The CoachAccountable Blog

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. :)

The first two times I met with CoachAccountable users it was while I was abroad: John Kentworthy early last year in Singapore, and David Frank Gomes a few months ago in Vancouver.

This time I had the luxury of a CoachAccountable user coming to me, and in my own country no less!  Kelly Talamo was in town from New Orleans for the day, and wanted to make a morning of meeting me at a coffee shop in my neighborhood.

In early September Kelly emailed me the following in response to CA’s birthday announcement:

Thanks for sharing this killer news.
I’m so grateful for you and your system.  It’s totally been a gift for me.

My business continues to grow — even more than when we spoke last. I’m about to swap out some old clients for new ones and also about to bring one of my clients into a team environment.  I’ve mentored a gal who’s becoming the “lead coach” in one of my companies and when I walk out the door they are committed to their own Coach Accountable system.  :)

So business is great for me — but will be even better for you!  Having said all of that –  I have a confession (of sorts) to make. That is — as well as I’m doing in my coaching and consulting — I’m not where I should be (knowledge-wise or practically) on Coach Accountable.  I’m so busy growing people – and creating solutions for my clients – I’m sort of “neglecting me.”  Not totally — but in this area.

So – I had a special request that I’d like to run by you.

I may be coming to Denver to spend time with a friend — and I was wondering if you and I could perhaps meet at a coffee shop – where ever you are and spend about 2-3 hours where you could walk me through some of this. I know this is kind of ‘special treatment’ – and I’d be happy to pay for your time — but it’s also how I learn the best.

Would you consider that?

It’s always a treat to meet the folks who use my system, so I was immediately keen.  As I’ve mentioned before, I can’t buy market research better than experiences like this.

So we made a date, and about two weeks ago spent what turned out to be a delightful four hours of hanging out.  Kelly has made good and regular use of the system in his nearly-a-year of working with it, but has really just scratched the surface by employing only Session Notes and basic Actions.

So at his prompting stemming from a desire to really master the system, we toured around on his laptop through all the things CoachAccountable is capable of.  He was delighted to learn about how Engagement Reports work (never bothered to click that button before), how Client Exports work (never bothered to click that button before), how Appointment Scheduling works (never bothered to set that up), how Happenings Reports work (never noticed them before) and even how Metrics work (never bothered to consider how he might fit that into his coaching).  Even the existence of Action Projects made a welcome bit of news for this veteran user.

Clearly I’m doing a rubbish job of bringing new features to the attention of established users.

My favorite part of our time spent together was when Kelly described his clients’ experience of CA:

My clients, they ask me “What’s the deal with this CoachAccountable guy?”  I say ‘whaddaya mean?’  They say “He’s all over me.  I have an action that’s due at 6pm, I rush home to get it done, I mark it done at 6:30.  CoachAccountable says ‘hey great job, but you’re 30 minutes late.’

I tell ’em, “Oh yeah, he’ll do that.  I may be a nice guy and lenient, but CoachAccountable IS LAW.”  CA has taken on a personality with my people, it’s like good cop, bad cop.

CoachAccountable is law, goodness that tickles me.  Having CoachAccountable be the hard-nosed bringer of authority and integrity has become so central to his style that when we were setting up his White Label branding, Kelly opted specifically to NOT rename the system to something else: “Yeah, let’s keep it CoachAccountable.  I don’t want my clients to think that CA is backing off in any way.”

The time passed quickly and Kelly even bought lunch: not a bad reward for a morning of being told your creation is awesome and collecting a boatload of user perspective.  One particularly actionable bit came in an email from one of his clients that he shared with me, wherein it was suggested it would be nice to see the comments for a given Action from within the Actions tab, rather than go fish it out on the Stream tab.  The next day I added little comment icons next to client items which put you a click away from the conversation about a respective item.  A nice touch for sure.

Kelly ended our time together with a request to be coached by me.  I usually coach programmers to be great at the business of contract work: having walked the walk myself it’s the professional realm in which I am eminently qualified to do coaching.  I hadn’t considered coaching coaches before this point in time, but upon being asked I realized that I am qualified to do that as well.

So for grins I’ll be coaching an already powerful and successful coach to do what he does even better.  As he put it:

I want you to know that I’m very much into this — as mastering the CoachAccountable system will not only benefit me personally, but will benefit every client I have. And that in turn, should benefit you. So in effect, I see this as the Trifecta Win! We all win.

Well reasoned indeed.  I suspect from our work together to come I’ll get a lot of insight into how to train a broader audience of coaches to be better at what they do.

Thanks Kelly for coming to visit, here’s to inspired collaboration!

Kelly and I agree we can do better on a picture together. The fellow patron at the coffee shop we troubled for the job wasn’t the most savvy photographer.

It has been my experience (and I know I’m not the only one) that coaching is an overall transient experience.  You get coached, you get ideas, insights & motivation, hopefully you act on these in a difference-making way, and that’s it.

What remains afterwards is hard to define or quantify: hopefully some noticeable results persist when the coaching ends, but motivation and inspiration are eminently perishable, and ideas (unless captured) all too commonly fade from memory.

This isn’t a huge problem for coaching: again it’s ultimately about the real-world impact which gets made, and if the coaching is worthwhile this should be a given.  Still, to have some tangible souvenir of the process would be a nice perk at very least, and perhaps a substantial value-adding takeaway.

I’ve had numerous coaches ask me some variation of: “My client is wrapping up their program with me.  Is there any way I can get all of their data out of the system so that they can have it after we’re done?”

With CoachAccountable’s ability to export complete client records, the answer is yes.

On the Clients tab you’ll find an Export button for each client:

Give it a click and you’re greeted with some options of what data you’d like to include in the export:

Include as little or as much of the client record as is appropriate for your purposes.

By default the complete coaching history will be exported, but if for example you’d like to share a monthly update, you can narrow the timeframe down to the month of interest.

Similarly, by default all types of items are included, but if for example you just want Metrics and Actions, just pick those two and uncheck the rest.

You can choose to include various levels of privacy (for Team Edition accounts, you can choose to share items that were previously visible only to other coaches, or those that were previously private between you and the client, too).

The result is a single HTML file: super lightweight and super portable.  This format makes it easy to share with interested parties via email as a simple attachment.

Here’s what one looks like:

Since it’s an HTML file, you can even post the record file online, either as a way to publicly showcase your style of coaching (assuming you’ve got your client’s blessing to do so) or to share with select parties in some sort of secure manner.

Though I imagine folks will come up with others, there are 3 general uses for client exports:

1. To provide a client company a consolidated report on coaching progress on the individuals they’ve hired you to coach.
2. As a case study to showcase your coaching stye and results.
3. As a regular or end-of-term souvenir for your clients to have and keep.

There’s so much about a coaching relationship that gets naturally captured within CoachAccountable, and the net result of this plus client exports is a good looking and readily-shared record of the whole process.

This is nice, because good coaching deserves to be so much more than a series of transient conversations.

Looking for something to give your coaching clients? Want to ensure you can export data at any time? CoachAccountable can do that, and we don’t share your data. Ever. 

Sign up for your free trial here.

Amid a tendency in business for smaller operations to portray themselves as larger ones to appear more successful or be taken more seriously, I submit to the world a proudly defiant confession:

CoachAccountable is indeed a one-man operation.

I’m delighted by how often that surprises people when they learn this, from long time customers to first time visitors to the site.

This setup works remarkably well.  Having marketing, customer support, UI design, copy writing, and actual building of the system all come from the same brain affords delightful efficiency.  Just the other week when creating a tutorial video I found places wherein it would be more logical to teach and more pretty to present with a few modifications.  So I just made those modifications to the software, and continued on with my screen captures (in a larger organization the marketer would usually have to propose those changes to the product manager, and if the marketer was lucky enough to have those changes accepted and prioritized, the product manager would have to schedule in those changes to with the development team, and then those changes would be made and released days if not weeks or months later).

But that I am just one person causes concern for some people, and understandably so.  One coach who was at the time a prospective customer summed it up beautifully:

…It concerns me a little that you are a one man shop.  Though obviously a very gifted, committed, and responsive one man (in fact I don’t like people like you who can make me – a mere mortal – feel like a sluff…haha) but there is inherent exposure for all of us there.  How will you keep up with supporting the system as it grows?  What happens if you (heaven forbid) were to get hit by the proverbial beer truck?  For those of us who could be staking our coaching livelihoods on a system like this, it leaves one concerned about the exposure and need for a continuity plan.

Very fair questions indeed.

Basically if I get hit by a bus today CA will, at very least, continue on indefinitely in its current form.  My poor widow of a wife knows exactly who to call for maintenance and upkeep, and she will be well motivated to do so to keep a lovely stream of passive income flowing.  Beyond that she may go so far as to get in touch with my apprentice and offer him a job to continue work on the platform.

Do I want to hear from my users? Yep.

As for keeping up with support, this is one of my most favorite aspects of being so directly available to CA users (rather than having sales teams and tech support teams serve as lines of defense), and the reason is as follows:

I CAN’T BUY MARKET RESEARCH THIS GOOD.

Every time I avail myself to answer a question, talk about someone’s specific business needs, or troubleshoot a problem, I take in useful perspective of what coaches want, what’s confusing about the system, and/or what would make things better.  Since all support requests go through me, I only address a particular issue so many times before I modify the system to permanently address the issue for all future users.

The net result of all this is that even though the CA user base has grown steadily over the last two years, the amount of time I spend on customer support has remained fairly constant.  And perhaps more important, the system is more polished and versatile thanks to the combined input of many coaches.

So that’s how CA continues to function as a one man shop.  To the degree that it proves necessary, eventually I will grow the CA team beyond myself in a measured way as I deem appropriate.

But I will be doing my best to avoid bringing others aboard for as long as is practical.  CA users generally like the current arrangement, as can be seen in a bit of feedback I got last week:

Great product!  Great support!

I’d love to see you grow, but I love to see you stay smaller too (for the personalized service) – maybe we can have our cake and eat it too.

Between a few hang outs and a lot of phone conversations I keep bumping up against CoachAccountable being more powerful than people are discovering on their own, even with a 30 day trial.

Clearly I can do a better job of tuning CA users into all that the system is capable of.

To that end I’m happy to unveil the first of a series of videos which, in detailed fashion, illustrate the many how-to’s of using the system to greatest benefit, distilled from the experiences of myself and many other users.

This first one is titled “How to be an awesome coach with CoachAccountable Appointments”.

Enjoy!

For reference, here’s the narration transcript:

CoachAccountable Appointments is your system for scheduling your regular coaching sessions. Let’s look at how to use them to their fullest, from start to finish.

We’re going to begin by setting up your Appointment Types. The place to do this is under My CA >> My System >> Appointment Scheduling.

Here you see a lot of settings, including the ability to disable Appointments entirely.

An “Appointment Type” is just a fancy way of specifying what sort of appointments you offer to your clients. Your account comes pre-loaded with two of these. In this example, you offer your clients a “Weekly Coaching Call” and a “Quick check in”.

And if you don’t offer your clients a 15-minute “Quick check in”, you just delete it, like so.

Let’s now take a close look at the “Weekly Coaching Call” appointment type which comes pre-loaded. You can see its set for a 1-hour duration, but perhaps your style is to have half hour calls. To do this we just pick “30”, “minutes”. Say you do 26 minute calls? No problem: just type it in. Here and everywhere else in the system, these little drop down options are only meant to save you keystrokes, they’re in no way a mandate of what you have to choose.

Now you see padding here: “Padding” allows us to ensure that CoachAccountable doesn’t let appointments be scheduled too close together: it puts in some breathing room between when one appointment ends and the earliest time that the next one can begin. The system follows strict rules about when your clients are allowed to schedule themselves into your calendar, and Padding is part of what is factored in when offering open time slots for them to choose.

For example I like to give myself 10 minutes before a weekly coaching call to get myself up to speed on whomever I’m about to coach, and then 10 minutes after to type up my notes from the session and send them off. Think about what’s best for your style and set padding accordingly.

Now let’s look at the reminders: this appointment type has these 4 reminders already set as an example. I like this style and recommend it: the email to my client 1 day before is sort of a warning, a heads up to look over their action plan from the last week and finish up whatever they should before we talk. Then a text to them 30 minutes before ensures that they’re prepared, that my call to start our session won’t take them by surprise.

10 minutes prior to the appointment I have CA send me a text, which is my cue to pop in and see what’s new with my client: a quick look at metrics and Actions tells me how they’ve progressed since we last spoke, and a review of last week’s session notes has me fully primed to dive right in.

The 1-minute-prior reminder tells me it’s time to wrap up my review and call my client. It’s a nice touch of professionalism to always call them right on time.

Some coaches prefer to have their clients call them, which is a sort of opportunity for a coachee to really be responsible for their coaching and opt into it. For my sake I think they’ve got enough already to work on, and that the impact of them forgetting to call or calling me 10 minutes late is too much a disruption to risk.

Both approaches have their merits, so pick whichever one feels most appropriate to you. Just be sure you never find yourself in the wasteland limbo of “oh, I thought you were gonna call me”. That sort of uncertainty is a coach fail.

To recap reminders: what we have here is just a template, a model for “what reminders should be sent to whom and when” for all appointments of THIS type that are scheduled.

Reminders by default are sent by email, but if you’re in the US or Canada, you can get the option to send via text by entering your cell phone number. Do this by visiting the My Account page if you haven’t already.

Moving on, you can either allow or disallow a given type of appointment to be scheduled by clients. If you allow it, there are a few settings that also govern what sort of availability options they are given.

Similarly, you can set cancellation rules.

The final piece of setting up an Appointment Type is the one I’m most interesting in teaching you about: CoachAccountable can assign your clients a worksheet prior to your appointments, and for your regular ones, like the weekly call, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this.

You pick a worksheet from your collection of templates. For now, your account comes pre-loaded with several, including this one here, the Pre-Session Check In. Set when it should be assigned to your client, and when it is due (these defaults are pretty good), and CA does the rest.

Let’s look at the Pre-Session Check in to see why this is cool. You can find your worksheet templates under My CA >> My Templates, and click on Worksheets. Here you see your templates and you can add new ones. Let’s look at this one.

Feel free to modify this to your own style, but the gist is you want your clients to think about how things are going and really become aware of what they want out of being coached. I used to think that some people were better at being coached, more motivated and so forth; while other people just weren’t as good.

So things are actually better than that: good coachees CAN be caused, and a well-crafted and well-timed pre-session worksheet is one of the ways to do that. They get your client thinking about what they’re getting coached for in the first place, and get them refocused on what they’re working on. You want your clients to be hungry for your coaching and expecting a lot from it, and answering questions like these gets them in that state.

So that by itself is useful, but better still is that YOU get to have their answers fresh on your mind going into your session, meaning overall it primes you both for a great conversation.

So that’s using worksheet assignments effectively with your appointments. For some types of appointments it’s not appropriate to have a worksheet, but for your regular ones I recommend it. Keep it short and sweet, because we don’t want to overburden the people we coach.

Let’s now wrap up with Appointment Types by setting up a new one from scratch. Back we go to My CA >> My System >> Appointment Scheduling.

Say your style calls for a typical “Getting started” type of appointment that you do with all of your clients when you first begin your coaching relationship. Let’s set that up now.

Like with the others, we give it the name: this is how it will appear in our listing of upcoming appointments, records of past appointments, and so on. (Don’t worry: the “with whom did we have the appointment” will show up as well when we schedule actual appointments. Again, here we’re just making templates which describe the “types” of appointments we’ll be having.)

Next we set up the duration: let’s say that we want to block out 2 hours for our Getting Started appointments. A little padding to decompress afterwards, perfect.

Set a few reminders, let’s say one for the client the day before and one for you an hour before.

This is probably something we should NOT let our clients schedule for themselves. Let’s also say no online cancellation, just by making a really big number here.

Maybe you have a worksheet they should complete prior to the session, maybe you don’t. Let’s assume none for now.

Click save and we’re done.

So that’s appointment types.

Let’s take a look at letting clients schedule themselves within your calendar. If you don’t allow it at all, you can just uncheck this box right here and be done with it: feel free to tune out or fast forward through the next 90 seconds.

If you do want to allow clients to schedule themselves, you just saw how to allow or dis-allow it for your various appointment types. Make sure that’s to your liking.

Next there is to let CA know when you’re open to taking appointments. Do that here: set up your typical weekly availability. Let’s say you do appointments on Monday afternoons, from 2pm to 5, and on Wednesdays, 10am through 4pm with an hour long break in there for lunch.

Your typical week might have exceptions to that availability, and you can set those here. Say you’ll be offline the entire second week of October for vacation, you can set that here under the Exceptions to your availability.

Let’s make sure we’ve got everything right: you can preview your availability as your clients will see it by clicking this link here. See our appointment types, only the ones we’ve made open to our clients for scheduling. See our time slots on Mondays and Wednesdays, and indeed there are no options during that second week in October. Perfect.

This brings up an important difference: your clients are the ones who are subject to these rules of availability, but you as coach can schedule whenever you like.

Let’s see the difference now by scheduling an appointment with a client. Click the “Add New” button here to get started. Pick a client to schedule with, then pick an Appointment Type. Unlike clients, you are able to directly pick the date and time. (If you’d like to know what your availability is just click this link here–quite handy to avoid double booking yourself.)

As with everywhere else in the system, times are in the timezone of the beholder. So if your client is in a different timezone, know that you’re picking the time in your own timezone, and this handy hint right here will let you know what time that is for your client.

Whatever reminders you setup for this appointment type are immediately suggested as a sensible starting point, but you can modify these however you like if the situation warrants it.

The worksheet assignment that we tied to this appointment type looks good, but we could skip it for this appointment if we wanted. Let’s say this is normal circumstances so we’ll keep it.

Finally you can send a notification of this appointment to your client or not. You can customize this default message however you like, and I’ll show you in just a minute how to change that default messaging.

Right, so that’s everything we need to set. If it’s all good we just click “Schedule appointment”. If you’re one to do a regular call with your clients, always at the same time of the same day, you can quickly schedule a sequence of appointment by clicking this link.

You can schedule up to twelve in a row, and at whatever interval you like. Say we want to do once a week at this usual time.

Let’s schedule 4 of them like this. And there they are. You can modify or cancel individual appointments as needed, either now or later.

Let’s take a quick look at how to customize your messages. Go to My CA >> My System >> System Email Messages. Here you can customize the verbiage for all sorts of emails that the system will send on your behalf.

For now, let’s focus on the Appointment message. “Appointment Notice” is verbiage we just saw for notifying a client of a new appointment we’ve scheduled them for. Change the pre-loaded messaging for that here.

“Appointment Reminder” is the verbiage for reminder emails that will be sent to clients. You’re free to change this to really make it your own. What you’re aiming for in both of these message templates is to give your clients a personal touch, something to have them look forward to their upcoming session with you.

Final stop on this tour of appointments: how to embed your schedule of appointments into your regular calendar. If you use a calendaring system like Microsoft Outlook, Apple iCal, or Google Calendars you probably like to have your full schedule all in one place.

Go back to My CA >> My System >> Appointment Scheduling and scroll to the bottom. Here you’ll find your Appointment Calendar Feed. This is a magic link that you can use to add your CA appointments right into your calendar.

A word of caution: these don’t always stay perfectly in sync. CA’s data feed is always up to date, but it’s up to your calendar software to fetch that latest data, and each system does it on its own schedule. Google Calendar, for example, refreshes about every 24 hours. So please don’t rely on this for mission-critical schedule planning.

To recap:

• Set up appointment types to fit your style
• Enjoy the timely reminders sent to both you and your clients
• Employ pre-session worksheets to prime the conversation,
• Embed your appointments into your calendaring software of choice.

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

But Wait, There’s More!

Since we launched Version 3, we’ve made Appointments even better:

• Appointment settings are now found in Settings >> Appointment Config.
• You (and your clients!) can now sync directly with Google Calendar.
• In addition to the pre-session Worksheets mentioned in this video, you can also send post-session Worksheets. This keeps the wins from your session fresh in the client’s mind.
• You can set type-specific availability, for if, say, a certain type of call is only available on Fridays from 2-5PM.
• Using your Offerings, even prospective clients can book an Appointment.
• And more!

Bump up your level of awesome coaching today and sign up for a free CoachAccountable trial.

I’ll level with you here: I totally just Photoshopped last year’s cake to add second a candle.

Today CoachAccountable marks its second birthday.

With the release of the Client Manual, Groups, remixed Billing, Happenings Reports, appointment worksheets, Engagement Reports, Team Edition, Action Projects, client records exporting, embedded videos, and a whole host of other improvements it’s been a good year.

To celebrate, I have a big announcement:

Effective today, CoachAccountable Courses and CoachAccountable Groups add-ons are FREE.

My decision to do this comes at the confluence of two things:

1. Business is good, good enough that I simply won’t miss the added revenue of charging for Courses and Groups as paid add-ons.
2. Both Courses and Groups keep revealing themselves to enable a lot of nice functionality, functionality that is useful and wanted by coaches beyond the niche users for them which I’d originally envisioned.

I’m really excited about this change.  I’ve had numerous questions and feature requests wherein my answer is some variant of “Oh yeah, you can use [Courses/Groups] to set that up, though yes, since you’re not actually doing [courses/group coaching] that may be a bit steep just to be able to do…”

With Courses and Groups rolled into the core subscription package I can forget about those extra programming projects to fill in the gaps, and instead focus on further bettering Courses and Groups themselves to make an overall more powerful system for everybody.

Here’s what the add-ons section of the “My Account” page looks like now:

Oh, right: I also added the ability to turn off Billing in case you don’t need it. :)

As before you’ll need to visit the “My Account” page to turn on Groups and Courses, but now it won’t impact the price of your monthly package.  And if you’ve already been using Courses or Groups, your monthly price has already been reduced accordingly.

In my defense THIS was a new Photoshop job.

Looking Forward

For CoachAccountable’s third year of public existence there’s plenty more in store that I’m excited about.

A big part of this year will be about teaching coaches to be great coaches.  Through the accumulated experiences of me and many who have shared with me there’s now a lot of systematic, demonstrably effective techniques and expertise to coaching that are made possible by CA.

To that end I’m working on a video series to illustrate and convey this expertise.  The first one, titled Being an Awesome Coach with CoachAccountable Appointments, is nearly complete and coming very soon.

Also in line with sharing expertise I’ll be creating a CoachAccountable user’s group.  Based on the several hangouts I’ve hosted with CA users I’m clear that you all talking together and sharing ideas is a very good thing, and the community is now big enough I think to support a vibrant dialog.  (I suppose it might still end up a ghost town boasting little more than the sound of crickets chirping, but we’ll see, right? :)

Also in my plan for this year is a much improved affiliate program, substantial evolution to the relatively young Team Edition, an API, a mobile app, and of course the usual stream of improvements large and small based on the feedback and experiences of the many.

If there’s anything in particular you’d like to see for the platform in the coming year, let it be known now in the comments.

Thanks as always for being on this journey with me–here’s to great coaching.

Got videos hosted on YouTube, Vimeo or Viddler that you’d like to share with clients as part of their coaching program with you?

CoachAccountable now lets you share such media (as well as audio clips) right within the system itself, allowing for seamless delivery of video and audio content in your programs.

You can now embed from:

• Video
  • YouTube
  • Vimeo
  • Loom
  • Wistia
  • Viddler
  • TED
  • educreations
  • Cubby
  • LibSyn
  • Spotlighr
  • Viloud

  Audio

  • Soundcloud
  • Audio Acrobat
  • Clyp

  To do this, simply add the video or audio clip to your Library by pasting in whatever embed code is provided by the hosting site.  YouTube’s embed code for a given video, for example, can be found under Share:

Once you’ve got the embed code, paste it into area indicated for adding embedded files, like so:

Hit the preview button, and if CA is able to recognize the code as a valid embed from one of the supported sources, you’ll see the media right in the preview.

Video and audio files which are added this way will behave a tad differently for you and your clients when shared.  Instead of a Download button, you’ll see a Watch or Listen button.

Click that and the media file opens right up within CoachAccountable:

Just click “watch” and the lights go down.

Like with other types of shared files, CoachAccountable keeps track of if and when your client last accessed embedded files.

This started out as an experimental feature, unlocked for a few coaches a while ago.  It’s pretty sharp and ready for prime time now, but even so I’m open to adding other established sites for hosted media beyond the 11 that CoachAccountable currently recognizes and supports.  If you know of one that I missed which would be useful to you, let it be known!

It was last fall when I first made the acquaintance of Michael Leahy of BraveHearts on the telephone, and since then he’s been one of CoachAccountable’s most discerning power users.

His thorough use of Groups and Courses have pushed the platform forward, and his perspective and insight of what would be useful have lead to an impressively high rate of his feature requests ultimately making it into the system¹.

One of our more recent exchanges led to the creation and launch of Client Engagement Reports, and as with so many other bouts of his feedback CA is better for it.

In June Michael was kind enough to favor CoachAccountable with a testimonial.  I usually prefer kind words regarding CoachAccountable to be more about the software than about me (because the software should stand on its own merits, right?), but I suppose the customer support aspect of CA is worth touting now and then (and my wife will tell you I spend a lot of time on that part of the business!)

Take it away, Michael.

If you are a successful coach or mentor and you’re looking for a best practices, leading edge platform to work with, look no further. As a discriminating and hard to please  technology industry veteran of 20 years, I spent YEARS trying to find a robust, fully functional solution for my mentoring practice that integrated appointment management AND client/practice management tools, AND that also offered excellent, responsive support. The winner hands down is John Larson and Coach Accountable

Rarely have I encountered an application developer like John who is so level headed, responsive and easy to work with. He truly believes in his product and loves his work, and it shows. And while I don’t always get my way re- new feature requests (who does), when it comes to fixing those inevitable software bugs or adding that logical functionality that might have been overlooked in a new software release, I’ve never met anyone more capable or responsive as John has been.

So let me save you a lot of wasted time and effort searching to and fro for a rock solid coaching/mentoring platform from which to grow your practice – choose CoachAccountable and spend more time doing what we all love and really want to do – coaching and mentoring!

Respectfully,