The CoachAccountable Blog

It’s been a delightful week on the CoachAccountable customer interaction front.

Last week I realized that one of the coaches on CoachAccountable is located right here in Denver.  So on Monday, after attending her yoga class, I spent two hours with her at a nearby Village Inn over coffee comparing notes and swapping stories.  I was tickled to hear what a perfect fit CoachAccountable continues to be for her practice, and as we parted company that night I felt thoroughly on the right track.

Then on Tuesday I got one of the most deeply complimentary comments I’ve ever received on this blog, leaving me feel utterly appreciated for willingness (and frankly my joy) to listen to what coaches need and respond accordingly in the growth and evolution of this platform.  To have it be said that my baby is “the best damn software application I’ve found out there after spending literally years looking around and trying and testing a litany of apps” in a public forum is high praise indeed, and from a rather domain-savvy individual no less.

The on Wednesday I enjoyed two hours on the phone with a woman from the East Coast who’d just gotten signed up with her account and was keen to get oriented and running as soon as possible.  I don’t think either of us expected our exchange to last quite so long, but there was just so much good stuff to cover.  I was delighted to get a glimpse into what’s confusing for a newcomer, and she was delighted to have me point out all the ways in which the system is already perfectly equipped for her needs.  To hear her excited reactions to one feature after another was perhaps the best hands-on experience I’ve ever had of a new coach’s first impressions of CA, and it utterly made my day.

To summarize: interactions with coaches are the best, and I shall continue encouraging that sort of thing.  INCLUDING a public write up of how fun it is to connect (ahem).  If you want to get acquainted and chat with me about the system sometime on the phone (or better yet are in the Denver area and would care to meet up), know in advance that I’m all for it, so drop me a line.

CoachAccountable isn’t some big faceless company where all the real people are hidden behind support ticket systems and lengthy phone wait times.  Rather: it’s just some dude who’s out to make seminal contributions to the field of coaching.  A dude who, for now, still has time to reply to your emails and chat with you on the phone.

The subject of today’s Delightful Collaboration is Michael Leahy of Brave Hearts Mentoring, who since becoming a user of CoachAccountable has had an exceptionally high percentage of his suggestions make it in to CoachAccountable.  Michael comes from a background of software development, and that has a lot to do with the regularity with which he’s able to perceive new features which would be more universally beneficial.  But moreover he’s a power user, and, for example, the sheer volume of appointments that he schedules per week gives him a unique insight into how things would be better to serve both power users and regular users alike.

So let’s take a look at his contributions thus far:

Smarter Appointment Listings

When you have a lot of clients and they each have a few scheduled, the dashboard listing of all upcoming appointments can be quickly overwhelming.  Sorted as they were (strictly by date), the pending appointment requests easily got lost in the shuffle.  Since each pending request begs a response, accept or decline, that turns out to be a problem.

Now the pending requests are floated up to the top, ready for responding to.  And among all upcoming appointments, now only the first 10 appear.  This puts into focus only the most immediately relevant ones.  To look further out, a handy “View all upcoming” button reveals the entire collection.

Coach-Only Appointment Types

Previously, any type of appointment that a coach could schedule was available for a client to schedule as well (assuming client scheduling was enabled).  But sometimes that’s not ideal, and there are some types of appointments which should be reserved for only the coach.

Now appointment types can be designated as schedule-able only by the coach.

Calendar-Embeddable Exceptions

Contrary to the model I’ve worked in and assumed of others, where the “office hours” into which clients can book themselves are more limited, the way Michael works is that essentially all work hours are open to client scheduling.  So keeping accurate exceptions to availability is critical to ensuring that clients schedule themselves at workable times.

Rather than have other life happenings in a separate calendar and have those happenings also need to be entered as exceptions in CoachAccountable, Michael figured it’s much easier to setup those exceptions once in CoachAccountable and then have then appear in his regular calendar software.  So now the collection of availability exceptions can be embedded into iCal, Outlook, and other systems much like appointment calendars can be.

Private Notes for Clients

In Michael’s work, where clients are working on overcoming sexual addiction, privacy is of utmost importance.  In the past I’d been remiss to add much to do about privacy between coach and client, reasoning instead from a premise of totally open and shared collaboration, but Michael sold me on a very good point: yes, client accounts are akin to a guest in the coach’s house, but more than that client accounts can be a certain sanctuary for clients where everything is kept all together as a useful resource, and that resource gets even better when a client is free to have their own privacy within it as well.

Thus clients too can create private journal entries for their eyes only, allowing them to feel even more at home within their client account.

Self-Assigned Worksheets

Here again Michael’s status as a power user reveals insight: before an appointment, Michael’s clients fill out a worksheet.  With so many clients having so many regular appointments, the need for coach to assign the worksheet for each one becomes cumbersome quickly.

Thus now specific worksheets can be made available for self-assignment by clients.

There are a few other tweaks,  and a spelling mistake catch or two, but the above captures the broad strokes of Michael’s contribution to date.  It’s an impressive set and speaks volumes to Michael’s sense for what’s widely useful.  In fact, while writing this post Michael had another good idea in my inbox which I reckon I’ll be adding: the ability to share library files with some or all clients in one fell swoop.

Thanks Michael for bringing your insight to the party, CoachAccountable is even better for it.

After explaining in detail the reasoning behind why I charge $50/month for white-labeling, I was delighted to receive a comment containing most thorough dissent from Michael Leahy, one of the newer customers of CoachAccountable, and one of my favorite for his high level of engagement and input.

I believe it’s the first real criticism ever to be expressed in the comments of this humble blog, and while the always-positive environment of the community’s feedback is a delightful boon to my morale, it does pose within it the chance of this devolving into a sort of rosy echo chamber.  By contrast, Michael’s strong opposition brings forth the chance for a lively exchange and exploration of ideas (if you haven’t read it yet, go check it out first before continuing), and affords me the chance to get off my laurels and work through a thoughtful response.

This is good stuff, so I’ve opted to move this more center stage into a post of its own rather than have it languish in the comments section.

Here is what I sent last night in response to Michael’s comments, edited slightly to make it fit for public consumption:

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your feedback.

After reading it through I’m left to wonder in earnest: why are you still a customer?  In asking that I’m not suggesting that it doesn’t make sense that you are, for I can think of numerous reasons based on your kind feedback that the system is overall doing good things for you and your clients.  But now on two separate occasions, one private and one public, you have railed against the pricing I have set to say it is not cost effective for you, despite that pricing being identical to what it was when you first signed up (barring the addition of Groups, which you then didn’t even know existed).

Moreover in your public comments you have insinuated that I’m ignoring the needs of my customers, am gambling with their future to overvalue and overprice, and am acting in a way that is emotionally too attached.  All while stating plainly that this is why software developers fail as business people.

I don’t want you to be suffering at my hands if you feel I’m recklessly running my software business.  I would miss you as a substantial paying customer, and more importantly as a fan and collaborator with your wonderful and insightful feedback.  But I will understand if my choices in the matter don’t work for you, and I will continue on serving the ever growing number of other coaches who do indeed vet my estimation of value by their willingness to pay for it and by their expressed appreciation.

Whatever your motives and whatever works for you ultimately in your coaching solution, I’m for it.

I’ll end by answering your question of why on earth I would hold out for a higher fee “knowing” your hypothetical and/or inaccurate suggested numbers, and it’s a reiteration of what I’ve already stated in the post: before I even contemplate lowering my pricing to serve the masses, I’m going to continue to work VERY HARD to make it so that your average coach, like you for example, can effectively sell and deliver coaching services to N more clients per month than they otherwise could, at their usual $X client revenue per month, such that N times $X is WAY more than the monthly $Y for CoachAccountable.

Ask for yourself what N needs to be in order to satisfy that equation, 3?  2?  Perhaps even 1?  For most coaches’ value of $X, I can put way more money in their pocket by helping them make N higher than I ever could by minimizing $Y.  (And then there’s the value those N additional people will get by being effectively coached, also a lovely outcome.)

That is the game I will continue to play as I grow this platform.  Whether you’re in or out, you have my deepest respect.

Cheers,
John

Fun stuff.  Nothing like a public challenge to bring out one’s A game.

After sleeping on it I see there’s one other piece of clarification which I should probably add.  I mentioned in an offhand way that I will accept going out of business should I fail to make a product worth the cost that I have set.  Michael says it is NOT OK for my customers if I happen to miscalculate and happen to go out of business, and wonders if I was being trite in saying that.

The answer is yes and no: I’m completely serious when I say I deserve to go out of business should I fail to create something worthwhile, AND it’s a fairly flippant remark to make at this stage, given the ever growing number of paying customers whose average spend is about $100 a month.  So don’t worry, CoachAccountable isn’t going anywhere.

Michael was kind enough to reply this morning.  It’s not my place to quote his words publicly, but suffice it to say his words came from a place of impassioned commitment to see CoachAccountable thrive, a sort of tough love that perhaps wasn’t fitting for public display.  Fair enough, I’d say it was every bit as pardonable and cliché‎ as a parent who cramps his teenager’s style through the occasional bout of excessive worry.  I’m good with it.

So to you, Michael, a heartfelt thanks for your contribution to a lively exchange.  In doing so you’ve given me a gem of an opportunity, to stumble upon what is perhaps the most real claim of value that I can offer via CoachAccountable:

It’s totally not catchy, but goodness the implications of this are nice for the future of CoachAccountable, the coaches it serves, and their naturally results-getting clients.

Note: As of late 2017, White Labeling is completely free/no longer entails any surcharge whatsoever–this article remains intact for historical purposes. :)

This is the thing about CoachAccountable for which I definitely take the most heat, that the right to white-label and style it as your own adds fifty bucks to the monthly subscription price.

I can appreciate that $50/month for this can be hard to swallow, and yes, I am aware that the Coaches Console offers this for free.

So why would I do this?

No, it’s not a ploy to get more CoachAccountable brand exposure out to potential customers, I’m going to go out on a limb here to surmise that the overlap between people being coached and people who might become customers is vanishingly small.

Here are the real reasons.

First it represents a sort of price segmentation that ultimately leads to lower pricing for coaches who can do without.  CoachAccountable remains a completely self-funded start up.  This is lovely, for as such I can focus on deliberately and methodically crafting a great product without investors breathing down my neck looking anxiously for their return on investment. But it means I still need this to be profitable enough for me to make a living off of it.

So charging larger outfits a little more for a premium add-on helps me grow the platform in this still-early phase of CoachAccountable’s existence.

Consider the grid below.   Larger, more established coaching practices generally fall in the lower-right quadrant.  They pay a little more for the premium add-on and it’s win-win.  The push back I get about the surcharge generally comes from the upper-right quadrant.   I totally understand the sentiment.  In those cases I actually encourage coaches with smaller client rosters (i.e. the situation in which the $50 flat fee amounts to a high per-client price hike) to consider that white labeling isn’t all that important, and that clients generally don’t think any less of the coaching experience when it comes with the CoachAccountable branding.

Indeed, the results one gets being coached are going to be the same whether it’s the CoachAccountable logo at the top of the screen or some other.

The second reason is to hold myself tightly to the cause of making a substantially value-adding piece of software.  If matching or beating someone else’s price is my way of earning the business of a paying customer, it means I can get away with a shoddier product.  So for now, as with the other premium add-ons (and even the core system), I’d rather be on the hook to make while labeling great and truly worth the cost.  If it turns out it’s not worth the money, no worries.  Rather than bargaining down, let me go back to the drawing board and make it better (and gracefully accept going out of business if I fail).

Finally, the premium surcharge for white labeling enables me to give due credit of earnest usage to those willing to pay the $50/month.  I still regularly take suggestions and feedback direct from my customers, from the $20/month Starter plan on up.  While I continue to evolve this platform, the whole pricing structure of CoachAccountable assures me that I’m taking my input from people who are vested enough to invest a few bucks a month into their system, ones who expect so much more than some cheap CRM with the word “coaching” on it.

So that’s why white labeling costs $50 extra per month, and similar reasoning applies to Courses and recently released Groups.  It’s not a popular choice, but a very deliberately strategic one.  To those who mind, I apologize and hope you’ll bear with me.

For those who don’t, I thank you for your enabling role in CoachAccountable’s growth.

Sometimes a simple misunderstanding reveals a good idea I never thought of.

In this instance of Delightful Collaboration that good idea came from David Green of LeadershipMARC, who forwarded me a URL for a page on CoachAccountable and wondered how to have that page be without the name of one of his clients:

The name is a fake but the branding is real.

I explained the misunderstanding, that this link was meant only to be the special page for his client to register her account (and that since that registration was already done, that’s why a login shows instead).  He countered with a most sensible expressed desire:

But I am looking for a landing page like that off of my website.

It’s a very good look.

Please tell me it’s possible.

Prior to this moment that screen, in all its customized, white-labeled glory, was only meant to be a one-off experience for clients.  But indeed it is a snappy login page, and a useful alternative to embedding a small login widget on one’s own site.  Immediately I agreed that it should be available to serve as coach’s own login page for their system, and took about 15 minutes to cook up a client-neutral variation:

Fit for any client of a given coach to login, branded to match his or her white-label settings.

Then I sent this reply:

David, I gotta hand it to you:

That’s a REALLY good idea.  So I’ve cooked up just that for you.  If you go to My CA >> My System >> White-Label Branding you’ll find a new piece there, “Customized Login Page”.  There you’ll find a magic link that is suitable for linking to as a branded, general purpose login for your clients.

Thanks for making the request, I imagine many other coaches will enjoy it as well!

I hope that they will!

Today I am delighted to announce a new major piece of the CoachAccountable platform: Groups.

Groups is CoachAccountable’s answer to supporting group coaching, designed to promote communication among group members, joint accountability, and a very real experience of  shared accomplishment and community support.

Let me show you around.

Groups for Team Efforts

Actions and Metrics are usually single-person affairs, but Groups take this to a new level of shared accountability and results.

With Group Actions you can create assignments for everyone in the group to tackle individually, and enable everyone to see how the group is doing as a whole.

When everyone can see what everyone else has or hasn’t done, people have a tendency to do their part.

With Group Metrics every member tracks their own result and the overall team performance can be seen, as either the sum or average of all of the individuals.

Metrics of individual clients are lumped together to reveal the overall performance of the group.

Groups for Communication and Collaboration

Easy sharing and messaging among group members is baked right in.  Messages can be posted to the group, items from individual coaching experiences can be shared with the group, comments are allowed on everything (easily added either when logged in or by replying to group email notifications), and coaches can even allow group members to send private messages to one another through the system.

Fine-Grain Control for the Coach

Coaches who setup their coaching groups can set a number of permissions regarding what client members can and can’t do.  At any time new client members can be added, and existing members can be deactivated or purged from the group all together.

You are free to set whatever is appropriate for your group coaching situation.

If needed, coaches can protect the relative anonymity of group members among one another.  Names can be masked and all communications among group members are handled by the system, meaning personal contact details are kept hidden by default.

Groups for Passive Oversight

Your coaching might not be suitable to have your clients talking and interacting amongst themselves, but perhaps they’re all up to the same thing and you’ll like to see a collective overview of how the team is doing.  With the option to make groups that are visible only to you, you can do just that.  Closed groups enable you to create Group Metrics and Group Actions just as in regular ones, leaving individuals with their individual assignments but only you with a view of the group’s aggregate performance.

All told Groups are ready to take the supporting structures of 1-on-1 coaching offered by CoachAccountable, and extend them into the realm of group coaching.  In the coming weeks I anticipate further evolving the system as coaches put Groups into real practice, and for now I’m excited for what’s newly possible in causing connection and accountability within group coaching.

One of the things I adore about being at the size that I’m at with CoachAccountable (and which I suspect I will eventually really miss) is that I’ve got time to personally reach out to the coaches who use the system.  Yesterday a cancellation notice crossed my email:

Coach Cancellation
Reason: involved in another wellness project
Comments: I love the service.  I will be back.  My private client case load is down while I take on a wellness consulting project. I hope to reengage in 2014.

Thanks for all your support!

This was coming from a woman who’d been using CoachAccountable since January, and with whom I’d already enjoyed a few nice exchanges.  When I saw this a few hours after it originally sent, I replied with the following:

Hi ____,

I just saw this notice come through, sorry to see you go but I completely understand! Thank you for being a most positively encouraging early adopter of CoachAccountable. If you’d like I’d be happy to make an exception and keep your data in tact, such that if and when you’re ready to pick up again next year you can do so from right where you left off.  I figure it’s the least I can do for you. :)

Thanks again for the kind words!
John

This morning she replied:

You are so kind! I would LOVE it if you kept my account. If all goes well, this consulting gig could lead to many more clients.

Regarding another topic…I do a lot of group coaching. It would be nice to have a feature that let’s me communicate with a group if people.

Thanks so much! I’ll stay in touch!

Nice!  Not only to be able to do for someone what turns out to be a useful favor (and indeed one that benefits me by making it easy for her to return as a paying customer), but that bonus insight into what would be useful to an interested user: support for group coaching.  The timing on hearing that is quite nice, for I was able to reply:

Super cool,

I will do just that.  Just drop me a line whenever you’re ready for me to reactivate your account.

Funny you should mention group coaching.  This week I’m putting on the finishing touches to CoachAccountable Groups and I will be releasing it next week.  Should be some new, useful goodies for you whenever you return!

Cheers,
John

This reply came swiftly back:

Please send me info when available…I may be back sooner than I thought. I will be conducting some groups and may find that service helpful :)

Thanks!

What a fine and unexpected outcome, just for sending a quick love note thanking a customer on her way out the door.  This is doubly nice for me because, when heads down coding a major new feature, nothing does quite so nicely to motivate and focus those efforts quite like hearing from REAL PEOPLE who are genuinely interested in what I’m working on.

So I get to commence my day of programming with renewed vigor and focus.  Reaching out to people is awesome.

10 months ago I released the “CoachAccountable’s Poignant Guide to Coaching with CoachAccountable”, a manual for coaches about how to incorporate CoachAccountable into their coaching style.

It is boisterous, just look at the color scheme of that sticker.

Today I’m excited to release a companion manual, written for the people being coached: “CoachAccountable’s Boisterous Guide to Being Coached with CoachAccountable“.

It covers both the motivation and mechanics of using the system.  My favorite part of this guide is that I’m inviting coaches to PLAGIARIZE THE HELL OUT OF IT.

Why?  These are strategies tuned to get clients more engaged in–and get the most from–the coaching process.  And even though they’re battle-tested over months of coaching, I readily grant that my voice and ideas might not be completely applicable to everyone’s coaching and clients.  So I’m inviting coaches to re-purpose and remix the ideas and essays in whatever way that fits to serve their clients.

Pass on the manual directly onto clients and tell them to skip the first half?  Cool.

Copy and paste whichever bits are useful into on-boarding materials?  Go for it.

Carefully read through and then co-opt the language and ideas to get clients oriented directly via conversation?  Love it.

However the ideas in this guide serve to get your clients more engaged and you to better coach them, I’m for it.

I’m really excited for this manual.  It finally represents a concise resource for coaching clients to get clear on–and excited about–the tools they’ll have while working with a coach.  I think it will help them generally get even more value out of the coaching work they undertake, and for me that’s the best part of all.

Download it here.

You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to find a ribbon of the exact shade of CA green, #6C9C31.

Goodness they grow up so fast when they’re young, don’t they?

Just yesterday CoachAccountable turned 1: it was one year ago that I released it from my laptop in Peru to deliberately very little fanfare.

In those days very few people who tried it really got the concept, because there wasn’t much by way of illustrating the why and the wins of using the system.  Now with explainer videos, an illustrated manual, a heap of blog posts, and a richer, more encompassing set of features people are much more able to understand the value of using CoachAccountable and put it into their practice (the change in my conversion rates make this most obvious!).

Year one of CoachAccountable’s public existence was marked by intentional obscurity.  Because I was traveling around the world as I went, I didn’t want the added responsibility of large amounts of traffic & interest (no, seriously).  The trickle traffic I got from search engines¹ was quite sufficient to cause a steady stream of new people trying out the software and reaching out to me.  So I got to grow and evolve things at a steady and very workable pace, considering the fact that during travel I would be offline for a week at a time now and then.  All this happened without doing a lick of advertising².

The result is a system I’m very proud of, and one which dozens of coaches have personally expressed to me their appreciation using nothing less than the L word (yeah that’s right: Love).

So it’s been a good year.  For CoachAccountable’s second year on the market I look forward to releasing support for both group coaching and teams of coaches, an enterprise edition, a manual written for clients, and a whole lot more besides.  And I’m going to forgo the luxury of obscurity before long: CoachAccountable has vetted itself as good enough that I may as well start promoting the darn thing in places outside of its own home on the web.

If you haven’t tried it, it’s just as easy to get set up with your own account it was on day one: in in 60 seconds, no credit card needed, 30 days free to play around.

And if you have tried it and already dig it, feel free to join in CoachAccountable’s emergence from obscurity by spreading the word (whilst earning a tasteful kickback in the process) by becoming an affiliate.

Thanks for being along this journey with me.  Here’s to coaching being great.

After 365 days of living and traveling abroad, my wife and I returned last month to the US.  Last weekend we moved into a home here in Denver, and just yesterday I setup my desk and my trusty ol’ desktop computer for working.

Prior to leaving the country last summer we road tripped about the US for 3 months.  Thus this marks the end of a full 16 months of working on CoachAccountable exclusively on my laptop.

Put another way, the bulk of CoachAccountable 2.0’s creation thus far has happened with my very minimalist setup whilst traveling.

Working on CoachAccountable while traversing the globe afforded me ample time to think through what I should work on and how to approach it.  So every time I actually sat down with good internet access, I had a very clear sense of my approach.  My efforts never came from an impulsive “ack, I gotta add this or try that!” but rather always from a well reasoned, carefully thought out place.  The intentional quality by which things have played out (to my surprise, everything I’ve built/written/created has gone over really well in terms of forward progress) is in many ways thanks to the slow pace that working while traveling mandated.

It also gave me a hands on experience of the internationalization features, especially managing timezone differences with clients on the other side of the globe.   It’s been a great way to polish these otherwise hard-to-experience aspects to perfection.

A few highlights from around the world:

• I launched CoachAccountable 2.0 from my kitchen table in Cusco, Peru exactly one year ago.
• I created the Coaching With Software course in the Euro Cafe in Granada, Nicaragua.
• I built Courses and wrote the Coaching With CoachAccountable manual whilst on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.
• I created the first explainer video introducing CoachAccountable while house sitting in  the suburbs of Sydney, Australia.
• I made a video illustrating CoachAccountable in action as well as a proper welcome for newly registered coaches in our house amid rice fields in Ubud, Bali.
• I met CoachAccountable’s first customer while passing through Singapore.
• I migrated to a bigger and better hosting environment from my bed in a guest house in Luang Prabang, Laos.
• I did a proper audio recording job for the marketing videos at a recording studio in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
• I migrated to an even bigger and better hosting environment from a cafe in Kathmandu, Nepal.
• I made a video about scaling coaching while looking out at the Libyan sea from our apartment in Crete, Greece.

Now that I’m settled here in the US with a much more regular living arrangement, I’m excited to do much more focused work on the platform.  (And I promise to not let my ability to do unfettered, heads-down work compromise the well thought out approach that this year has instilled in me.)

Much more to come in the coming weeks, it’s good to be home!