The CoachAccountable Blog

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. :)

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.