The CoachAccountable Blog

If you use CoachAccountable to manage your appointment scheduling with clients (and this is highly recommended, by the way) you can have the appointments that you schedule with a given client pipe directly into his or her online calendar (e.g. iCal, Outlook, or Google Calendar).

This is because, in addition to calendar feeds of all appointments available for coaches, CoachAccountable offers a calendar feed for clients consisting of their appointments with you.  The setup to do this is a one-time step.  Tell your clients to find their listing of Appointments with you the next time they login (found in the column on the left), and beneath that listing they’ll see a button: “My calendar feed…”

When your client clicks the button, they’ll be given instructions on how to add their appointments with you to their online calendar of choice.

What they have for their calendar feed is exactly what you have as coach, so if you’ve added your appointment feed to your online calendar you’ll be able to talk them through the process.

Once they’ve added their appointment feed to their online calendar, any appointments you (or they) setup within CoachAccountable will automatically appear in their online calendar.

This is a nice convenience and a powerful way to integrate your coaching into the rest of their life and schedule.  Seeing their coaching appointments with you amid all of their other happenings in life provides a nice reminder to make the coaching work they are doing a priority, and might even cause them to complete one or two more assignments prior to your next session.

So let your clients know as they’re getting started with you on the platform: add the feed of their appointments with you to their online calendar of choice, and they’ll have their current and future sessions with you effortlessly added into their schedule.

Courses within CoachAccountable allow a coach to design a timeline progression of materials and assignments, to be delivered automatically according to the schedule to course participants.

Among items that can be delivered are Actions: assignments of what to do and by when, plus helpful reminders, e.g. “Read Chapter 3 of the Workbook, due 2 days from now at 5:00pm with a text reminder to be sent 24 hours prior to the deadline”.

Action Projects are a way to group separate Actions as contributing steps to the overarching goal or milestone.  With their progress meter and summary display they do a great job of visually organizing the bigger picture of tasks which your clients are undertaking.

You can now bake project structure right into your Course Actions, and CA will do the work of creating those Action Projects for your course participants.

Here’s what the setup looks like on the Course builder:

Action assignments in your courses can be freestanding or part of a project.

Just type in the name of the project that a given Action should be filed under, and assign a weight (i.e. a value of how big or important is this action relative to others in the project) and CA handles the rest.  A given Course could entail Actions which fall under multiple projects, or all under the same one.  When typing in a project name, CoachAccountable suggests Action Project names which you’ve used elsewhere in your course so that it’s easy to ensure that they all line up.

As a Course with Action Projects progresses, those projects are automatically created and tucked away in your participant’s Actions tab:

The weights set originally in the Course builder determine how much of the progress meter gets filled as Actions are marked done.

When you’ve got big, complex courses whose Action assignments logically build towards one or more overall fronts, partitioning them off into Action Projects is a fantastic way to organize the experience for your participants.

Courses allow a coach to define a timeline of assignments, materials, and communications to be given to a given course participant over a span of days, weeks, or months.

Groups allow a coach to put 2 or more coaching clients together and allow them to jointly participate in Group Actions, Group Metrics, and Group Worksheets, wherein each group member does their thing which counts towards the overall progress of the group (for example Group Metrics, wherein each person reports their number which contributes to the overall Group Metric, computed as either the sum or average of individual performance).

These two tools for structuring sophisticated coaching programs used to be completely separate: Courses could be taken only by individual clients and their progress and results were kept completely separate, and there was no such thing as a Group going through a Course all together with shared results.

With Group Courses these structures for program delivery can be combined: Groups of coaching clients can embark together on the same course, and all items of the course will be delivered as group items.  Say Day 1 of a course entails an Action assignment to call on five prospects.  Members of a group taking that course would each have that assignment, and could all see the overall progress of everyone in the group, i.e. who is done and who is not.

Like regular Group items, everyone can see everyone else’s progress and make comments.

Starting up a Group Course is as simple as choosing a Group to be the participant in your Course:

In addition to individual clients, entire Groups can be put into a Course.

When choosing to put a Group into a Course, you can indicate exactly which members of the Group will be doing it, handy in cases when one or more members will not be joining in:

Choose all or some of the group members to be part of the Course.

Group Courses versus Individual Ones

Group Courses are fully backwards-compatible: any day-based course that was originally setup to be delivered to individual clients can also be delivered to groups, and vice-versa.  So when it comes to designing a course, be it for Groups or for individuals, the process is the same.

That said, you might spin off a clone of a course originally designed for individual, and tweak the wording to directly address the group setting of your participants.  For example:

Oh yeah, did I mention you can make course items that get sent out only after everyone has completed the previous assignment?

Blending Group and Individual Components

Depending on whether you put individuals or a Group into a Course, the entire track will be all individual items or Group items.  But sometimes it’s not appropriate to have all parts of a course be collectively shared.

In these cases you can create 2 separate Courses which are meant to be run in parallel: the Group course for the shared components, and the Individual course for assignments that should be kept private to the respective individuals taking the course.  To set the course in motion with both its group and individual components, put the group in the Group Course, and the respective individuals all into the individual Course.

Managing Group Course Progress

Just like with individual courses, you can see an overview of how the group of course participants are doing:

Like with individuals, clicking the “Modify this course participation” button allows you to pause, rewind, fast forward or altogether stop the course progression. You can also add or remove group members.

Group Courses are a fantastic way to put a collection of people through a standardized program, and have them benefit from the joint accountability and transparent results as the program unfolds.  Like Group assignments given out in an ad hoc fashion, the open transparency is powerfully motivating to individuals who are a part of the group.

As you might imagine, no one wants to be the last person to mark an action complete.

Since its release, even WAY back in the 1.0 days, CoachAccountable has allowed coaches to accept invoice payments online via PayPal.  It felt like the time was right to open this up to a wider range of payment processors.

Now coaches can offer their clients a way to pay their invoices online with Stripe or Authorize.net.

Not affiliated, respective trademarks, etc. etc.. :)

Unlike PayPal, both of the new processors allow a client to pay the invoice right within CoachAccountable, as opposed to bouncing off to another site to complete the transaction:

As an added convenience your clients can choose to have the system remember their credit card for future use.  When clients have one or more credit cards on file, this is what the invoice paying process looks like:

Payment is super simple with a credit card on file.

Managing one’s stored credit cards looks like this:

For identifying purposes, CA remembers the card type, last four digits, and expiration.

For those of you who are mindful of the security concerns of storing the credit card information of others (and hopefully that’s everyone who’s looking to take payments online) both Stripe and Authorize.net offer systems for offloading the storage of such sensitive information.  As is the case for coach subscription payment information, the CoachAccountable server never stores your client’s credit card details (beyond identifying bits like last 4 digits and expiration), and instead keeps a unique token which allows it to perform transactions on your behalf.

This, coupled with the security measures already in place, makes CoachAccountable a PCI compliant system for handling your clients’ invoice payments online.

Setting up CoachAccountable to process payments on your behalf is simple.  Just go to My CA >> My System >> Online Invoice Payments and pick your processor of choice.   When you have an Authorize.net account it is as simple as entering in your API Login and your transaction key:

Find these details within your Authorize.net account under Settings.

And if you’d like to use Stripe, it’s just a matter of clicking the “Connect” button and authorizing CoachAccountable on the Stripe side of things.  You can even get yourself a new account on the fly through this process.

I’m excited to offer a more streamlined payment experience for coaching clients than hopping off to PayPal, and moreover the ability to safely store client payment information for later charges opens up a few interesting things for down the road.

I suspect I’ll add support for a few more payment processors according to demand for it, so if there’s one that you’d like to see supported by CoachAccountable, let it be known!

If you work with coaching groups that are highly collaborative, it can be nice for your group members to be able to connect with one another directly.  With CoachAccountable Groups you can make a directory of group member information to enable just that.

From the settings tab of a given Group page you can find the controls and options for setting up your Group’s directory:

By default the directory for a given Group is not enabled.  With a click you can switch to an opt-in directory (meaning each group member can choose whether or not to list themselves, and what information they which to share) or an all-inclusive one (meaning each group member is included, and you as coach choose which information is shared).

When enabled, the directory is visible to your clients by clicking the “Directory” button from their Group page:

What’s especially nice about this Group directory is that it auto-updates: client information is pulled directly from that client’s user account, meaning if members change their information like getting a new email address or adding a work number, the directory is automatically updated to reflect that new info.

Group Directories are just one more way to keep your group members connected with each other and thus more engaged with the group coaching process.  Enjoy!

Metrics: one of the most powerful parts of CoachAccountable, allowing you to do things in your coaching that are otherwise not possible with just spreadsheets, email, or even online shared docs.

They’re also somewhat complicated and thus tend to be intimidating thing to learn.

This 15-minute tutorial video will teach you the ins-and-outs of setting up Metrics for your clients, and teach you how to integrate them into your coaching style:

If you don’t use Metrics in your coaching yet, perhaps now is the time to start.

For reference, here’s the narration transcript:

CoachAccountable Metrics provide a tangible, results-based component to your coaching.  This makes progress evident for your clients, and gives you both real-world insights that can be acted upon.

Though the most complicated part of the system, the learning curve is worth it.  I’m going to get you comfortable with using Metrics by illustrating the setup of a few examples.

Metrics are always something that is attached to a client: a matter of so-and-so is tracking such-and-such for a period of so many days, weeks, or months.  As such let’s go visit our Demo Client, and setup a few Metrics for him.

Go to the Metrics tab and click “Create a Metric” to bring up the Metric adder.

Now here we see a lot, but it looks harder than it is: all the setup of a Metric really amounts to is telling the system WHAT we’re going to be tracking, WHEN do we want to be tracking, and WHAT target are we are aiming for.

So let’s go through with a few of these.

For our first one, say you’re a business coach helping owners to increase their monthly revenue.  Say your client, Dave, has a business that cleared $17,000 last month, and the game you’ve come up with together is to get that number up to $20,000 for the coming month.  To make this a manageable game, wherein Dave can see when he’s falling behind and when he’s getting ahead, he wants to track the revenue each business day.  Let’s setup a Metric for this.

We’ll start by giving it a name: “October Revenue” seems appropriate.

Then the unit, as in “what ARE these numbers that Dave will be entering”.  For our example it’s dollars: as in when Dave reports 100 for this Metric on a given day, that means “100 dollars”.

Now on to the date span, or, “over what range of dates are we going to be tracking this Metric?”  This is October revenue, so we’ll have it start on October 1st and end on October 31st.

Note these controls in the middle here: they’re an alternate way of specifying the end date.  As you change this here, that there updates, and vice-versa.  You can specify your date range in whichever way makes the most sense.

Now “Frequency”, which allows us to specify the schedule on which we’d like our client to report.  We’ve got a number of options here, and for the purpose of this example the “every weekday, Monday through Friday” is fitting.

Now data entry.  Since Dave will be reporting daily revenue numbers and we’re looking to accumulate those daily revenues towards our monthly goal of $20,000, we’re going to pick “cumulative” for this one.  (Don’t worry, in the coming examples I’ll better illustrate the difference between these two options.)

Next, target.  We’ve got an end target for the month of $20,000.   CoachAcountable here kindly tells us that that means an average of $933 per weekday is what will be required to meet that goal.  As such we should set our starting goal to that $933, because a day 1 revenue of that amount means we’ll be right on target.

For this metric higher numbers are better, so this option is the one to pick.

Now the reminder.  Metric reminders are the real magic to getting regular tracking to happen.  Delivered regularly to your clients, Metric reminders are the gentle yet persistent force that keeps awareness (and thus performance) on this Metric front-and-center over the long haul.

This automation is nice, because you yourself reaching out in this way on a regular basis is apt to be off-putting or unnerving to your client, not to mention time consuming for you.

Best of all about reminders is that your clients can respond to them directly to track their numbers, thus making the process as minimally bothersome as possible.

So while you can forgo reminders for your clients, I recommend they stay in place.  Pick the time of day that’s most fitting for your client to receive the reminder: ideally a time when they’ll be in a place to respond right back with the number for the day.

Since we’re tracking business revenue here, the end of the business day sounds good.  Like everything else about a Metric, this time can be tweaked later by you or your client.

Then pick what days it should be sent.  This first option, “on days when a value should be entered” is generally ideal: that keeps reminders right in step with the reporting frequency you’ve set for the Metric.

If your client has a US or Canadian cell number entered you’ll find the option here to send reminder via email or text. Emails are especially nice in this regard, because when reporting via email your client gets an email reply right back, containing the updated graph of their progress.

Text replies work almost as nice, but there is a quick word of caution regarding these: unlike emails, which can each be responded to in turn, there can be some confusion if your clients get text reminders for multiple Metrics.  Your client’s replies will be interpreted as a reply only to the most recent text message sent.  So if you go with text reminders, you or your clients will want to spread out the sending times, to allow an ample window for replying to each.

Right then, so that’s our Metric setup.  Click “Create” and we’re done, the new Metric is all set in Motion and ready to go.  Starting October 1 Dave will get a regular reminder to track his number for the day, and over time the record of his month’s accumulating revenue will build.  You’ll both be able to see how he’d doing against his target, and can use this to inform your coaching efforts.

Let’s explore Metrics further with another example.  Say you and Dave have created a long range goal to get his business up to $40,000 per month over the next year.  So there is to track what monthly revenue actually is during that time. Let’s setup a Metric to do just that.

We’ll call this one “Monthly Revenue”.

Dollars again is our unit of measure.

We’ll start October 1st, and go for 12, months.

For Frequency we’ll track Monthly, on the first.  Because different months have different last days of the month, our convention will be to record on the first of each month what total revenue was for the month that ended the day before.

For data entry, we’ll go normal: we’re concerned about what the number is for each month, and NOT doing anything like a running total across the months.

For our target, Dave’s business is starting at $17,000.  Our end goal is to be at $40,000.  Again, meet or exceed is where it’s at.

A similar reminder will do, maybe this time at 10am to install a habit of Dave reviewing his monthly numbers in the morning.

And that’s it.

Over the months Dave will report on the 1st, and create a clear record of how things are progressing (or not) towards the intended goal.  If you do a monthly call with Dave this Metric will a fantastic reference point as you both dissect what’s working and what’s not.

Let’s do another one.  Say now that our protagonist Dave also wants to introduce a work life balance.  He’d like to make a habit of going for a little walk, everyday.  At least for 10 minutes, but more is great.

Let’s setup a Metric for this.

Name, let’s get poetic and call it “A daily breath of fresh air”

Units, we’ll be measuring in “minutes”.

Let’s set this up for a month, starting today.   That’ll give him some time to get into the habit, and if he loves it or hates it, he can extend or cut it short as needed.

Frequency will be every day.

Data entry will be regular: we’re just looking for the 10 minutes or more every day, no need to bother with a running grand total.

Target will be 10 minutes to start, and 10 minutes to end.  That means for the whole month we just care about getting 10 minutes or more of walking.

Indeed as is often the case, we say that more is better.

If Dave wants to make this a morning ritual, 8:30am might be a great time to set this.  This will remind him to take his walk if he hasn’t already, and be easy to record while the number is fresh on his mind.

That’s it, Dave’s good to go.  His auto-nag system is poised to get him into a nice new habit.

So far in these 3 examples we’ve seen 2 types of Metrics: first, a cumulative: one that kept a running total during our time of tracking, and then two examples of a “measurement” Metric: wherein every data point is regular measurement of something.

There are two other types I want to introduce you to: rating Metrics and Binary Metrics.

Let’s say we’d like Dave to weigh in once a week on how he feels everything is going in his business, something like a scale of 1-to-10.  Let’s set that up.

We’ll call it “Overall satisfaction with business, from 1-to-10”

“Points” is our made up unit for this.

Let’s track it for the next 2 months.

Once a week.  Now say we’d like to have him weigh on Fridays, but notice the weekly option here says “on Wednesdays”.  The reason is because our Metric starts on a Wednesday.  To make that Friday, we just need to make the Metric start on a Friday.  Like so.

Regular data entry,

And for our Target: let’s say 7 is dividing line between “things are overall okay” and “things are overall NOT okay”.  So 7 to start, and 7 to end.

A late afternoon reminder sounds fitting for this, a good time to report in on a Friday, and with that we’re done.

The 7-to-7 target means a clear line between when we’re in the green and when we’re in the red: a nice visual cue suggesting that satisfaction should generally be high, and if it’s not, that’s ripe for some coaching.  Ratings metrics are great because they allow you to take something subjective, like how your clients are feeling about this thing or that, and from that give you a foothold into coaching and influencing these important intangibles.

Even if your coaching is strictly business, or otherwise just “all about the numbers”, I recommend you do at least one of these with your clients.  It can even be as simple as “How is the coaching process for you this week?”.  Giving your clients a simple, non-intrusive means to weigh in on THAT can do wonders to open up honest feedback.  It’s your opportunity to keep your clients motivated, engaged, and happy to keep working with you.

Okay, final type of Metric: Binary.  In many cases it’s useful to track regular practices in terms of a simple “hey, did you do this, or did you not?”  This is where binary Metrics come into play.

Let’s say we’d like Dave to adopt a regular practice of checking in with his staff 3 times a week, on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays.  Let’s set this up as a binary Metric.

Call it “Regular check-ins with staff”

“Check ins” will be our unit, and we’ll expect that for any given day the number will be one or zero: he either did or didn’t check in with his staff.

We’ll pick our frequency option, Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays.

Regular data entry,

And for target values we’re going to do .5 and .5.  This is weird, but it’ll all make sense when you see data filling in, so bear with.

Set as suitable reminder, and we’re done.

Now for a binary Metric there is to let Dave know that he should report a ONE if he did it, and a ZERO if he didn’t.  Here’s how the Metric plays out with that convention.

I say do a .5 target flat line because that makes the ones, “yes I did it and that’s a good thing”, firmly in the green; and zeros, the “oops I forgot” days firmly in the red.  Visually, both coach and client can see streaks and patterns of keeping up or falling off.

So those are the 4 types of Metrics.  Just for practice, let’s rattle off 2 more.  My aim is for you to be comfortable enough to quickly set these up for your clients in no time at all.  So let’s see how fast we can go.

Say Dave wants to lose 10 pounds over the next two months.  He weighs 224 right now.

So we have “weight”, “lbs”, starting today for 2, months.

A weigh in every day.

Regular data entry.

A target which starts at 224, and an end goal of 214.

Since weight loss is the goal we want to “get at or below” the target value.

A reminder to weigh in at 8am every morning.

Done.

Okay, last example.  Play along and see if you can’t guess how to do this as I go.  Dave can do 20 pushups in a single set right now, but wants to get that number up to 50 over the course of a month.  To give himself time to recover and rebuild, he’s going to track it every other day.   Here we go.

Single set push ups.

Push ups.

Every other day.

Regular.

20, working to 50.

More is better.

Early evening reminder.

There we have it.  That’s the whole world of setting up Metrics.  Hopefully now far less intimidating than it looked when we started, there’s a lot of flexibility here.  The best part is that once you’ve set up a Metric or two for your clients, they themselves tend to quickly get it, meaning with little training on your part they’ll be able to create their own.

It’s a very good thing if you can get your clients interested in creating and managing their own Metrics: that sort of self-determination is a very positive indicator of their drive to get the most out of your coaching.

There’s another dimension to Metrics that makes them so much more than just raw numbers, and that is comments.  When your clients record their numbers on a regular basis, be it while logged into the system or by replying to reminders, they can annotate those numbers with comments.

A simple, one-liner can reveal so much about a particular result, and taken together, a series of comments tell an insightful story about what’s driving those results: winning strategies, common derailments, effects of mood and momentum.

As such I can’t stress enough: TELL your clients how important it is that they leave comments.  Just a quick one liner about the why, or how, or whatever’s going on that’s contributing to how the Metric is playing out that day, week or month.

Let them know that it may seem obvious or trite in the moment, but that those little notes will eventually be valuable insights when looking back one, two, three months down the road.

And let them know that those little notes also give YOU, as coach, useful insights by which to coach them better.

So let your clients know: leave little comments on the Metrics they report on.  You’ll both be glad they did.

 

Once you’ve got a few Metrics set up, you can arrange them by priority using the drag icon here. If you have Metrics that are rarely reported on, or not currently important for some other reason, you can collapse them by clicking this arrow icon, and tidy up the space. Uncollapse a Metric by clicking the arrow again.

You and your clients can always edit the details of a Metric by clicking this edit icon. Reporting dates, the target, and even the reminder details can all be tweaked. At the bottom here note this little section on embedding. Embedding a Metric means to put it on display somewhere else on the web. This is nice to showcase results gotten within your coaching, or to share client results with interested third parties, like a manager or head of HR.

Now for you as coach, there are a few other things you’ll want to manage while overseeing your client’s Metrics.  During your quick review on a particular client prior to a coaching session, you’ll want to always eyeball the Metrics and pay attention to the most recent happenings.

Taking note of what’s new and how things are going allows you to thoughtfully dive right in.  When things are in a slump, you can get yourself prepared to make suggestions on what might make a difference going forward.  When things are headed in the right direction, you’ll know that too and be ready to further guide however is fitting to the situation.

And when some goal is turning out to be utterly unrealistic, you’ll need to note that as well and be prepared to intervene: you can save your clients from a demoralizing and increasingly hopeless game, and get them back on track to a more empowering and feasible one.

In short, the awareness that Metrics provide is your access to giving on-point and insightful guidance, so take advantage.

Now that you know how to set them up, and how to coach with them, take a few minutes to think about what sort of Metrics your clients could be tracking.  I HIGHLY recommend that you have your clients tracking at least one or two, because it makes such a big difference in how engaged they are.  Even if there’s nothing quantitative about the coaching you do, at very least a rating Metric for weighing in on happiness will be a useful component of your coaching, and you can always do a binary Metric to instill a new good habit.

So think on it: Metrics may be a little outside of your usual coaching style, but you won’t regret adding them in.

To recap:

• You can track virtually anything using one of the four types of Metrics
• Practice setting up a few to get past the learning curve.
• Think about what kind of Metrics you could have your clients tracking, even just “How is coaching going for you? on a scale of 1 to 10” is a great starting point.
• Use the insights collected by Metrics to inform your coaching and strategies.

Do this and CoachAccountable will be doing its part to make you an awesome coach through Metrics.

If that was a bit of a whirlwind, here’s a helpful walkthrough of the Four Types of Metrics in CoachAccountable.

Handled the basics ok and ready to move on to some more advanced Metrics Mania?

• Pipe in answers from Worksheets to automagically create the data for your Metric
• Foster collaboration (or friendly competition) using Group Metrics
• Share your client’s Metrics and other aspects of the coaching program with a third party

Know your clients’ results will take off once you start measuring their gains? Sign up for our free 30-day trial and watch those green graphs grow!

CoachAccountable allows your coaching clients to schedule themselves for appointments right into your calendar.  By setting your weekly availability, you tell CA when, in a typical week, you are open to receiving appointment requests from clients:

But of course things come up.  Sometimes you have a dentist appointment at 11am on a Monday, and so you need CoachAccountable to not offer that slot to your clients for booking.

For a long time now this could be done by manually specifying these exceptional occasions, like so:

Just let CA know when you’re not available, and it will subtract out those times.

Now by popular request you can pipe a live feed of your calendar events into CoachAccountable, letting the system know directly when you have times that should thus be made unavailable for appointment scheduling with your clients.

Adding a calendar is as simple as finding it’s private URL within your calendaring software of choice (not all do, but many of the popular ones, like Google Calendar and Apple iCloud do) and pasting it in to CA:

You can add up to 3 external calendars this way.  When done, event data pulled from these one or more calendars will be used to remove options for your appointment scheduling availability.

The system will even alert you when you’re about to schedule an appointment that conflicts with something found in your calendar:

Ah, right! Fishing!

With this addition CoachAccountable calendar scheduling data now travels two ways: you can pipe your CA appointments into your scheduling software of choice (provided it supports subscribing to calendars via URL) so as to see your entire schedule there, and you can pipe your typical calendar of events into CA to prevent both yourself and your clients from causing booking conflicts when scheduling appointments.

Consider the following scenarios:

• Nutrition and wellness coaches routinely have their clients track things like weight, exercise, and dietary intake.
• Real estate office managers training their agents on performance will often be concerned with typical metrics like appointments, touch points, and showings.
• Business development coaches commonly start their clients with a standard action plan which has owners taking stock of their operations and getting generally prepared for the process.

In these cases and so many more it is common for a coach to have a standard set of Metrics and/or assignments that applies to every new client they onboard.

Especially now that they’ve been freed up for everyone, CoachAccountable Courses provides a way to quickly set up new clients according to these standard templates using what I call “Starter Kit Courses”.

A “Starter Kit” course is simply a one day course which contains all of the items that are part of a standard setup for a new client.  Here’s what a Starter Kit course might look like for a fitness coach:

This setup consists of a welcome message, page content, 3 Metrics, 1 worksheet, and 2 action assignments. Not a bad way to get things rolling.

Once created, onboarding a new client is as simple as putting that client into the Starter Kit course, set to begin today:

If you’re starting up multiple clients at once, quickly add them all by clicking the “Actually I want to add several participants…” link.

Upon adding, the system will immediately dispatch the items for Day 1 of that course, and thus the client will be set up with all of the items that they should be to get started.

Notice how each item is set to send out early in the day, 5am.  The exact time isn’t important: you just want it to be at such a time that, at the time at which you add a client to the course, the items’ sending time has already passed (thus they’ll be put with your client immediately).

Click over to the client’s page and sure enough you’ll find the items all set up:

Courses are really nice general-purpose tools for automating the delivery of coaching programs.  A Starter Kit Course is just a special case of Courses in general: a 1-day mechanism to deliver a few setup items.

If you have standard things that go out to all of your new clients, try setting those up as a Starter Kit Course.  And who knows, after playing around with that for a few minutes you might find you have reason to build an even longer and more complex course from that–just add more days to the timeline and see how much structured support you can add over the long term for your clients.

I first really made the acquaintance of Marney Makridakis of artellaland.com about one week into her trial, when she sent a lengthy email containing about a dozen questions about CoachAccountable.  Pretty much all of them were of the hard-hitting variety: questions that came from savvy about the how the system worked and thus whose purpose was to push for more.

Marney got right to the point:

Hello. I’m a new user (currently on the trial) with a handful of questions.  I’m starting with about 30 clients, though in the future I may have more than that, as I may be planning a Team setup, where I can supervise my coaches’ coaching – in which case I would have a pretty robust team system.

My questions are below. Some of these may be more along the categories of “wish list” items – but perhaps you might be able to direct me through a workaround for things my client and I might try.  If a phone call is easier for providing support, let me know and I’m happy to call over phone

…

I opted for the phone call–actually chatting with a coach is way more fun than banging out a detailed email in solitude.  As luck would have it, the answers to a few of her questions were already in my immediate plans and would soon be released (Action Projects and Client Exports).  For the other things we got deep into the nitty gritty of flow (eliminate all emails flying back and forth and have it all instead in-system), scale (manage a large pool of clients in a very high-touch manner), groups (lots of group interaction, collaboration, and sharing), and user comfort (having system be friendly for creative and very visually oriented types).

Marney was a power user in the making, and in her state of already liking the system as it was, she wanted to see it stretch in directions to serve her groups of coachees and their particular style of doing things.  She was rattling off suggestions, good ones, in rapid pace during our 75-minute phone call.

“I’m sorry I’ve got such a long wish list” she said at one point.

“It’s all good, folks who care enough to have high expectations of the system are part of why CA is as good as it is today.”

“That’s very diplomatic of you to say that.  I suspect I’m really more of a pain in the ass, aren’t I?”

“Oh, completely–let me be clear here: I have about half a dozen pain-in-the-ass users, and I love every one of them.  Again, y’all push me to make the system the very best it can be, and the other users of the platform have much to thank you for it.”

She laughed.  She got it.  Over the coming month we had plenty of back-and-forth as she continued to push the system with her highly active groups.

Here’s what’s been added to the platform that we can all thank Marney and her clients for:

• Full formatting access for clients working on worksheets
• A color picker for fonts in the WYSIWYG editor
• Clients able to add images to journal entries and worksheet assignments
• The Happenings Reports allow for the inclusion of client comments
• Messages for worksheet assignment notifications can be added as Stream comments
• The search box on the Stream tab
• The “back to top” link on the Stream tab
• Session notes for Groups
• More inclusive notification settings around client activity
• The “View this conversation online” link found in most notification emails
• Worksheets are sorted alphabetically by title
• Worksheets can be worked on collaboratively between coach and client while in draft form

Overall these tweaks have gone over well with Marney’s people.  One said:

I LOVE systems with flexibility and this perfect for that. I can imagine it being a challenge for some right brain people, I say this with love and compassion but in fact this could be an absolute gift to them to help get organized and support them achieving their business/personal goals, once they allow themselves to be flexible in it. We are very lucky. Thank you. :-)

Another:

Wow and wow. I have just been playing with the Project Action Tabs and it is absolutely brilliant. Not only can you list the actions under different headings which is just fab but when you go into Up Next what ever dates you have chosen to complete comes up in order. Easy, peasy, no figuring out what next, it is just there. I can feel my head and shoulders feeling lighter and lighter. Having no problems changing dates if I need to. Oh my goodness. I love this! Thank you.

Marney relayed yet another comment to me:

A client last night commented that the new tool felt like a combination of my two newest books – one of which is called Creating Time and the other one is called Hop Skip Jump, coming out in the fall, which is all about the intersections between play and productivity. I thought that was an astute comment…that CA both creates more time, AND makes productivity more fun. :-)

Quite the compliment, and I’m delighted that you and your people feel so at home using CA as the medium for collaboration and communication for the work you do.

So here’s to you, Marney: you gave me quite the lot of work to grow the system so as to make it ideal for you and your cohort, and CA is all around better for it.

Baby Kira, sporting promotional gear.

In fairness I drew this on a plain white onesie a few weeks before she was born.

Turns out demand for CA merch for newborns is really low. :)