The CoachAccountable Blog

CoachAccountable is available only in English.  As there’s still so much to do to make this a great coaching platform within just the cozy confines of my native tongue, this will probably be the case for a good long while!

But even so, now and then I get emails which ask a good question:

Hi John,

Is there a way I can customize the CA client’s site language to another language…

My target market cannot speak or read English language :(

Talking about the “client’s site” reveals a subtle nuance: the coach side of the system is vastly more complex with much more [English] text to navigate when compared to what clients see when logged in.  Any coach who uses CA will generally need to know English in order to do so, but what about focusing on just the client side of the system?

For now there’s no such ability to switch out the full language of the client experience, so indeed if your clients don’t speak English they might find it difficult.  BUT, for what it’s worth, coaches have made it work for their non-English speaking clients by customizing the email templates and having the actual content that they enter (worksheets, session notes, and so on) be in the preferred language.  Because the lion’s share of the words your client will ever read through CoachAccountable will be the ones you wrote, not knowing English needn’t be as severe a limitation for clients as it is on the coach side of things.  A little bit of vocab coupled with your content can be quite manageable, once they find their way around the basics.

During your free trial the system makes it super easy to set things up and then see them from the client side of things, so that you can explore whether or not you are able to make it workable.

If you’d like to give it a try, be sure to go to My CA >> My System >> System Communications to find the place where you can customize the full text of all emails the system sends on your behalf.

All of these templates can be rewritten in the language of choice.

One other idea that might help is to setup a Whiteboard for your clients explaining a little bit of the key vocab (like what each of the tabs like Stream, Actions, and Metrics mean).  If you’re not familiary, here’s a guide to how Whiteboards work.

CoachAccountable currently isn’t designed for non-English speakers, but  with a little bit of setup and customization you still can leverage all the tools it provides for your non-English speaking clients.

A major piece of CoachAccountable is scheduling and managing client appointments.  A lot of coaches ask “how do I sync my CoachAccountable appointments with my regular calendar, and how does that work?”

(By “regular calendar” I am referring to whichever online calendar system you already use regularly– Apple iCal and Microsoft Outlook are by far the most prevalent.)

CoachAccountable has a direct sync with your Google Calendar (instructions HERE), but if you use another calendar keep reading.

Syncing is key for two reasons.  One, because you want your CA Appointments to appear right along side all of your other stuff, allowing you to see your complete schedule.  (Moreover you want this without having to manually enter your CA appointments into your regular calendar, because who has time for double data entry?)  Two, because when scheduling your appointments within CA you want to know when you’re actually free, to avoid double bookings.

These two reasons together form a two-way street: how to get your CoachAccountable appointment data into your regular calendar (so that it shows up there), and how to get your regular calendar data into CoachAccountable (so that CA can prevent double booking).

CA provides the way to do each of these two directions of syncing, and it’s important to understand what each direction does as they are quite distinct.

CA to your regular calendar: To have your appointments which were made in CA show up within your regular calendar, CA offers a data feed URL of those appointments.  By adding this URL to your regular calendar system (“Add by URL” or “Subscribe”, the wording to do this varies from system to system) you allow your regular calendar to pull that data in so that it shows alongside the rest of your schedule, allowing you to thus see the whole picture.

This data feed URL can be found within Settings >> Appointment Config >> Calendar Feed.

This URL is all you need to add your CA appointments to any calendar.

Your regular calendar to CA: To inform CA of when exactly you are busy, so that CA doesn’t offer those time slots to your clients when they’re trying to book (and similarly gives you as coach a warning if you attempt to book something when you’re already busy), CA allows you to enter up to 3 calendar feeds.  This is the same mechanism but in reverse: instead of CA giving you a data feed URL to be added to your calendar, you need to find the data feed URL offered by your calendar and paste it in to CA.  Again, how or where to get this data feed URL varies from system to system, but most calendar systems which are web-based in nature offer this.

Here’s what the interface to do this within CA looks like, found within Settings >> Appointment Config >> Availability Exceptions.

Click on + Calendar to add one.

Just paste in the magic URL from your calendar and CA will pull in the data.

Together setting up these two steps make the full, two-way sync.  The intended workflow is that you use whatever calendar you usually would the way you usually do (which is nice: no new calendaring system to learn, just a one-time setup step and then it’s business as usual), and then CA appointments effortlessly pipe in there to give you the full picture (while getting the benefit of all that CA does for facilitating coaching appointments: reminders, client-initiated scheduling, worksheets, hours tracking, piping into the calendars of your clients, etc.).

Whether you use the method above or direct sync with your Google Calendar, you’ll most certainly find it convenient to have coaching appointments automatically appear for you. Sign up for a free 30-day trial and get the calendar up and running in about 2 minutes!

CoachAccountable Team Edition gives coaching organizations flexibility to accommodate their organizational structure.  The key to this is the system of Pairing and Permissions.

Let’s look at these two systems in greater detail.

Pairing

Pairing is the process of matching up which coaches are allowed to access which clients, and at what level.  If a coach has any access to a client at all, it’s at one of three levels:

1. Primary.  At this level a coach is the primary coach for a client.  Every client has exactly one primary coach at all times.  It is the primary coach who shows up as the “My Coach” for the client, and the primary is the default recipient of notifications pertaining to a client.
2. Coaching.  At this level a coach is actively coaching a client (much like the client’s Primary coach).  “Actively coaching” means that the coach can assign Actions, setup Metrics, and so on for the client.
3. View only.  At this level a coach is NOT actively coaching a client.  Instead, the coach only has access to view a client’s file but can in no way participate.  At this level the coach is effectively invisible to the client: a client cannot see coaches who have only view only access.

The pairing interface is accessed by clicking the “Pairing” button either on a given coach from the Coaches tab, or a given client from the Clients tab.

Here’s a look at the pairing interface from the perspective of a coach:

Looks like Aarthi is coaching four, has view-only access to two, and no access to the rest.

Setting the pairing is as simple as clicking the radio button for the desired coaching relationship.

By doing this you can very specifically set exactly who (and in what way) a given coach can interact with.

The pairing interface from the perspective of a client works very similarly:

John, Mira, and Rob are coaching Cassandra (John’s the primary); Jeannine has view-only access; and the others have no access at all.

One quirk of setting the pairing from the perspective of a client: SOMEONE has to be the primary coach, so you couldn’t click to toggle off the “Primary” status from a given coach–you instead have to click “change” underneath the primary coach in order to pull the “Primary” status away.

Whether you accomplish it from the coaches’ perspective or the clients’ (or a combination of both), you are able to set the pairing any way you like to precisely control who gets to interact with who.

Permissions

Permissions is the collection of settings that dictate what a given member of your team is and is not allowed to do.

To find and set the permissions for a given person, find them under the Team Members tab and click their respective “Manage” button:

The Team Members tab is, of course, located only on the Team Dashboard.

From the Manage Team Member screen, click “Permissions” to bring up the permissions section:

Lotta check boxes here. Mostly self-explanatory.

Let’s go through how things are set up for Bob.

The first and perhaps most important setting here is whether Bob is actually one of the team coaches (who will be actively coaching clients) OR if he has instead only an administrative role.  Having only an administrative role would mean Bob is NOT in the active pool of coaches who can be paired with clients, and thus wouldn’t appear in that context at all.

Because Bob is a team coach, there are some options as to what he is or isn’t allowed to do:

• Schedule his own appointments.  Perhaps in your organization these are set only by an administrator who manages client appointment scheduling.  If so, we would uncheck this permission.  If, on the other hand, Bob should be free to schedule his own appointments with clients, checking this allows him to do so.
• Issue invoices to his clients.  Should Bob be able to manage his own client invoicing through the system?  Like appointments, this is something that might be handled only at the administrative level, in which case we would uncheck this.
• Issue Agreements to his clients. Agreements might be an organization-wide standard that’s been evaluated by your legal department, for example. If individual team members should not have the ability to create his own Agreement templates or send new Agreements to his clients, uncheck this.
• Delete his clients’ agreed-to Agreements. With this permission, Bob can delete an Agreement even if a client has already signed/agreed to it. In general, agreed-to Agreements demonstrate part of the coaching record. We recommend instead issuing a new Agreement in most cases. Note that this permission is not available if the team member can’t issue the Agreements (the permission above), so these two are somewhat a pair.
• Add and manage his clients.  If Bob is able to more freely manage his collection of clients in the system, we would check this.  This type of permission is often not granted to organization coaches and is instead reserved as an administrative privilege.  If granted, know that clients added by your coach count towards your subscription plan (we can of course delete or deactivate any clients added by Bob, with our administrative privilege).
• Delete his clients. This enables Bob to completely delete a client account. Deleted client accounts cannot be restored, so we generally recommend deactivating instead.
• Manage other coach memberships within his groups.  Checking this will allow Bob to add other team coaches to be part of his coaching groups.  This is useful if you do team coaching within your coaching groups.  We don’t necessarily need to enable this for any given coach, as we could also manage these multi-coach group setups as an administrator.

Which clients Bob is paired with defines the effective “silo” into which Bob’s coaching activities are confined, and his Coaching Permissions dictate what he can do within that silo.

After the Coaching Permissions there are a slew of Administrative Permissions.  Administrative Permissions describe what an individual is allowed to do at the organization-wide level. These are organized by role type.

Appointment Management

• Schedule appointments for all team coaches.  This enables someone to set up, modify, and cancel appointments for all coaches on the team.  This is perfect for someone in your organization who’s responsible for setting and managing coach/client appointments.

Business Management

• Create and manage invoices for the team.  This allows an individual to create invoices for all clients within your account.  Whoever manages client billing should have this.
• Set up and manage Offerings. Offerings allow people to sign up and pay for coaching. This permission allows the team member to create new Offerings, edit existing ones, and delete them.
• Manage Client Engagements. Engagements track your coaching products and packages. With this permission enabled, the team member can create Engagement templates, edit existing ones, and delete them. Also, this allows the team member to start, modify, or end an Engagement for all clients.

Legal Management

• Share Agreement Templates with the rest of the team and issue Agreements to all clients. As with the coach-level permission above, the Agreement Templates your organization uses may have been given the green light from your legal team. If someone on that team or with that type of role should be able to create new Agreement Templates that the rest of the team can use, check this. Also note that this permission enables Bob to issue Agreements to all clients, not just his own.
• Delete agreed-to Agreements. Again, we recommend that Agreements generally stay as part of the coaching record. However, if an Agreement that has been signed should still be deleted, enable this permission. Note that without the permission above, a team member will not be able to delete Agreements.

Accessing Team Resources

• Access the Files & Templates Library. This enables the team member to view and download the Files in your Library, as well as Session Note and Worksheet templates.
• Access Courses. This lets a team member see the Courses that have been created within the account. He can also create his own Courses and add clients or Groups as participants.
• Clone shared team Courses. This allows an individual to make copies of Courses, whether Bob has created them or others have created them. These cloned Courses may be edited by the individual who made the clones, without altering anything in the original Course.

Master Coach

• Share Session and Worksheet Templates with the rest of the team.  This allows an individual to designate the templates that he or she creates as a shared resource, available for use by any of the other coaches with any of their respective clients.  This is meant for someone in the “master coach” role, the one responsible for designing the forms and content for use throughout your organization’s processes and programs.
• Share Library Files with the rest of the team.  This allows an individual to designate certain Library Files that he or she uploads as a shared resource, available for use by any of the other coaches.  This effectively allows someone to be the keeper and distributor of key files within your organization.
• Share Courses with the rest of the team.  This allows an individual to designate certain Courses that he or she has designed as a shared resource.  This is meant for someone responsible for designing the standardized programs offered by your organization.
• Reassign ownership of team resources (Templates, Library Files, and Courses). This enables ownership to be passed if, for instance, a coach is leaving the organization or changing roles.

Group Management

• Administer team Groups.  This allows an individual to set up coaching Groups in the organization, building groups by pairing coach (or coaches) with one or more [client] group members.  Being able to manage team Groups doesn’t necessarily mean being able to see the actual coaching work that is done within the group (see the next permission).
• View all Group happenings.  This allows an individual to actually see into the group coaching work done within all groups in the organization.  This is meant to enable highly transparent oversight into the coaching, and is meant for, say, a senior coach who wishes to oversee group work being done by other coaches.

Brand Management

• Manage team branding, email templates.  This allows an individual to control core team settings: the branding (including email templates, logo and other branding settings), as well as default templates for system emails that are sent to clients on behalf of coaches (action alerts, appointment reminders, etc.).  This is an important administrative role but is mostly a one time, initial setup (and thus often done by the account owner).

Client Management

• Add and manage team clients.  A rather central administrative role, this allows an individual to set up new clients, as well as deactivate or reactivate existing ones.  Someone who manages the intake and setup of new clients would need this permission.
• Delete team clients. While the add/manage permission allows an individual to deactivate or reactivate a client, this one allows for actual deletion. Deleted client accounts can’t be recovered.
• Manage coach/client pairings.  This enables an individual to manage how coaches are paired up with clients.  This permission very often goes with the previous two.

Super Powers

• See and manage Worksheets assigned by other coaches. This permission is specific to just Worksheets. You can allow a team member to see only Worksheets that have been assigned by other coaches – meaning that team member cannot see Actions, Metrics, etc. that have been assigned by others. The permission below allows a more blanket view into interactions other coaches may have with a given client.
• View all client happenings, even if not specifically paired.  This enables an individual to view the coaching happenings with every client within the organization.  This is meant to enable highly transparent oversight into the coaching, and is meant for, say, a senior coach who wishes to oversee individual work being done by other coaches.  This permission is equivalent to giving “View Only” access on all clients for the coach/client pairing.
• Do coaching stuff with all clients, even if not specifically paired. This is equivalent to giving Coaching access on all clients for the coach/client pairing. Generally reserved for, again, a senior coach type or perhaps a floater type if you have one.  This can also be handy for an administrative role charged with doing common setup tasks for new clients.
• Manage team members.  This enables an individual to set up new coaches and admin members within your account, manage their permissions, and deactivate, reactivate, and delete existing ones.
• Manage team administrative privileges.  The most powerful permission, this enables an individual to grant administrative privileges to other team members (including themselves).  Having this permission automatically implies being able to Manage team members.

There’s just one higher level of privilege that any given user can have, and that is being the account owner.  The account owner is whomever originally set up the account, and these following special rules apply:

• Only the account owner can change the subscription plan, enter in payment information for the account subscription, and cancel the account (basically, all of the account-specific stuff found on the My Account page appears ONLY for the account owner).
• No one else is allowed to mess with the account owner: no deleting, no deactivating, no changing their permissions.
• The account owner can’t un-grant him or herself the Manage team administrative privileges.  In other words, they’re all powerful within their own account whether they like it or not. :)

And that’s Permissions.

Ultimately the configuration of users and roles within a Team Edition account amounts to who’s coaching who plus a bunch of check boxes saying what a given member of your team can and can’t do.

Through Permissions and Pairing you’re able to set up all kinds of roles within your organization, letting your people do and see exactly what they need to.  If you have a specific role that you can’t seem to setup using this system of settings, let me know!

Here’s a screen cast walk through of using Form-based Worksheets within CoachAccountable, including:

• The difference between form-based Worksheets and regular ones.
• How to create form-based Worksheets.
• The work flow of assigning your Worksheets to clients and their experience of completing them.
• Incorporating Worksheets as regular pre-assignments for your appointments.
• Piping Worksheet answers into Metrics.
• Using Courses to deliver recurring worksheet assignments.

At 32 minutes long it goes in depth, and because it goes at a leisurely pace is very easy to follow.

Enjoy!

I wrote earlier about why Metrics are awesome.  Now I’m going to go into the more nuanced version of why Metrics are so powerful when used as part of group coaching.

In other words, why Group Metrics are awesome.

Group Metrics are when you’ve got a coaching group in which all members (or some, you can have individuals sit excluded as appropriate) are working at the same Metric.  Examples include:

• A group fitness program in which members are each tracking their weight and or daily exercise.
• A sales team in which all members are pulling towards an office-wide sales goal.
• A real estate team concerned with tracking performance measures such as number of appointments, showings, and touch points.

In each of these cases, individuals each have their own numbers to report for a given Metric, which in turn contribute to the collective performance of the group.  That group performance is calculated as either the sum or the average of all of the individuals.

A CoachAccountable Group Metric enables you to manage that this detailed tracking gets done, see overall performance as it unfolds, and optionally enable the group participants themselves a transparent view into group performance, or even the individual performance of other group members.

Let’s look at a few examples in turn, to examine the ways by which this can enrich group coaching and foster higher engagement & performance.

Regular Exercise

Say a fitness program challenges its participants to exercise regularly during the week, 3 times at least.  Let’s set this up as a Group Metric (Groups >> select a group >> Group Stream >> + Button >> + Metric) :

Just like setting up an individual Metric, but with a few extra settings.

Note that I opted to include all members of the Group, and the unit of measure is days, as in “how many days did you exercise this week”.  Say this is a six-week program, so we’ll have this span six weeks.  As you can see in the Frequency setting, we’ll have folks report weekly on Fridays.  We’re NOT doing a running total (see the Data entry setting), and accordingly our target will begin at 3 and end at 3.  In other words: in the first week as in the last, exercising 3 times per week is the goal, and more is better.

Beyond group inclusion, there are two other group-specific settings here: we’re choosing to group the data as an average so we can see how the group is overall stacking up against the 3-times-per-week goal, and we’ve set client visibility to include aggregate plus individual performance, meaning they’ll be able to see that group average as numbers get reported, as well as peek into everyone else’s graph.  (A key part of this is that group members know that everyone else can look into their graph–that can have interesting side effects, more on that later.)

Clicking the down arrow in the lower right reveals a slew of blank individual Metrics. I posted a little comment to set the tone.

Group Metrics work how you think they would: as group members report their numbers over the passage of time, the Group Metric average is automatically calculated to show the updated state of things, visible at any time to you and your client group members.

After a few weeks of tracking real data, here’s how things look:

Anthony was bringing the average down, until he got into it.

Think about having this sort of data organized like this as coach: you know exactly who’s thriving and who’s struggling, and can give meaningful and insightful coaching to both the group and specific individuals because of it.  The at-a-glance comparison among group members also gives you an immediate sense how feasible (or not!) a given target really is, allowing you to tune accordingly when needed (after all, if EVERYONE’s in the red zone…).

A Shared Sales Goal

Say a sales team wants to collectively cause $100,000 in sales over the course of a month.  Let’s set that up.

We’ve chosen to group the data as the sum of individual data points, and so here we have to do a little math: since there are four members of the group, each should have an individual target of $25,000 in order to have a group total goal of $100,000.  I’ve set the reporting frequency to be every weekday to prompt the group members to report on each business day.  Under Data entry I’ve chosen the cumulative option, as this is a matter of daily reported sales numbers each contributing to a running total for the month.

Here’s how this could play out after a few weeks:

Tobias was dragging things down for sure.

The summed performance of the group can be seen at the top: at-a-glance you can see that the group is on track to make the overall goal.  Data points can also be conveniently seen for each individual: Anthony stands out as having really excelled relative to his individual goal, and Tobias can be seen easily as being way under.  (Better yet: in practice you as coach would be able to detect this almost immediately, and have the opportunity to intervene and/or offer support way sooner than 3 weeks in.)

You have the option of whether or not to make all individual performance visible to all other group members.  While not always appropriate, this can be a great way to cause a useful sort of peer pressure to perform: everyone knows their own numbers are subject to scrutiny by other group members.  In the best case this can create a very healthy sort of pissing contest among participants, spurring on a sort of one-upping that elevates the group as a whole.

Tiny Habits

A Group Metric can be an effective way to instill a useful practice into your coaching groups.  Say for example you’d like all of your group member to, for the next 3 weeks, take on the practice of meditating daily.

Here’s the setup:

Tracking a regular practice is a good candidate for a Binary Metric, wherein the measurement is simply a “did you do it or didn’t you”, a one or a zero.

Here’s how the Metric looks two weeks in:

Huh, is Tobias Canadian?  You probably won’t have that kind of trolling among your group members, but you never know. Could be fun.

As with other Metrics that have a target, what’s powerful about a Group Metric is that no one wants to be the one with lots of red on their graph.  It’s a subtle (but effective!) nudge to keep members keeping up.

Group Metrics accommodate a wide variety of group performance scenarios, and devising useful things to track among groups is open to a lot of creativity.  To summarize, these are the key benefits to using them:

• Manage performance of the whole team thanks to detailed awareness of what’s going on with everyone.
• See the aggregate performance of the whole team, always calculated for you up-to-date.
• Transparency among group members of the collective (and optionally, individual) performance which pulls for individual accountability.

If you’re doing group coaching, give Group Metrics a try: you might be surprised at how much more engaged your clients become when the results are shared and visible in this way.

I’d never heard of Zapier until someone asked if CA integrated with it.  There is a veritable sea of other apps I might make CA integrate with, quite impractical to do them all and certainly not to be done in response to only one request, and so I tucked the idea away for the time being.

And then eventually I got another request.  And then another.  And then several more.

By about the third person to ask I gave it a good look and very much liked the premise: integrating with Zapier, it turns out, is not so much integrating with one app, but rather is a gateway to near-effortless integrations with a whole ecosystem of other apps.

Zapier makes it possible for your average person (specifically, NON-programmers) to make two different apps to talk to one another in order to accomplish certain tasks of automation, and with no programming necessary.  These include tasks of the form “when X happens over here, make it do Y over there”, like for example “When someone schedules an appointment with me from my WuFoo form, add it as an event to my Google Calendar.”

With the CoachAccountable API, CA is ripe for being one of the apps that can be integrated with others via Zapier.  I hadn’t yet made it a priority as of this past week, until just the other day I got another request for it, this time via chat from one Louise Beattie of Working a Better Life.

“Hey, since I’ve got you here, would you mind telling me specifically what you would use it for?” I asked.  She said she’d like to have it so that clients she added to CoachAccountable would be automatically added to her mailing list within ActiveCampaign.

Hmmm… “Are you going to be online for a little while?  I’d be happy to cook that up for you if you’d be willing to be my guinea pig on this, and let me know how it was working for you.”  I explained more or less how I myself wasn’t a Zapier user and so somewhat flying blind about the whole thing.  She was game.

So it was then that I spent some time putting the finishing touches on some toying around I’d done earlier, motivated by being able to serve a real and specifically requested use case.  Fun!

Even in this super early phase, this totally works, and is one of many MANY possible tasks that could be setup.

Louise was offline by the time I had things ready to go (being 7 hours ahead of me in the UK I suppose I might’ve suspected that) but the next day I’d got confirmation that the setup was a working success.

CoachAccountable as a Zapier app is now in invite-only mode.  Again, flying blind as I am (and more to the point, not myself chomping at the bit with specific integration needs), I’m leaving it up to users of both Zapier & CoachAccountable to guide in what would be useful, and the functionality of what can be easily setup via Zapier will grow and evolve in accordance with requests.

For example, two weeks ago another coach said this:

I’d love to have some rules fire when a new coaching client is added. Like connecting on LinkedIn, Facebook, maybe tie it in to a service that ships a card or brownies.

Automated brownie sending to new clients–nice!  I take it as proof positive that there’s a lot of room for creative ideas in this space.

If you’re a Zapier user and would like to link your CoachAccountable account to it for whatever purposes of automation with other systems you use, you can!  You’ll not find CA in the Zapier app directory yet, but you can connect it via this invite link:

https://zapier.com/developer/invite/29519/b40a6c79d29336524e270178ecba2252/

My thanks to Louise for being the well-timed push that got me finally really rolling on this front!

• Yay!!!!! :-) THANK YOU! :-)
• My clients have been asking for this for years. It looks great, you’re a champ! :)
• Lovin it so far!
• LOVE IT! CONGRATULATIONS! I can’t wait to dig deeper but it looks great!

Thus were the communications sent to me from the community of CA users within the first 6 minutes of my announcement that CA Mobile was ready to go.

Indeed this one’s been wanted for a while.  CoachAccountable has worked from day 1 on smartphones so I deliberately let a mobile version slide as a priority.  Having a second, complimentary version entails substantial overhead to maintaining and evolving the system, and so it was net quite useful to not have that while I grew CA in other ways, ways that made more fundamental expansions to what CA was capable of.

(That, and dragging my feet on this front has meant a much improved “least common denominator” of device that I needed to support over what it would have been a year or two ago, making the released product both nicer and easier to build & maintain.)

But I’ll grant that pinching and zooming about is clunky, especially when all you want to do is mark an Action complete or report on a Metric.  And since we coaches traffic heavily in the realm of getting folks to do that which they weren’t about to do of their own accord, ANYTHING that reduces barriers to acting on our coaching is bound to be a win.

Thus CA Mobile’s time has come.  Let’s take a look!

When you log in as coach you’ll first see a listing of your clients along with a summary of what’s new:

(The “Appointments Outlook” button takes you to a succinct listing of all of your upcoming appointments in the system, as well as any pending requests for you to accept or decline.)

Tapping on a client takes you to their respective client page, wherein you see a detailed listing of what’s new and recent, broken into sections:

Tap on any section to be brought to greater detail of that section.  See for example Actions:

Most items in a listing (for example the listing of Actions seen above) can be swiped to reveal controls: swiping right reveals buttons for common commands that can be done (like unmarking an Action done, or deleting it).  Swiping left reveals a button by which to view comments on a given item (for those items that support it, like Actions, Worksheets, etc.).

Here’s what Metrics look like:

Since hovering doesn’t apply on mobile, you tap a given data point to see the details and any comment.  Tap again to hid it.  If the graph is looking to squished on your upright device, rotating it 90 degrees will have it expand to fill the additional horizontal space.

For this initial release, CA Mobile allows your clients to do pretty much everything they’re allowed to do, and for you as coach to do pretty much everything you can do with client, like making action plans, scheduling appointments and assigning worksheets.  (Heck, though I don’t recommend it, you can even create new form-based worksheets from within CA Mobile!)

(Let’s be clear: this is a squashed mess here, so I say edit complex worksheets on your smartphone at your own peril!  Tip: to edit a form input in a worksheet, do a double tap on it, and if that doesn’t work, a touch hold for one second will.)

Here’s the My Account page, which allows you and your clients to update personal info, including your head shot (no excuses now for your clients to not upload their own, given doing so can be as simple as taking a selfie on their smartphone camera):

And finally the logout screen, which in addition to letting you log out gives you the option to switch to any other accounts you may have linked within CA (assuming there are any), and a button to jump you back to the desktop version of CA for whatever reason (nice if you need to do anything that’s not yet supported by CA Mobile).

I’ll grant grouping all of these things together is a fairly loose take on what the phrase “log out” means, but really this is all the stuff of jumping out of one context and into another.

Getting in to CA Mobile

Accessing CA Mobile is as simple as logging in from the regular login screen a smaller device.  When CA detects you logging in from a device that would probably prefer to show CA Mobile, it’ll redirect you accordingly.  (This works the same for your clients.)

It’ll also remember the preference for a given device so that if, say, you or your client click a link into CA from your email you’ll go to the right place, desktop or mobile.  What if CA puts you in the desktop version and you’d rather be in mobile?  You’ll find at the very bottom when logged in a little link to “Go mobile friendly” in all cases, and a bigger one towards the top right when viewing CA on a smaller screen.

And if you’re in CA Mobile and want to jump back to the desktop mode?  Again, that’s always as simple as bringing up the “Log Out” screen and tapping the “Go to the desktop version” button there.

White Labeling and CA Mobile

One of the fun things about CA Mobile is that it can be made to be very “appy”, in that as a White Label branding user you can set an app icon.

App icons are the spiffy little square images that becomes the icon when you do the whole “add to home screen” thing for a given website on your mobile device. Since your clients will probably enjoy to have a home screen shortcut to CA Mobile on their smartphones, it’ll be quite slick indeed to have your branded app be what shows up.

You can set this up by going to your white label branding settings page within CA and finding the new “Custom App Icon” section within.

CA has a nice default icon for a home page app on a smartphone, but it’s kinda fun to have it be your own.  Compare the default versus a custom:

Your custom app logo will probably be more intentionally designed, and the name of your app doesn’t even HAVE to be a witty pun on “CoachAccountable”.

Another perk of White Labeling in this new mobile-friendly era for CA is that the standard login page (which has been remixed to be look and work great on screens of any size) will brand itself according to the white label settings of the account last logged into, meaning that login page can serve nicely as the one your clients regularly visit (you might want to change your Login URL setting to “https://www.coachaccountable.com/login” to take advantage!).

To wit, after being logged into an account with Couch Reclinable, this is what the login screen looks like:

Looking Ahead

So far CA Mobile is a hit with users who’ve tried it.

Groups, Billing, Courses, and Team Dashboard are yet to come, but what’s in place already should be the 90% solution for the regular interactions with CA done by you and your clients.

I’d like to wrap up by sharing the words of one Michael Leahy.  I give his words on this matter a certain special credence, for he has been one of the staunchest demanders of there being a mobile-friendly CA for now nearly two years (so much so that when my wife and I made a bet of whether or not I would have CA Mobile done by 4th quarter 2015, we set his approval as the threshold of sufficient completion).

One hour and 20 minutes into CA Mobile’s release Michael wrote:

John, so far, all I can say is AWESOME!!! I’m really loving’ this!

So I haven’t really spent a lot of time on it yet, and only on my iPhone. Can’t wait to try it out on my iPad. I may never access CA on my laptop again (except for the obvious stuff where I’m doing a lot of document creation or course creation).

…

You’ve far exceeded my expectations! I can’t wait until I see what you come up with re- Groups, Courses, and Team Dashboard.  Again, let me just say in closing that you’ve really blown me out of the water with this new CA Mobile. Exceptional job!!!

With that I’m given hope that CA Mobile was worth the wait.

I’m looking forward to rounding out CA Mobile with the missing parts, and I thank everyone both for their patience with the process as well as their excitement for the result.

Here’s to giving our clients an exceptional experience of being coached by us.

Lordy me, has another year gone by already?

Fresh from the Photoshop I mean bakery.

Indeed!  It’s now been a full 3 years since the public release of CoachAccountable2.0, and what a delightful year.

Year 3 marked Team Edition’s move into real use.  Much like CoachAccountable Basic, Team had little uptake for the first few months of its public existence.  But after that similar stint in obscurity a number of organizations took to using it, and with that real world feedback I continued to refine it.

In a similar vein a few power users pushed the envelope of what they needed CA to be able to do, resulting in support for more complicated, fancy things like Group Courses, Group Item visibility settings, and weaving Project grouping into Course Action items.

Inspired by the needs and structure of some intricate programs offered via CA by power users, CoachAccountable also got Form-based worksheets, which when combined with Metrics and Courses make possible the delivery of some rather sophisticated programs indeed!

Teaching coaches to be better coaches with the benefit of CA was another direction of creative output this year, including videos on how to be an awesome coach with Appointments, Actions, and Metrics, and presented all together in an in-system Tutorial.

Click the “Tutorial” tab on the bottom right when logged in for these lessons.

Here are some of the other fun things that got added in year 3:

1. Sync with your regular calendar to avoid double booking and offer accurate scheduling options.
2. Group Directories to let your group members opt to share contact information.
3. Support for clients to pay your invoices online via Stripe or Authorize.net.
4. A calendar feed for your clients so they’ll keep up on their appointments with you.
5. Whiteboards for general purpose sharing and posting of information.
6. System Email Addresses which are seriously cool but most people have overlooked: post messages and share files with the benefit of CA but do so from your regular email program.
7. And perhaps my favorite, the spelling out of how I run this business known as the Terms of Awesome.

Oh yeah, and there’s an API now.

Way cuter now than when she was sporting the CA onesie.

For me personally, the majority of CA’s third year was marked by the arrival and presence of our daughter, Kira, who was born one month in.  (She had a cameo appearance on this blog earlier, showing off the first ever CoachAccountable merchandise.)

Upon looking back at the list above I’m happy I managed to get as much done as I did, despite the broken sleep and adorable distraction!  Fun fact: both Kira and CA have tripled in size during this year, by weight and customers, respectively.

As CA’s third year comes to a close, I’ve an announcement that I’m very happy to make:

CoachAccountable mobile will be released in September.

It’s been in the works for a while now and coming together beautifully.  This is one of the most requested features for CA, and indeed one of the last major pieces of the system yet to come for it to be truly complete.

While fully functional on any device with a modern web browser, CA as-is takes some pinching and zooming to get around on a smartphone and so could be better.  Mobile means it’ll work great on smartphones for both you and your clients, making regular usage like reporting Metrics and scheduling Appointments super smooth and super practical to do on the go.

My focus with Mobile is to make things in the regular flow of coaching (and being coached) as good as they can be, so I’m keeping the stuff of getting set up (like building Courses and tinkering with configuration options) limited to the desktop version.

Here are a few screenshots.

Login page.  White label branded when appropriate:

Actions.   Swiping on a given Action reveals relevant controls:

Setting up a new client Action:

Client Metrics:

Looking Ahead

The near release of mobile-friendly CA is of course the most immediately exciting thing I have to point to.  You’re probably wondering, will CA be then found in the app stores?  The answer is yes, eventually.  I just haven’t yet worked out what to do about white label customers: it’s straightforward enough to put CA branded as CA into the app store, but submitting and maintaining apps and the approval process is much less tenable for a multitude of customers, and might well raise some ire with the folks at Apple who generally seem pretty keen on careful curating.

More teaching via tutorial videos is on the docket.  After making the well-received trio on Appointments, Actions and Metrics I put others on hold, realizing that there was still much changing in the system and it’s hardly fun to have to redo them (the Appointments tutorial, for example, is already outdated!).

Last year in this space I said I would be creating a CoachAccountable users group and an improved affiliate program.  Those didn’t happen, they probably will this year.  Call it part naivety in my estimation of what I could complete amid the onset of parenthood, and part they got bumped in favor of other things that weren’t then on my radar.

I’ve got work to do to grow the system to better fit more enterprise-y needs: a few times I’ve been asked how well CA would handle 1000+ clients, and the answer is it’ll take some tweaks so as not to be a clunky mess.  But there are still more goodies ahead for smaller coaching businesses as well, such as letting prospective clients schedule themselves for appointments.

All in all it’s been a good year, and I’m excited for the next one.  Growing and evolving this platform continues to be a lot of fun, and my thanks as always to the growing community of coaches and organizations on this journey with me.

Hot on the heels of releasing the ability to have Worksheet answers populate Metrics, I got a question from Laura Watson of Venture Coaching, which asked if a similar thing could be added to support setting up Actions:

I am building a project planning worksheet for my clients. We use this on a quarterly basis to plan personal and professional projects together. The worksheet includes an area for creating action steps.

On the worksheet I’m creating in CA, I will have my clients fill in their action steps using the simple text field. I’m wondering if, at some point, it would be possible to have these action step fields linked to actual actions so we don’t have to enter the data twice.

To that I replied:

Good question, and it’s in many ways a good idea.  On first consideration however the answer is PROBABLY not ever.  The reason is that Actions within CoachAccountable are so much more than just what would be filled out in the single line: in addition to the “what”, CA also tracks the “by when”, reminders, and optionally which project the action falls under.

Since the complete data entry process for a given action is so much more complex, I doubt I’ll support having worksheet inputs pipe into Actions (to wit, setting up Worksheets to pipe into Metrics with a comment is complex enough to get right when creating a worksheet template! :)

Still, perhaps at some point I’ll allow simple action creation with just the what and by when, perhaps a date picker type of input to be put into the form-based worksheets.  It’s good food for thought!

She thanked me for the reply, and liked the idea using the worksheet for the “what” part and having clients fill out the rest in the Actions tab.

With a little more time to mull on it, I added the following in reply:

Since writing you another thought does occur to me: you MIGHT consider an alternate approach in which you in your worksheet prompt your clients to more literally make their action plan, rather than type in a few one-liners that don’t have the same sort of supported reality.  After all, Actions are living things with due dates and alerts, and optionally (ideally) have project-based organization with progress meters which satisfyingly fill up as things are marked off.  By contrast, it’s an uphill battle to get clients to go back and read an already completed worksheet.

So you could skip the double-data entry, by preferring instead that your clients make actual Action plans to just typing into a worksheet.  It won’t be that much an interruption as it’s guaranteed they’ll be logged in already, and 3 Action Projects will be perfect to organize the 3 Benchmarks.  Extra bonus?  A worksheet once submitted CAN’T be edited unless you send it back their way, but Actions can be added to and/or modified at any time as a quarter progresses. :)

I was honored to get back a simple reply:

Great ideas, thanks for this!

And I was honored not just because I was able to be helpful and not just because I avoided putting another new feature on my to-do list (both super cool, don’t get me wrong).  But rather because here was an established way of doing things, and there exists within CA a way to do it better if only by being willing to restructure a little.

More generally speaking, it occurs to me that any established part of your coaching style is worth revisiting to see if it can’t be tailored to how CoachAccountable works.  Not for CoachAccountable’s sake, because who cares, right?  But for the sake of making your coaching better in ways that would not otherwise be possible.

Sometimes that takes shifting out of an established way of doing things, disrupting inertia in favor of giving your clients a better experience.  Don’t hesitate to ask if you could use a little guidance in how to bring your style of coaching to life with the tools of CA–with a little creativity there are some real wins to be had.

A few weeks ago a CA user, about a month in on his Team Edition account, sent me a support request note that simply read:

Can I hire you or someone on your team to build out our system?

To this I replied:

Depends on what you need.  In an ideal world I would be able to get you guys up and going with an hour or two of collaboration, and I’m happy to do that gratis.  If you’re looking for more than that I’d have to see what exactly you need.

Give me a call whenever convenient today and I’ll see what I can do to get you sorted!

We were talking shortly thereafter, and while I like to think that just a little direction over the phone is all anyone needs to set up even really sophisticated programs, it was after about 20 minutes I was asked if I could come out to work with the team directly, next week, if possible.  “That would be ideal.  We’re at a breaking point with scaling up our programs and we really need to nail our setup to have things go smoothly.”

I quick checked my schedule and confirmed that an overnight would be alright with the Mrs. (‘cuz you know, we’ve got a little one and I don’t want to ride roughshod over my wife being saddled with full-on Kira duty), and then sent back the thumbs up.  Within minutes my flight and hotel were booked, and my day rate was paid, half-day plus a half-day.

This was my first taste of doing business with Garrett White of Wake Up Warrior.  I immediately liked his style.

Garrett is thoroughly tatted, decidedly cut, and has a booming voice and personality.  Contrary to any stereotypes that the preceding adjectives might’ve conjured in your head, he is a fellow who meditates daily, constantly builds up the people around him, and signs his program emails “Love and light,”.  For a taste of his style and intensity go watch his 4 minute introductory riff about his programs.

I arrived at John Wayne Airport on a Wednesday early afternoon and was immediately picked up in the ‘Warrior wagon’, a big ol’ van black van decked out with 6-foot-tall Wake Up Warrior insignia.  Jeremy, Garrett’s Chief Marketing Officer who picked me up, explained this was for taking participants in their Warrior Weeks out for intensive, day-long programs.  Off we headed to Maro Wood Grill in Laguna Beach to get started proper with lunch.

Garrett welcomed me with a big hug and a handshake.  Over lunch we got to talking about our respective paths which got us to where we are in the coaching world, and how CoachAccountable was poised to be instrumental to their continued growth.  The key thing was to automate the systems they already had in place (largely a patchwork of Wufoo forms, Schedule Once appointments, and coaching call & webinar recordings)  so that they could continue to scale without being spread too thin on the coaching side of things.

After lunch we got to it back in their office.  Garrett began by outlining on the whiteboards the current weekly flow of their 90-day programs: the touch points, the interactions, the assignments, all of it.

“This will be fun,” I declared when everything was written up, “CoachAccountable as is can do pretty much everything you need.  Fire up your account and let’s get to it.”

Garrett and Jeremy both had their laptops out and logged in to CA, and took turns plugging in to the wall mounted flat screen by which I could oversee their work and backseat drive.  “Click here, okay now go over there and set that up.”  I barked orders with impunity, assured that bossing them around and guiding the setup of their systems was the very reason I was brought out.

We covered a lot of ground, including:

• Setting up availability and the appropriate Appointment types for the coaches to manage their weekly one-on-ones and on-demand sessions, including setting up the right pre-session worksheets to be sent to program participants automatically prior to appointment, the so-called “One-on-One Hot Seat” form.  This was to eliminate the pain of crisscrossing schedules and participants forgetting or not being prepared for their calls.  The pre-session worksheet was a nice touch to make things easier and save time, and the team being able to see all of the coaches’ appointment schedules in one place was a win as well.
• Setup daily checklist Worksheets to record numbers into Metrics using the newfangled ability to do so.  This served to make tracking of the so-called “Core-4” practices as frictionless as possible, a key component to instilling the core practices taught by the program.
• Setup a Course to manage the 3 worksheets per day that participants are to fill out.  This served to both make the guys more likely to actually do the work, and eliminate the serious weekly pain of tracking down who’s done what and getting on the case of those with incompletions.
• Created Groups so that members could have transparency and accountability among each other for their key Metrics, thereby eliminating the pain of having one of the staff spend hours each week painstakingly compiling all the stats into an Excel spreadsheet.  That group members can each see each other’s stats has the nice side effect of creating a healthy sort of pissing content about who’s keeping up the best, and a positive pressure to not fall behind.
• Experimented with daisy-chained course items (e.g complete the first worksheet and then you are assigned the second one, complete the second one and the third one finally goes out) and decided that could be a fantastic way to get participants to actually fill out ALL of the assignments each day (“There are some guys who like to fill out their numbers each day but never both with the Power Focus and the Positive Focus worksheets.”  The solution?  Make the numbers Worksheet follow the completion of the other two.)

On the morning of the second day Garrett invited me to meditate with him and Jeremy before we got going, or if it wasn’t my thing to just hang out while they did their 20 minutes.  I was happy to join, and felt remarkably clear headed and refreshed at the end.

I saw wisdom in that detour prior to commencing work.  “Wow, good one Garrett,” I said as we got going, “Since I’m very much a brain worker, I think you’re going to get more of your money’s worth by taking out that 20 minutes.”

“Of course!  You do much better work when your mind’s all settled.”

What a delightful working environment.

On day 2 I whipped out my own laptop and got to making a few improvements to the system in response to perspective gained watching these power users do their thing.  Jeremy was having fun making daisy-chained sequences in the Course builder, and since that was to be a daily set I improved Course Item cloning to clone daisy-chained items as well.

Since they were building out a 90-day course with very regular, repeating components, I also made it so that course item cloning can be done a multiple of times at once, making it a very quick matter to build out a repeating course timeline spanning months.  “Hey Jeremy, hit refresh.  Okay, now click the little clone icon.”

I don’t make a regular habit of coding on the fly for an audience, but man is it satisfying to build out improvements in real time and have them be immediately useful.  It’s a sort of feedback that with a web-based business I seldom get to enjoy.

Wake Up Warrior is indeed one of those power users who push the limits of the system and cause it to become better in response.  Thanks to them, the rest of the CoachAccountable users get to enjoy the following improvements:

• Individual Group Members can work at an independent paces on daisy-chained Group Course items.
• Team admins can directly update the message templates for other coaches.
• Notifications of new items sent out in response to completing prior items are delivered right within the system when a client is logged in, rather than always defaulting to email.
• A course participant can be jumped directly into any point in the course other than Day 1.
• The display of dispatch and due dates for assignments is more logical in the course builder.
• Clicking on a Worksheet in the Up Next listing brings that worksheet right up for working on.
• Public-style calendar feeds are now correctly understood and used for carving out availability for appointment scheduling.
• Several subtle bugs fix and subtle usability tweaks that just make the system nicer and more robust.

All in all the trip was a real win.  Contrary to my earlier belief that just a little time on the phone would do the trick to get them going and making the most of the platform, my time spent guiding Garrett and his team was received as a huge boon to their efforts leveraging CA.  Indeed, I was able to talk them through a lot more of the nuances of how to coach and how to setup the structures than I thought I could fill in an hour (or even two) on the telephone.

Garrett even casually insisted on paying my day rate for a second day, even though our agreement had been for just one day.  “I mean, you’re here a second day, taking this time away from your family and all that, right?”  Can’t argue that logic when so politely applied.

For my sake there was something deeply satisfying about being among people who are benefiting from and excited about my creation.  “We’ve got this great software”, Jeremy mused at one point aloud to Garrett, “and the guy who created it is sitting right here beside us.”  Goodness it’s nice to get out, a nice bit of perspective to underscore what I’m doing with CA and the impact it makes.

(Yeesh, that last paragraph was quite the pat on my own back, right?  Seriously though, it’s fun to be onsite.)

When it was nearly time for me to head back to the airport Garrett thanked me for being there and headed off to do his next thing.  As Jeremy and I left the Wake Up Warrior office it finally occurred to me to get a picture of us, but Garrett was by then gone.  Jeremy was a sport an took one of me outside the office–I swear it’s legit and not just me doing a selfie from the sidewalk as an uninvited guest. :)

I look forward to seeing how things unfold for Wake Up Warrior, their coaches, programs and participants.  Two weeks in and I’m told the new system is already a hit, well loved and a most welcome improvement over the old.