The CoachAccountable Blog

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 was 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.

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.