The CoachAccountable Blog

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,

Actions are CoachAccountable’s way of helping coaches structure action plans with their clients and manage completion between sessions.  Actions recently got a big leg up this week with the addition of Action Projects.

An Action Project is a way to group related actions under the banner of a single project:

How close is the project to being done? The progress bar gives the overall picture.

Tying a new Action to a new (or existing) project is a snap.  Just choose an existing project from the drop down menu, or create a new one simply by giving it a name:

When an action is part of a project, weight is relevant.

“Weight” is simply a way to tell CoachAccountable how much a given action contributes to the overall progress of the project.  Effectively, it dictates how big a slice of the progress meter should be filled up when the action is marked complete.  Actions that are more important and/or entail more work should be given greater weights, and quicker or less significant Actions get smaller ones.

You can think of weight as being on a 10-point scale, but really they can be represent whatever scheme of weighting you like.  For programming projects where features to-be-built are contract line items, I like to make actions that mirror the line items with weights that match the dollar amount of those line items.

The progress meter is cool because it gives a visually satisfying look at how much is done, plus it’s fun to watch the meter fill up in the moment an action is marked complete.

Hover your mouse over any of the completed slices of the progress meter to see details about the corresponding action:

Hovering reveals an associated color for the completed action: red means it was done late, yellow, a little late, and green on time.

By editing the action project you can set a description for it, as well as set weights and update due dates in bulk for all of the Actions in the project:

The due dates of already-completed Actions can’t be updated, but their weights can be.

For my sake I already really like Action Projects: to queue up related actions into 2 or 3 projects is a major leg up from having a big, interlaced list of to-dos, organized only by due date.  To see the progress bars of each and recognize at a quick glance both how far we’ve come and how much further there is to go for a given project is super satisfying for me as coach, and my clients like it as well.  After using them for a few weeks, a big list of standalone Actions seems almost primitive by comparison.

I’m happy to report that already others have similarly weighed in.  L. T. from Australia writes:

Well done on the projects, makes working with businesses so much clearer!

and M. M. from Texas says:

Totally love the new Action Projects! :-)  Congratulations.

Enjoy!

In addition to the testimonial she so generously provided last month, Twila Gates offered to write a mini series reviewing the various features of CoachAccountable as a way to share with other coaches her experiences and how she’s made it serve her practice so well.

Recently I’ve had a few requests for a CoachAccountable user’s group, and until that’s ready I imagine Twila’s accounts make a fitting way to fill some of that void.

Twila has opted to start with the basics for her first piece, and herein describes CoachAccountable’s documentation of coaching sessions.  Take it away, Twila!

CoachAccountable is, by far, the very best interface for collaboration and coaching with a client.  After coaching for 19 years, I have several systems in place that I have utilized with my clients to promote success throughout the coaching experience.  One of those systems is documenting the actual coaching session in a way that my clients have added benefit beyond just reading an e-mail.

When I started using CoachAccountable, I was very happy to see that there was a way within the system to document the coaching sessions – even better, the documentation is stored in chronological order within the interface – and is searchable.  This immediately eliminated my need to remember the beginning of the e-mail address of my clients for sending the e-mail to them (I was using Outlook).   I also don’t have to save a copy of the documentation to myself, however, since there is the option to have the notes automatically sent to myself, I go ahead and keep a copy of the documentation in a client Outlook file.  The only reason I do this is in the event I need to review something about a client when I don’t have access to wifi.  Of course… how often does that occur – so I’m probably wasting my time and effort.  Hmmm… I might consider giving that up, now that I think about it!

Being able to pre-create templates for various types of coaching sessions is a real time saver.  It also creates some structure for my busy brain to latch onto so I can write optimal documentation to assist the client.  A typical session is easy enough, but what about “fire drill” sessions OR “focus sessions”…  You stay on track with giving your clients the notes they really need to promote continuity with their needs/desires.  Writing notes becomes easier and even enjoyable through the use of templates

I love the way CoachAccountable appends all actions created to the end of the documentation as an immediate reminder of agreements made during the session.  This creates the entire picture for the client to move forward… and I don’t have to go through gyrations to write notes at the top and the bottom in an e-mail.  It is all automatically pulled from the actions created during the meeting.

Sometimes I do take advantage of the little check box at the bottom of the documentation screen to make the notes private for my eyes only.  This is great for remembering something that might not be appropriate to include on the client’s notes and yet is important to me.  Of utmost importance is that both myself and my client have easy access to all notes since they are web-based.  I can’t tell you how many times my clients asked me to re-send notes previously because they couldn’t remember where they saved them or maybe they deleted them and realized that the notes included important information that they wanted to review.  Having it all online is invaluable.

So, all in all, CoachAccountable provides an excellent package for doing documentation of meetings.  This is a huge added bonus for your clients as you are able to focus on documenting the things that really matter for various types of coaching sessions.  Of course we as coaches need to focus on what our clients need from us in our notes and CoachAccountable supports our efforts in this important endeavor.

Happy documenting with less effort and better outcomes!

Last week my wife and I were in Vancouver enjoying a little getaway, during which I had my second international face-to-face with a CoachAccountable customer.  This time it was David Frank Gomes of Life Compass Coaching.

Relative to the timeline of CoachAccountable, David and I go way back.  He was one of the very first people checking it out with whom I chatted on the phone, one of my early attempts to convey in words the how and why of the system.  This was in November of 2012, just over 2 months into CA’s public existence.

I think the job I did of convincing him was good but not great in that green period of my sales call ability: it wasn’t until 5 months later that David came back as a full-fledged user of the system, but to my delight he’s been a vocal fan ever since.

During our visit we talked of Team Edition’s imminent release, our mutual paths as entrepreneurs in the coaching space, and David’s experience of using CA for his year+.  For David’s practice though he loves the system he finds a lot of its mechanics (for example of Metrics and Actions) to be cold, uninspiring, a little too right-brained.  For his sake, he told me, he’d love to give his clients a more visual experience: something to viscerally inspire the dynamic process that dealing with life’s issues and ambitions generally is, and communicate more than just numbers and graphs.

“Like sharing images,” he said, “yes I can upload it as a file to share with the client and put it in their Files tab, but then they have to click through and download it to their machine and open it.  It’s clunky.  It would be nice to see them just appear in the Stream tab.”

He went on to explain how “Yeah you can do a Metric of ‘how do you feel about your dad’s death today?’, but what does that mean, when they report a 2?  I want them to go out in the world, take a picture that expresses how they’re feeling.  When they share that we can have a conversation, create and build a story based on that rather than some sterile graph.”

It was fantastic to see and hear things so clearly from his perspective.  The way he described the situation gave me several ideas of low hanging fruit to put more imagery into the coaching experience.

So today I’m happy to announce the release of two tweaks to the system which allow the coaching process to be just a little more visual.

The first is that clients are now able to upload and embed images into their journal entries.  Like coaches have enjoyed for a while now, a little image button on the WYSIWYG editor allows them to access and add to their image gallery:

Fun fact: that sketch of me was done by some nice gal during a drunken draw-off competition at a house party in college.  Pretty sure she won.

You may need to let your clients know that they can insert images into their journal entries, as that little picture icon is easy to miss.  And remember: as coach you can add images to your templates, worksheet assignments, session notes, and even client messages.

The second tweak is that shared files that are in fact images are now rendered inline in the stream.

Taken together the Client Stream can now be a much more pictorial account of the coaching process:

The client has included an image in his journal entry. The shared image file shows right up with no need to download.  Also: that’s what I looked like in grad school.

David, it was a pleasure hanging with you on the Granville Island harbor.  Thanks for sharing your inspired perspective!