day trial of CoachAccountable.

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!

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.

Morgan’s Experience

At the last software company I worked at, here’s how suggestions from the front lines were handled.

Support team: Hey developers, every day we have to do X thing about a hundred times, and we’re often stuck waiting for you to help us out. It’d make all our lives easier if we could….

Developers: Yeah yeah, that would be nice someday. But we’re really busy fixing stuff that we shouldn’t have released because it was broken, so why don’t you write that suggestion on a scrap of paper and burn it as a sacrifice to the gods of programming in hopes it’ll someday happen?

Support team: …

How I felt at work, pre-CoachAccountable

And at CoachAccountable, during Morgan’s the Boss I get to actually ask for things that make my and John’s jobs easier. And they get done.

I can request everything from a “Loved On” button to mark when/how I’ve loved on customers (consistent with my title as Director of Customer Love and Handholding), to blog posts that have been lingering, to updated images on the signup page, to a quick way to delete multiple old Worksheets.

John makes a guess as to how long the task will take him, then races to beat the clock and show off his work. He often surprises me with a bonus item, something like, “While I was building thing X, I realized thing Y would also be great, so I built it!” I enjoy seeing the challenge take shape, too; often I’ll suggest something, John will take it to a different level, and we’ll co-create the idea of the final result. That process animates both of us as we get to step out of our expected results for the week.

The net result of Morgan’s the Boss is that I feel empowered to make my job more efficient, John’s enthusiastic about having less busywork to do, and CoachAccountable as a whole is better for it.

John’s Experience

For me, Morgan’s the Boss time is a special kind of treat for several reasons.

First, I’ve been by-and-large calling ALL the shots for CoachAccountable for quite some time now, 6 years and counting.  Yes, I love the control and being able to play this most worthy game wherein I’m fully responsible for the outcome, but boy is it nice (and a novel change of pace!) to relax the ol’ executive function for even just a little while and settle in more simply executing based on another’s leadership.  To do so is to experience one of the luxuries of being someone else’s employee, one that I, as a long term entrepreneur, had largely forgot.

Second, MtB is a chance for me to truly play, even if for just a little while, the idealized role of the utopian egalitarian leader: I get to put my money where my mouth is in saying I value the input and perspective of others and believe in their capacity to meaningfully contribute direction.  I hope to always remain open to the insights that are not necessarily mine, both from CoachAccountable customers and team members, insomuch as I genuinely prioritize and act on them.  I’m fond of the phrase “CoachAccountable is a benevolent dictatorship”, and this exercise fits that to a T.

Third, some really good stuff gets created when we go according to Morgan’s priorities rather than mine.  Routinely dealing with different things as she does, she naturally has different insights into what would help the cause.  These insights concern not only serving our users better but also making her job easier, which feeds right back into serving our users better.  Time spent making her more effective is time well spent indeed.

Finally there’s a certain energy to carrying out Morgan’s tasks in a rapid, time-bound fashion.  We hop on a Zoom call, she tells me what she wants me to do, I say something to the effect of “Okay boss, I’m on it… see you when I’m done!” and I hop off and get cracking.  It’s a game to see how quickly I can knock out the task, and there’s a keen audience of one that I’m performing for (which is way more fun than toiling in isolation).  Focus and flow come easily, and being able to proudly show off something new and done is so very rewarding.  We hop back on the Zoom call for show-and-tell, and move on to the next thing.

And that’s how it goes for the 3 hours.  It’s not exactly instant gratification, but it’s darn close and I love it.

And there you have it.  Here are some of the cool things that have come out of MtB sessions that you might have come across:

• Having a Worksheet as part of an Offering sign up process
• Rapid deletion of duplicated items in Courses and similar Worksheet assignments
• A tidier Terms of Awesome
• This speed run video of setting up an Offering from a new account in under 3 minutes.
• The former Affiliate program became the more aptly named Referral Program
• A Support Services page created using Offerings, where you can book a time for help
• The coaching hours log report (ICF credentialing, anyone?)

We continue to have fun rewriting the script and inventing new structures for how our company is “supposed to be run”, and we’ll continue to improve CoachAccountable in the myriad ways that our joint perspectives allow us to!

Sue of The Wellness Community, a CoachAccountable Team Edition coach, dropped us a line with a complex document she uses for all her clients. It’s a holistic Wellness Assessment that’s intended to give her members an idea of their current overall wellness, as well as help her match new clients with the right coach.

Sue wonders:

Is there a way for CA to compute and report a wellness score from the answers submitted in a wellness assessment? I have created an assessment with seven sections, each measuring a different area of wellness. Each answer has a score and contributes to the total for a specific area with each area contributing to the total wellness score, being a maximum of 100.

Can I also create a metric that combines all these metrics into one to give a snap shot of their overall wellness in graph form?

We were happy to reply that YES, CoachAccountable does that. It’s called a Computed Value.

Form-based Worksheets give you the ability to create professional coaching Worksheets for your clients. Many coaches find they can stop using tools like Google Docs plus Google Forms and instead assign a neat, packaged CoachAccountable Worksheet, placed where clients can easily find, complete, and review it. You can take data from your form-based Worksheets and pipe them into Metrics, allowing clients to enter data only once into the Worksheet while the Metric auto-populates both data and comments if you like.

Now, form-based Worksheets can do even more. The newest type of field, computed value, allows you to input formulas that include other form fields on your Worksheet. That means you can automatically calculate averages, sums, and so on, and of course pipe these into Metrics as well.

Let’s take a look at one in action.

From the Worksheet in this blog post, I’d like to know how a given client feels on average about the topic. I’ve already got two questions that address that opinion, so I will take the average of these to get the person’s general feeling.

Step 1 is to create the form fields you’ll use in the computed value. Basically, the system has to know what it’s supposed to add/subtract/multiply/divide. It’s like baking: you can’t start with the step that says “mix all the ingredients into the bowl” without knowing what those ingredients are. In this case, I’ve already done the work to create those.

You may remember this totally unbiased survey from such blog posts as “Using Form-Based Worksheets”.

Next, create a computed value. The name should be something you’d use as a title in a spreadsheet column. The formula, though, is where it gets really juicy.

See the options for values to include in this formula, those clickable green links? They are all from the same Worksheet I’m working on. That’s why it’s so important to create these fields in advance. Now, just click on any of those to add it to your formula.

Since I want the average, I need to add these two fields together, then divide by two. CA knows PEMDAS (remember that from school? Please excuse my dear aunt Sally?), so using parentheses makes sure that the adding gets done before the dividing.

For this post, we also learned that in the UK they use BODMAS (Brackets, Orders, Divide, Multiply, Add, Subtract), while in Canada they say BEDMAS (Brackets, Exponents, Divide, Multiply, Add, Subtract). The more you know!

I don’t want my client to see this as a question, because I only want to use it to create a Metric for her (another reason you may not want clients to see the computed value is if you’re just keeping this number for yourself. You can always run a report on just this field by using the Data Lab’s Single Field reporting function).

Because I chose to hide this computed value, I’ll need to mouse over it to see or edit the field.

This hidden field means that the Worksheet looks exactly the same to the client as it did before.

Let’s build a Metric that pipes in the data from this computed value field.

This’ll be useful for my coaching, right?

And voila! You’ve got magically appearing Metric data from a question your client didn’t even know she answered.  By the same token, it’s often nice as well to have a computed value show right within the Worksheet.  That value will magically update itself as your client fills out the other parts of the worksheet which are part of the formula.  This can be quite nice for something like a total score that grows as your client answers the questions.  Hidden or on display, you can have it whichever way makes the most sense.

Which functions can a CoachAccountable computed value do?

Pretty much any valid mathematical expression of arithmetic will work!  This includes:

• Parentheses
• Exponents
• Multiplication
• Division
• Addition
• Subtraction

And if the formula as you’ve typed it is not valid for whatever reason, perhaps some parentheses don’t match up quite right or you’ve got a typo in your input names, the system will let you know right away so you can make needed corrections.

If, like Sue, you’ve got a complicated Worksheet for your clients and you’re ready to have the math automated for you (plus reminders and more), set up your free 30-day trial with CoachAccountable now.

Do you scratch your head wondering how other coaching businesses scale beyond just one coach, and whether CoachAccountable can help you get there? Anissa Fulbright of Icenhower Coaching and Consulting graciously offered an inside peek into their rapid development. We’ve edited Anissa’s words below for length and clarity.

Brian Icenhower

The Origins of Icenhower Coaching

Brian’s been coaching for 20+ years. We have this belief that people learn in their own way[s]: touch workbooks, watch videos, print the materials, listen to a podcast or an audiobook. They’re busy, [but they need] access to these materials in different ways.

[For example], we have audiobooks; [clients say] “I’ll do it while I’m on the treadmill.” We accept [those various learning styles and used them] to make training that was versatile and up-to-date.

Icenhower Resources

We have “therealestatetrainer.com, Powered by Icenhower Coaching,” which is a free resource for [real estate] agents. When subscribers come to us, they’re so tired, and they’re like, “I’ve been looking for this.” We also have the ICCOnlineLearningCenter.com for our online video courses.

By the end of the year [2018], [we’ll have] 11 books, all turned into a training series with video modules, workbooks, and online courses.

And that’s what we’ve set out to do. We didn’t mean to be a publishing company!

Life Before CoachAccountable

[At the very beginning, Brian] was spending much more like three hours a week with [each] client then. Now it’s closer to 30 minutes, and we’re able to get more clients [and] spend less time while giving them more value. 

With CoachAccountable in place, our number of clients has gone up over five times the number we had just last year, and we have been able to add more coaches to the team, too. We have had incredible growth that we wouldn’t have been able to do without CoachAccountable, especially onboarding [clients] and getting them into a system where they can feel the value. They don’t feel like they’re getting just a 30-minute phone call; they feel like they’re getting a lot more.

Anissa Fulbright, Icenhower Coaching

Icenhower Coaching + CoachAccountable

We’re branching out, but the bread and butter of our business is [still] one-on-one coaching. It’s the most effective way for people to grow; we’re seeing a 39 percent increase in our agents’ GCI (gross commission income) after one year of coaching.

These people are busy and they’ve been in the business for a while. They just need structure and a coach that can help them hire someone effective – not their sister who needs part time work.

We take them out of the “traditional age”; they don’t have business training, so we’re taking them to that level.

Communication

Poignant reminders – e-mails, texts –  [are] important because they are texters.

They don’t want more e-mails, so I can customize [the customer experience] with texts. We [as coaches] don’t work out of email anymore, because stuff is going to get lost.

A Client’s Full Picture

My favorite part about CoachAccountable is that it’s a centralized place for us to work with clients. On a daily basis, I can check progress and history. It’s a customized experience.

[Session] Notes have been really helpful. We actually started recording our calls. We just drop the [recorded] file right into the Stream when we’re done, so [both coaches and clients] can always reference [it]. It’s helpful for the coach to be able to make those Notes quickly right on the call. The function to add Notes that are either private or [visible] is really helpful.

[Using] the Stream, the files, and the Session Notes, you can see the trajectory of where the [client is] headed. [In the Stream,] you can also look back to see what they’ve been working on and the notes from each call.

The pre-check-in [Worksheet] is helpful for Brian and [the other] coaches, because it gets people in the right mind-state. They write down anything they were working on or struggling with this week, and they know exactly what they’re going to address on the call.  So, [during a coaching call], they’ll do “old business”, then jump right into the “new business”.

Scaling a Coaching Business

CoachAccountable has allowed us to kind of duplicate [Brian]; we are able to scale because we can send actions and reminders and tasks to do between calls week to week instead of him having to spend more time on the phone [creating these systems].

Now that we’ve built out the Library, we can get 10 more coaches and they can all have at least 10 clients, then slowly work Brian out of the process. He’ll [instead] go into creating training materials. It’s really exciting to have that big-picture outlook. He’s going to be much more like, “I just get to write and build [programs].”

Coaching Client Feedback

We haven’t done a ton of marketing, but through CoachAccountable we’re able to impress the agents [who are our potential clients].

The feedback we get from our clients is that it’s a centralized place. They love working out of [CoachAccountable instead of] e-mail, because their email’s flooded. It’s really easy to use the [CoachAccountable] app. They often want to pull something up at a meeting, and they have that PDF right there.

When we unload the Library to them [in CoachAccountable], they’re stunned by the amount of [answers] they’ve been searching for. We have job descriptions and everything they need to hire, train, and grow a team. [We have the resources to] get their business plan on track and start turning their business into a machine.

Some of our agents are the top agents across the country. They’re selling 400 to 1000 homes a year and [because of our coaching], they’re spending their marketing dollars in ways that previously real estate agents weren’t doing.

Thank you to Brian Icenhower and to Anissa for sharing with us! If you’re like Icenhower Coaching and looking to scale your coaching business, try out CoachAccountable free for 30 days. If you’re building or managing a team of coaches, a Team Edition account can give you the freedom to be a real leader and help you to only do the boring work once.

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

Sometimes coaches request to bulk onboard new clients into CoachAccountable. This can happen with a new account (when a company switches all its coachees over to CoachAccountable), or when a new program starts (suddenly 45 people in the cohort need to be added by Wednesday, help!).

Adding a client the usual way is pretty quick, but going one by one can get tedious when you’ve got more than a handful.  However, if you’re handy with a spreadsheet you can get all of their information in line and import it all with just a few clicks.

How to Bulk Import Clients

1) Bring up the client adder as usual by clicking the +Client button.   In the lower right, click on the “Bulk Import…” button.

2) In the “Bulk Import Clients” pop up you’ll see a button that says “Download Template”.  You’ll probably need to grab that as a starting point so that your client data is in the correct format.  (The template also serves as a guide to the various information you can include for clients as part of the import.)

3) In the template, add rows and enter in client information to your heart’s desire.  Commonly you will already have some sort of spreadsheet of client data that you are working from.  Filling in the template will commonly be a matter of copy-and-pasting over various key columns.

Note: the only required fields are firstName and email.

4) When you’re done save out the file.  Be certain you save it as a .csv file, .xlsx or .numbers files WILL NOT WORK.

5) Choose your .csv file as the one you want to import.

5) Observe the status of your data that’s loaded for import.  If everything looks good, dance victoriously.

More Than the Basics

Using this method, you can do more than simply add the clients into your coaching management system. You can also:

• Add profile information, such as a note about that client (this’ll show in the “profile extra” area, and is not visible to the client)
• Add clients to a Group (or two, or three, add Group columns as needed)
• Put them in a Course (or three, or more, like groups, add as many Course columns as needed) and optionally set a future start date
• For Team Edition, designate who the primary coach, secondary coach(es), and view-only coach(es) are

Errors

The system is smart enough to know when something’s messed up. For instance, it’ll throw an error if the email address is invalid.

No, you can’t write “don’t know” for someone’s email address.

Also, if you add a client who’s already in your account, CoachAccountable will notice and let you know that person won’t be added (this helps avoid paying for clients twice, too).

It’s nicer than “hey dummy – you’re already coaching this person”

Use Cases

As previously mentioned, you may want to use this function if:

• You’re new to CoachAccountable and want to add your entire roster at once.
• You want to transfer a bunch of clients from your CRM (InfusionSoft, Insightly, Hubspot, etc.) along with their relevant details.
• A new coach joins your organization and brings his/her clients.
• And more!

Were you dreading the thought of inputting all your clients? Did that keep you from signing up for CoachAccountable? Fret no more and take advantage of our 30-day free trial.

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:

• You can have the system automatically send them a coaching intake form or questionnaire prior to that first call.
• You can have a few Action items pre-loaded as tasks for your new clients to take on as part of getting started with you.
• You can share select videos or other resources for clients to review as preparation.

Essentially, this allows you to give new clients more value up front, and a sneak peak of what it will be like to work with you.  They’ll get to experience the results-oriented approach that you offer, and see that you offer real accountability in getting them where they want to go.  They can engage with the REAL system that you’ll have for them, and get a sense that, by working with you, they’re buying way more than a package of conversations.

These are things that set you apart and make their decision to buy from you easier.

Amid all these perks, there’s still a simple fact that clients who sign up for an Offering might well just be kicking the tires with that free intro call.  CoachAccountable pricing is based on the number of clients you have, and so a question we hear a lot is something to the tune of:

Since These Clients Aren’t ‘Real’, Does CoachAccountable Count Them Toward My Subscription Plan?

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: Our goal is to have you deliver better programs, to more people, with less work. The more prospective clients you have coming in, the more paying clients you’ll have (assuming you’re able to close a reasonable percentage of earnest prospects!). And, without a doubt, those who can see the actual coaching management portal you’re using are more likely to pay – they’ve gotten a tangible idea of what your coaching will look like, and they know it ain’t just a notebook and a phone call.

Our intent is that the clients you attract via Offerings are every bit as worth adding to your roster as those you add directly.

But what if they’re not?

If any of these “potentials” aren’t viable clients, you can, with just a few clicks, deactivate them at any time. This will preserve their data, so that if in a few months they decide to pursue coaching with you, their transition is seamless.

Prospective Clients and CoachAccountable Pricing

These clients only affect your subscription price IF they happen to bump you over your current plan’s limit.

Team Edition, we didn’t forget about you! Click on the image to see both versions of the pricing.

For example, imagine you’re currently at Level 3, which includes 11-20 clients at a flat $120 per month. You have 13 active clients. Then, you book 6 free intro calls with new clients this month: you’re now at 19 clients. Since you’re still inside the 11-20 client range, you’ll still pay $120 this month.

On the other hand, if 8 new clients book free intro calls with you, you’ll have a total of 21 clients; this bumps you to level 3.5, and you’ll pay $200 this month. UNLESS, of course, one or more of those intro call clients decide not to pursue coaching; just deactivate their accounts before your billing date, and you’ll be automatically back at Level 3 (11-20 clients).

Why Do Potential Clients Count?

These clients have full access to real, live CoachAccountable accounts. With your Offering, they’ve done any and all of the following:

• Used the calendar sync and scheduling system
• Received automatic Appointment reminders (via text or email)
• Automatically received pre-session and/or post-session Worksheets
• Experienced the magic of one or more of your CoachAccountable Courses and content delivery
• Interacted with one or more of your Groups

And, you’ve just used a powerful and personal marketing tool by showing them the detailed innerworkings of your coaching process.

Best Practices for Maximizing Value

We get it, no one wants to be bumped up $80 in cost just to take on some complimentary intro calls.  Though ultimately that should enable you to close more business to more than offset any marginal CA expense, you do have a few ways to hedge against paying more than you need to:

Know your CoachAccountable billing date. Not sure when it is? Click on your name in the upper right, then go to My Account >> Invoices.

Do any housecleaning the day before. If your billing date is the 15th, do a sweep of your account on the 14th and deactivate any prospective clients who aren’t yet moved forward with coaching.  Takes just a few clicks and you can reactivate them whenever.

Develop a robust Offering. Oftentimes, the more interaction a client has with CoachAccountable, the more likely they are to be a paying client (and one with remarkable results). Utilize your Offering to its fullest; maybe you choose to automatically add clients into a Course that gets them really thinking about your content.  You can design the Course however you like.  It can assign a quick Worksheet or two, drip some relevant articles that you normally share via your blog or CRM (a la InfusionSoft or the like), or show off your personality with a few heartfelt messages.

Sell More Coaching By Putting Your Best Foot Forward

At the end of the day, Offerings allow you not only to let your would-be clients book with you, but also to show off what sort of experience they’re really going to have working with you.

That they are full-fledged clients within your account is ultimately a good thing.

Take advantage of that fact by really wowing them before you even get on the phone, and you might find them hungry and eager to work with you before you can even say hello on your intro call.

Ready to give the leads in your pipeline the true experience of your coaching? Start your free trial of CoachAccountable today, and set up an Offering in just a couple minutes.