The CoachAccountable Blog

Yesterday I got an email from Bryan Gilliom of Level 5 Coaching Group, a fellow who was goodly enough to reply to my “welcome, how’s it going?” email that gets sent to all coaches shortly after they grab an account¹.  In addition to giving a really nice account of what he was looking for, he let me know his wish list so far for the system.  The first on this list was this:

1) To improve my own efficiency I want to be able to send worksheets based on an appointment.  So it seems like I am going to have to remember each session to schedule a “Check in” worksheet and reminder, and I will have to schedule a pre-meeting worksheet.  This seems like repetitive work that would be better done by defining triggers tied to the appointment.

In this I love both his forwardness to ask and clarity of reasoning behind it.  (Incidentally, the second item on his wish list was essentially a request for the forthcoming Team Edition.)

To his first request I replied:

Tying a worksheet to an appointment type is a really good idea, one which I’ve toyed with in the past and am just about sold on as being worth adding.  As you might imagine my to-do list is quite flush with good ideas but I reckon I may add this sometime in the near-ish future.

Then I realized I was just a few days off from a trip to Vegas for MicroConf, and thus it wasn’t a good day for doing any major architectural wrangling for Team Edition.  Instead, a quick project was a perfect way to spend the day.  So I did just that.  And now, as of this morning, coaches can tie worksheet assignments automatically to their appointment types.  Let’s take a look.

When setting up an appointment type it’s as simple as choosing which worksheet template you want assigned to your clients prior to those appointments, and setting rules of timing (when to assign it, and when is it due):

Check the box and you’ve got a few options. By default the system suggests assigning one day before the appointment, and having it be due one hour prior.

That’s pretty much all the setup you need and CA takes care of the rest.  When you as coach schedule an appointment with one of your clients you have the option, if you feel so inclined, to override this assigning behavior:

The worksheet assignment is checked by default, but you can cancel it if the situation so deems appropriate.

When clients schedule themselves for a given appointment type, any associated worksheet assignment is automatically done by CoachAccountable at the right time.  In all cases CA sends clients an email the moment the worksheet is assigned, with a magic link that puts them one click away from working on it.

Cheers to Bryan for his well-timed and well-articulated request, I’m happy to have this one all done reckon it’ll be a win for a large number of coaches besides him.

Happenings Reports.

Or: “CoachAccountable’s system of emailing a summary of what’s new with your clients on a regular basis”.  It is perhaps an odd twist of a phrase, but this tool is one that I suspect will be quite powerful and useful for coaches.

So much customization!

Setup is as simple as indicating who to send to, which clients to report on, and when to send.  There are three types of recipients to serve three very distinct purposes.

Happenings Reports for You, as Coach

By configuring a report to go to yourself as coach, you can get a quick digest of what’s happening with any or all of your clients at regular intervals, without needing to log in and look into individual clients.  This summary enables you to be even more on top of how things are going, and allows you to be more proactive with your support.

If you coach your clients on a regularly scheduled basis, you can configure a series of Happenings Reports, each covering a single client and each to be delivered to your email inbox right before the respective appointments–perfect for getting up to speed just in time if logging in that moment isn’t convenient.

Happenings Reports for Your Clients

By configuring reports for your clients, you can give them a summary of all coaching happenings at regular intervals.  This can serve either as a nice tangible record of progress and accomplishments, or as a tidy reminder to keep up with outstanding actions, complete outstanding assignments, and be mindful to cause and track results for current Metrics.

Happenings Reports for Third Parties

The record of your coaching relationships in CoachAccountable is generally shared only between you and your clients, but in many scenarios it is desirable (or even necessary) to give third parties a window into client progress as it unfolds.  With Happenings Reports, these designated recipients can be automatically kept abreast of progress and coaching results on a regular basis.

This is perfect for when the person hiring you is not your coaching client but someone else, someone to whom you are responsible for producing results with your coaching clients.

Note: if those third parties want more direct access to what clients are doing, you may want to consider using Companies. That way the third party person will have their own login and access to whatever you provide about that client, instead of a passively received Happenings Report.

Include only what is fitting, send when useful

The controls for setting up a Happenings Report offer flexibility to handle numerous and varied scenarios.  Here are some examples:

• Send only Metrics for certain clients to HR on the first of every month.
• Give each of your clients an end-of-week summary of Actions for them to keep up with.
• Send yourself the complete details on a particular client every Tuesday at 10:45, just prior to their weekly session.

Here’s what one looks like in your email inbox:

Client and coach alike can make comments on any item in a Happenings Report via email simply by clicking on the little comment icon() next to it.  Comments sent via email this way are captured in the system as Stream Item Comments, and forwarded on to the other party as usual.

You can configure as many Happenings Reports as you like, each on their own schedule, covering their own set of clients and item types, and sending to their own recipient or recipients.

I’m excited to make these available to coaches and their clients, as a way to make CoachAccountable an even more useful tool for collaboration and accountability in ways that reach beyond when people are logged in.  To set them up in your account go over on the right side of your screen to Settings >> Happenings Reports.

Special thanks to Michael Leahy who was kind enough to give me his real-time first impressions over the phone while using an earlier, less polished version.  My wife and I wondered how long it would be before someone requested the ability to choose which things to include in a given report, and my conversation with Michael gave the answer to that question: 6 minutes.

For his feedback this official release is more polished and user friendly. :)

This is one I’m excited about.

One of the serious wins of Metrics is that they makes progress evident: they turn a set of numbers into a tangible experience of how things are going, with a satisfying visualization of results relative to a target.

One of the other serious wins of Metrics is that they make it dead simple for your clients to track that progress at regular intervals, thus eliminating much of the tendency to forget as well as keeping goals regularly within their awareness between coaching sessions.

Those two major wins have been combined: now when your client replies to a Metric reminder email with their number for the day, they’ll get back an email response which shows them their freshly-updated progress in graph form, like so:

Visual feedback comes right back to your client when they report progress via email.

It’s an effect that I’ve already enjoyed while testing, and one which I think many clients will benefit from.

Why?  Because it’s satisfying to get that feedback right away, and that satisfaction motivates further effort towards next data point.

There was a time, late last April, when I received some feedback about CoachAccountable’s system for client invoicing.

It was critical but fair, and pointed to a lot of the shortcomings one is bound to find in a system that presents itself as purposefully lean and minimal.  It was a reminder of a fact that I well knew but resisted: CoachAccountable client invoicing was a far cry from the level of polish and quality found everywhere else in the system.

To explain why, we need just a little historical perspective.  Client invoicing was truly the bastard step-child of the system, left over from the 1.0 days and never really given the sort of love of a re-write which most of the rest of CA received when I created version 2.  Prior to launch it was never important enough to prioritize among so much else to work on, and I was perhaps too sentimental to axe it completely.  In the FAQ’s I gave a small apology on the matter: in response to the hypothetical question “What about invoices with broken-out line items? Or taxes? Or reports for my accountant?” I wrote the following:

Sorry, the billing setup of CoachAccountable is deliberately lean and mean, and indeed will probably fall short for more complex scenarios.  CoachAccountable is not meant to be a full on invoice and accounting solution, so if these tools fall sort there are other great online options that do it better than CA ever could.  I’m a fan of Freshbooks myself.

Content as I was to not reinvent the invoicing wheel, I still found this particular earnest criticism of the neglected feature really cut home:

I understand the desire for the lean mean look, it’s strange but when people are spending top dollar for coaching, I like my invoice to reflect some care… just a thought.

CA invoices didn’t reflect any care?  “Holy moly he’s right” I lamented to myself.  I resolved that I needed to remove billing if this is what it’s like.  Then I looked into how many coaches were actively using it: about 30% of my then modest collection of customers.

“I should’ve removed it when I had the chance” I grumbled to my wife, always the sympathetic ear to my work musings.  Undeterred, I put out a warning notice to those customers that sometime in the next 6 months I was apt to remove client billing entirely.  For a while it was invisible to all new sign ups, and quietly removed from the product tour page.

Weeks passed and the sting of being called out on evident half-heartedness faded.  I relaxed a little, mulled on usage, and decided it could stay a while longer after all.  I still had plenty to do elsewhere in the system, I decided to let it limp on a while longer.

Fast forward to two weeks ago.  An email from a new user, Brandi Starr, asked the following:

Is there a way to schedule recurring invoices? It appears when I enter an invoice and hit “send to client” it sends it right away no matter when I set the invoice date for. Most of my clients are billed monthly and it’s a hassle to have to remember to go in and generate an invoice each month.

Such a simple and well-formulated set of questions and implicit requests.  My usual M.O. regarding billing was to point to it’s deliberate simplicity and acknowledge that there are better solutions out there, and I more or less replied as such.  Brandi volleyed with a simple observation:

…regarding invoicing even if it isn’t recurring it would be awesome if it wouldn’t send the notice until the invoice date.

That made a LOT of sense, and wasn’t too much to ask for at all.  In that instant I realized that, one, I was never going to take out billing completely, and two, I was officially tired of apologizing for the half-hearted billing system of CoachAccountable.  It was time to do something about it.

What followed was a week long complete remix of billing, including the following new goodies:

• Line-item invoices, instead of a single amount plus one-liner description
• Option to add tax as a percentage
• Post-dated invoices with the option to schedule invoice deliver at the later date
• Create a recurring sequence of invoices with just a few clicks
• Spiffy new display of invoices visible to both coach and client, in-system and via email

Creating an invoice now looks like this:

Click the “I would like to make a series of invoices just like this one” and you see the following:

Here’s what an invoice looks like, including payment history when relevant:

Invoices play nicely with branding settings:

I stand by my earlier view that invoicing is hardly central to supporting and doing great coaching (which remains my main concern for CoachAccountable), but I suspect that having a nice invoicing solution baked right in will be a useful perk for many.  In its shiny, new state I imagine that CA invoicing will be a viable option for many more coaches than before.  Since it will help a now substantial (and ever growing) group of people, I may as well go the last mile and get it to the “Yep, that’ll do for my needs.” state for a wide class of folks.

Accordingly it will be my pleasure to put finishing touches on it to have it really be complete, including exportable reports ripe for shipping off to an accountant and various online payment methods.

I’m keen to hear of what (if anything) else is needed.

There’s a new goodie for CoachAccountable client and group messaging today: the ability to add HTML formatting.

Previously messaging was constrained to just plain text.  This is generally sufficient and right in line with how most email messages are composed.  Starting today however coaches can opt to add rich text formatting to messages sent through the system:

Just one click turns a plain text area into…

…a WYSIWYG area, ripe for making a formatted message.

All told, this new ability applies to messaging a single client, bulk messaging some or all clients, group messages, and group private messages.

It’s nothing revolutionary, but kinda nice.

I got a bit of feedback recently regarding the management of Groups, in particular managing a large number of them.  As of about a week ago Groups were listed in the order in which you created them, and one of my customers suggested it might be nice to have the most recently created on the top of the page, rather than at the bottom.

I thought about it for a minute and realized this was worth handling quickly.  To her I said:

Hmm…

Good call!  Perhaps I need to add the ability to sort groups so you’ve got total control.  Give me a minute! :)

John

Perhaps most important in this communication wast the postscript:

PS: I love that you guys, as power users, are so up on giving me feedback.  CoachAccountable is better for it!

Her reply:

Thanks! Glad you are cool with it :) Some time I feel like a pain…

A pain?  I quickly wrote back to set the record straight, for her and now here on the blog for everyone else:

Nope,

I totally love it: customers who might be conventionally categorized as a pain are my favorite, because y’all challenge and demand of me to make a system that JUST SINGS.  When I nail it for you guys, I nail it for a lot of other people who might not feel so free to be as vocal in demanding perfection.

The end result is a really sharp system that people are all the more apt to fall in love with, which, as you might imagine, is good for business! :)

Though it’s been a much longer than anticipated time in coming (more on that later), Team Edition beta is now ready to go.

For my beta testers I’ve just installed a new section on their My Account page which gives them the power to migrate their account:

Migrating to Team Edition takes but a few clicks and a few seconds, and is fully reversible.

I can’t wait to see how it performs in the wild.  The basics of managing a team of coaches and overseeing a full roster of clients are solid, and in the coming weeks with the aid and input of my beta testers I’ll be adding numerous power tools for organizational coaching management.  Together we’ll play at the evolution for a few weeks, eventually leading up to the release of Team Edition to the general public.

The next chapter of CoachAccountable is now officially begun.  My gratitude to the many who have given me both their interest in Team, as well as their patience with its arrival!

Yesterday I had a fun chat come in to me from the website.  A fellow from Poland started it off by writing:

I just found your web software
are you really founder of this?

To which I replied “I am indeed.”

wow
can I be frankly?

To which I replied “Please do.”

sound like: hmm is they have so SMALL about of business, that founder can spend time to chat ??
because for example I am founder of my own company and its hard to talk with me – only via coaching session :)

To that I chuckled.  That’s a fair assessment, and since I have no hang up about CoachAccountable being a tidy, one-man operation realized then and there just how comfortable I am with projecting that appearance.  I replied the truth, the last line of which was an insight which came to me on the spot:

Yep. For the time being I’m going to enjoy for as long as I can the luxury of being able to talk directly with the community I’m serving.
It makes a huge difference for me to be able to do so,
you might think of it as the best sort of market research one could possibly do.

That about says it all.  Being available to chat keeps causing great conversations.  These conversations bring super useful insights to me and helpful answers to people who chat me (to say nothing of the sense of connection to this being a real thing made by a real guy and not just some faceless company).

So THAT’s why, yes, you can still chat with the founder of CoachAccountable.

I’m gonna ride this train for as long as I can.

No, seriously.

That was oddly satisfying.

I just released a major update to the CoachAccountable code base and database structure, and if I’ve done it correctly no one will notice any change whatsoever.

What’s the big deal?  I’ve spent the last week overhauling the mechanics of user accounts, news items, and customizable widget items including note areas and task lists.

(Especially the widget items, which were a kludge of bloated code to cover left-column widgets for the coach’s dashboard, the client centers, and the client view pages.  My only excuse is that this code harkened back to nearly five years ago in the early days of CA 1.0’s development, and this is largely the reason why widgets are some of the most useless and least interesting parts of the system.  This too shall pass.)

All of this under-the-hood work was in the interest of making a more robust and generally powerful platform upon which to build Team Edition.  As mentioned in a little update note a week ago, my fall emphasis on Team had given way to more immediately relevant work of marketing and outreach.  But it feels good to be back on the case of building Team.

Remixing user accounts was to enable a single user account to have multiple roles within CoachAccountable (e.g. admin of a Team, coach to his clients, and client of some other coach).  Remixing news items was to enable Team Admins to get new alerts just as coaches do now (and who knows, down the road coaches who would like to send news alerts to their clients may get their wish).  And remixing widgets was to enable Team Admins to enjoy flexible configuration of tools to be easily added in a variety of contexts, as well as to pave the way for more interesting ones.

All in all a good week, and Team Edition continues to progress.  Soon I’ll be setting my beta testers up with Team accounts of their own, bringing CoachAccountable a giant and very real step closer to supporting multiple-coach coaching organizations.

When setting up a new client in CoachAccountable, the system makes it super easy to send an invitation email which welcomes them into the system right away.  But you might want to hold off of that for just a short while.  Here’s why.

As coaches we want our clients’ experience of our coaching to be a delight at every step, and their first run experience with CoachAccountable is no different.  By taking 5-10 minutes on a new client BEFORE inviting them in you can set things up so that they’ll immediately feel right at home.

First things first: your smiling face.  This actually isn’t something you have to do for every client, rather just once and you’ll be set for everyone.  The very first thing your clients will see when they click the magic registration link is the registration page.  If you’ve got your own headshot uploaded to your coach account, they’ll see that photo of you and instantly know they’re in the right place. Oh, and if you’ve set up your branding, this page will show with your colors and logo, too.

A picture of you lets your client know they’re in the right place. This is most reassuring for a technophobe.

Once your client registers their user account with you, unless you’ve intervened they’ll be greeted by a blank slate for what’s next:

This looks pretty enough, yes, but it doesn’t provide your client with a lot of clues as to what business they have here in this fancy, newfangled online system.

The other tabs are also friendly and inviting, but similarly suffer from the same problem of being not at all  personalized to what your client would or should care about:

So we instead want to set the stage.  Setting the stage means our clients are going to immediately know what’s going on, understand how things fit together, and appreciate why that’s cool.

Fortunately for us it’s pretty simple: just adding in a few items will make all the difference.  Here are some that I recommend:

Notes from their last session.  Just a few paragraphs and/or bullet points will do.  If this is a truly new client, then briefly write up your understanding of what they have at stake for coaching.  Really anything that conveys “here’s what’s going on for you, here’s what we’re going to work on, and here’s the game moving forward” will work beautifully.

A few Actions with precise deadlines.  Add however many are appropriate to the situation.  These may be basic tasks you have to get any new client started, or items that concern projects already underway.  I recommend one that’s due very soon called “Mark your first Action complete” so that they can see what it’s like to do just that.  A little visual candy and feedback from the machine will make it very satisfying for them (have you seen what it’s like when you mark one complete yourself?).

A shared file or two.  If you have typical “getting started” resources this is the perfect time to share them, and doing so gives your client practice with accessing files in the system.  You might tie this in with an Action that references a shared file, e.g. “Read our Coaching Practices document”.

A Worksheet assignment.  Perhaps you’d like a new client to take a few minutes and fill out a little Worksheet pertaining to getting started with your coaching.  Since you’re just setting the stage right now, be certain to NOT send your client a notification about the Worksheet (which at this point would amount to jumping the gun).

The next scheduled Appointment.  If you know when your next coaching session will be, set that up with a useful reminder or two.  It’ll appear in their “Up Next” listing and they’ll be able to set reminders about it for themselves as well.

A Metric.  Metrics are the most intimidating feature of CoachAccountable, but when you see one all set up (especially with a target set and a few data points already in there) they quickly make a lot of sense.  If there is any sort of measurable progress that you’ll be working on with your client, make a Metric to track it.  If you’re lucky enough to have a few data points from the recent past you can back-date the Metric and add that data in straightaway–a really nice touch to have your client get excited about what you’re working towards.

If you can add all of the above for a new client that is, of course, fantastic.  But even if you only add in two or three your client will immediately see that this system is tailored specifically to what they’re working on, and they’ll see for themselves how the pieces fit together (and likely feel comfortable straightaway with setting up things for themselves).

Do you have a fairly set series of onboarding items? You can actually set this sequence up ahead of time for ALL your clients as a Course, then just enroll each new client into said Course.

When this is the first thing your client sees, they recognize the account as lovingly set up just for them.

Once the stage is set, THEN the time is ideal to go ahead and invite them.  Just go to the “Clients” tab on your dashboard and click the big “Invite” button on your client:

Doing this right is the stuff of having your clients immediately loving your system, and appreciating the organization and attention to detail of your coaching.

It’s worth the effort, ESPECIALLY when making first impressions.

Ready to set up a simple onboarding series for your clients and get them pumped about using software to achieve their goals more efficiently? Sign up – it’s free for 30 days.