The CoachAccountable Blog

Following shortly after the sharp and fitting chastising I got the other week for shoddy audio quality on the CoachAccountable homepage videos, I had a really fun session in the Voice of Peace recording studio located in Chiangmai, Thailand.  With the help of Poe, VOP’s in house audio technician, I was able to do 2 solid takes for each of the videos (including one on scaling coaching programs, still yet to be animated).

90 minutes very well spent!

The result is now finally in place for the current set of homepage videos.  I don’t have a terribly well-trained ear for audio quality, but when I got home and listened to the studio recordings and then again the ones I had earlier (with my $19 headset), the difference was STAGGERINGLY clear.  So overall I daresay it made quite the upgrade.

I’ve now finished remixing and uploading the 3 videos.  Doing so called for a lot of tweaking of the visual elements’ timing, and while at it I also made a bunch of updates to make things even prettier.  The end result speaks for itself.

Right then, so that should make it much harder to discern that CoachAccountable is a one-man operation.  Should be easier now to keep that fact on the down low.  Mum’s the word. :)

Every now and again I’m asked if CoachAccountable can be used to send messages between coach and coachee.  My thought process in responding usually goes like “Well, sort of: journal entries, session notes, action alerts, reminders, file sharing notifications… all kinds of messaging!”  But the real essence of the question is of course concerning more fundamental messaging, like an email.

Until now, my response has been to just use email.  Email is great, everyone gets it and is already set up to use it.  There’s no reason to reinvent that wheel within the context of coaching software, I figured.

It turns out there are a number of perks CoachAccountable can offer by way of a messaging system, perks that specifically support coaching relationships.

You can quickly contact your clients via in-app messaging OR via system email addresses.

Let’s look at how CoachAccountabe’s in-app messaging works.

Sending a message is just like composing an email, and either coach or coachee can message the other.  Here, for our example, coach is bringing down the hammer upon coachee (because people who are coached are up to big stuff, and sometimes get behind):

Dude, where’s my follow through?

Note the [loginLink], which means the email will send off to the coachee with a one-click access to magically log them in (let’s make it as easy and effortless to have them comply with our request, right?).

Coachee gets an email just as composed by the coach, plus your spiffy coach branding (makes the email stand out, reminds your coachee “Ah, this is a coaching email, coaching emails are important!”, and keeps your branding consistent):

Mmmm… pretty emails!

Coachee does his thing, logging in and acting upon your most actionable request.  When done, he can reply right back to you like a normal email:

The reply comes right to your email (OR as a text, if you’ve set your North American cell up and chosen that notification setting), keeping you in the loop:

Oh good, he’s not totally asleep at the wheel on this.

Back in CoachAccountable, the Stream on the coachee’s page updates accordingly as the communication unfolds, meaning that this exchange has been automatically captured in the growing record of your coaching happenings.  This is kinda cool right now, and very cool later (when review, reporting, and/or auditing become interesting and/or necessary).  As a bonus, coach can see when the coachee actually opened the email:

Prettier than the average inbox search, I reckon.

To recap, the benefits of CoachAccountable messaging between you and your clients (over conventional email) are:

• Super simple to send while within CoachAccountable, when coaching is your focus.
• Coaches can provide a magic login link for clients as part of their messages.
• Messages arrive with the coach’s branded style, looking sharp and differentiated.
• Coach is able to see if (and when) the client opened the message.
• Replies work just like regular email.
• The complete exchange (which happens via conventional email) is automatically documented and filed away in CoachAccountable, meaning it’s ripe for referencing later, for recall, documentation, auditing, etc. No searching through your various email addresses for that one message that you can’t quite remember the subject of.

Keep all your exchanges with coaching clients in one place – sign up for a free 30-day trial of CoachAccountable.

Just launched, a tidy redesign of coachaccountable.com.

Designed by the talented Anne Richardson of Local Flavor Marketing, the newness is geared to highlight the (relatively) new explainer videos.  The videos are doing a bang up job of telling the story of CoachAccountable, so I figured they deserve more front-and-center treatment (rather than just sloppily tacked on, one after another, as I had been doing.  Ahem.)

The result is light, clean, and crisp.  You can see in the comparison of the old homepage to the new:

I also took this opportunity to remix the login screen.  Rather than having it tucked away amid lots of other things going on (which presents coaches and moreover coachees with way more informational content than they generally want to see when just accessing the system), I gave it it’s own tidy little screen:

Thanks Anne for the bang up job on the aesthetic remix!  I’m delighted to see your pretty pixels up in place, and reckon others will agree.

Earlier this week I got an email in my inbox that positively tickled me:

Subject: Feedback on your website presentation…..

Guys, its looks like you spent a lot of time and effort on your product, your website and your branding. For a company to spend this much effort, but then have the speaking portion of your presentations done on a very cheap headset microphone is INCREDIBLY limiting to the perception that potential clients will have of you. I can’t believe that a company that has this much talent, would allow something as simple as your message to be portrayed with such serious lack of quality.

It’s not the speaker, the information which is articulated well, or the speed in which it’s delivered. it’s the recognition that it was done through a $12 microphone headset. I hope that you’ll read this and go back to your website and update your videos with some quality. Believe it or not, that one improvement will raise your value tremendously. Just an FYI from a professional business owner who trains people in sales and marketing….

Sometimes criticism comes your way that is so raw and on point that you can’t help but snap to attention, I imagine not unlike how a Private in boot camp reacts when the drill sergeant starts yelling.

Here’s my immediate reply:

Wow, thanks for the very kind and doubly thoughtful note!  You totally busted me, my $12 microphone is indeed the culprit here (actually I think it was $19 at Best Buy last summer, but yeah :).  A good friend of mine just last week said essentially the same thing to me, that the only discernible clue that CoachAccountable is a one man operation is the narration quality in those videos.

My excuse is either fascinating, or flimsy, or both: I’m currently traveling abroad for a year on a world tour with my wife, and during this time (9 months and counting) I’m working on things as we go (I launched CA from my kitchen table in Cusco, Peru).  So indeed the microphone I’m toting in my backpack is the only thing I’ve got on me for the job.

Still, your words resonate with me immensely.  So much so that I’ve just googled for “Chiang Mai sound studio” and came across this site, I’ll give them a call when business hours commence to see if I can’t get in for an hour or two (it’s 6:30am right now here in Thailand).  That, and my aforementioned friend is a bassist with all the proper gear who has offered to take a crack that the narration.  I just forwarded your note to him and asked if he might do so in the next 24 hours.

So thanks again for busting my chops in a brutally honest and deliciously effective way. Let me see what I can cook up, and I’ll drop you a line when some new, more respectable audio is in place!

Cheers,
John

PS: I appreciate your writing me so much that, should you decide to grab yourself an account sometime in the future, I’ll be happy to extend your free trial to two months as thanks for your taking out the time!

I’m happy to report that tomorrow afternoon I’ve got a session booked in a sound studio here in town, so some better audio tracks for the home page videos are coming soon.

There’s a lesson in coaching to be taken from all of this.  Between a coach having the right wisdom or knowledge, and imparting that wisdom or knowledge in a way that it actually gets acted upon by the coachee, the latter is quite often the harder piece.

The guy who wrote me out of the blue in this instance nailed both.

This one’s been floating around in my brain for a while now.

Coaching is abstract, often easy to forget, and generally hard to visualize and review.  A sharp lookin’ system like CoachAccountable goes a long way to fixing this problem of presentation, and there’s now a video to illustrate exactly what I’m talking about.

Watching in full screen mode is highly recommended.

Ready to up your professional game? Sign up for CoachAccountable.

One of the most common inquiries I get about CoachAccountable goes approximately like this:

Can you tell me the major differences between your coaching tool and Coaches Console?

At the risk of appearing lazy and/or ignorant, my answer is always, well, no, no I can’t.

For better or worse (and I think it’s better, bear with me here), I’ve willfully remained ignorant of other coaching software solutions that are out there.  This may seem like a fool-hardy gap in my attention considering the industry I’m in, but turning a blind eye to the goings-on of my, I dunno, “competitors”, I guess, has served me quite well.

The reason is this.  If you aren’t confident you’re making a dynamite product to serve the uses you are aiming to serve, then looking out at what other people are doing is going to leave you in a mindset of needing to keep up with the Joneses, pitting you in a sort of features arms race.  (For example, “They have email newsletter blasts?  Well then I’ll have email newsletter blasts!” or, worse yet “Well then I better have email newsletter blasts or my system WILL BE INFERIOR.”)

If you are confident that you’re making a dynamite product for your intended purpose, then looking out for what others are doing is going to be simply a distraction.

In either case, you can’t unfill your head with ideas that such reconnaissance of the competitive landscape provides, and the ideas you get will be only informed from a surface understanding, i.e. they are doing X, which is far cry from “I’m going to do X because I recognize a genuine need and value to doing so.”  From the surface understanding you can only be a copycat, and thus not at the source of the why, which, it turns out, is needed to inform the how of a truly excellent execution.

(Incidentally, I personally transitioned gradually from the first scenario to the second over the last 7 months–I had a hunch I was on to something great, but there was still yet to see if anyone would find it worth paying for.  My reasoning with regard to ignoring other coaching solutions has remained invariant the whole time.)

So to avoid a sort of features arms race between other systems I’ve remained willfully ignorant of what the other online coaching platforms do.  This has made me much better able to focus on making a system that I think is actually great for the uses I see to serve (rather than work hard to keep pace with some features checklist).

This principle actually hearkens back to the experience of the 1.0 days.  We extensively researched other coaching management platforms out there back in ’08 when we were first getting started, and it led to a lot of unnecessary complexity that we thought we’d need to have (I can’t tell you how happy I am to have completely axed the calendar feature in version 2.0–no one seems to mind).

My ignorance in this narrow band is working well, I’d say.  I do have a number of “defectors” from Coaches Console who have expressed their gratitude for the alternative (plus many more appreciative users from other backgrounds/systems), which suggests, ostensibly, that I’m on the right track.

I used to call this “Custom Branding”, but I don’t think that really communicates to most folks.

“Custom branding?  No, I’ve already got my logo and color scheme sorted, thank you.”

White-labeling, by contrast is, a much more common phrase, and the standard understanding/expectation of what is meant by it is exactly what I wish to convey.

As of today CoachAccountable is available as full-fledged white-branded coaching software solution, meaning you set it up and your clients need never see the words “CoachAccountable” nor ever need directly visit the site.

Setup is a snap: pick your color scheme, choose a name, and upload a logo & favicon.

Pick a color, pick a name. You’re almost done.

Go one step further and embed a login widget on your website.  Adding a little snippet of HTML into the right place enables your clients to log in from your home on the web, not CoachAccountable’s:

<iframe src=”https://www.coachaccountable.com/login?s=6dumgjrCzFxv8au48uyg” height=”180″ width=”320″ border=”0″ scrolling=”no” style=”border: none;” /></iframe>

A login interface, seamlessly embedded in the sidebar of a coaching website.

(You may need help from your web guy or gal on this one, but it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to do.)

And you’re done.  Your clients are welcomed to YOUR system when they follow your invite to create an account…

Your smiling face assures clients they’re in the right place.

…and your system is lookin’ sharp once they log in.  Note the title and spiffy icon up there in the browser tab:

This is one comfy lookin’ system, yo.

And that’s all there is to it.  Very little work to setup, and for it you get a seriously professional representation of your own private brand, seen regularly by the people you coach.

White-labeling CoachAccountable is completely not necessary, the system looks really sharp as it is.  But if it makes a difference to the people or organizations that you serve, you can have your own private-label coaching software up in no time.

If you haven’t got one already, you can try this out with your own free account, get started in under a minute.

Last week during the database downtime incident happening at the (now past) hosting environment, Scott Hudspeth of Marketing in the Clouds dropped me an email:

Tried to sign up through 2 different browsers, are you guys having issues?

Scotty

Sure enough, this was during the 90-minute downtime window we had.  Luckily I was online (this was at around 9am in Laos), and was able to reply 7 minutes later:

Hi Scott,

Unfortunately we are–CoachAccountable is hosted with DreamHost (for literally about 1 more day only), and they are having a major outage right now: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2013/03/26/connection-issues-in-us-west-data-center-los-angeles-ca/

The public site is up, but the database connectivity is down, hence your difficulty in signing up.

Thanks for dropping me a line, and thanks for your patience as this gets sorted.  As you might imagine, I’m now doubly keen to get things moved over to a more reliable and high-powered host!

Cheers,
John

We volleyed a little more with Q and A, and I was feeling pretty good that most of what Scott was looking for was, sure enough, supported by CoachAccountable.  20 minutes later the database was back up and everything was back to normal.  I relayed the good news, Scott signed himself up, and onward we volleyed with Q and A about the system, now based on his firsthand experience of playing around with the system.

After fielding a few more questions and explaining how CoachAccountable courses work, Scott made my day with a shining endorsement:

This system is sick brother and exactly what I needed my friend.

I’m honored and blessed to have met you by email :)

I was moving on being the sign up didn’t work but something said to try the support email to see what happens and you responded.

Thank you for responding, I usually don’t give it a second chance.

Love it, you have a client for life

Wow, I am SO GLAD he gave CoachAccountable the second chance with his simple note that started off the exchange, and, in a roundabout way, appreciate how the outage gave us the reason to connect and chat over email in the first place¹.

So thanks for your patience, Scott.  May CoachAccountable serve you and your people fantastically!

If you’ve been reading this blog a while, you’ve no doubt come across the words of Dr. John Kenworthy of Celsim Business leadership coaching.  Dr. John signed himself up for a CoachAccountable account on launch day back at the end of August, and since then has been the most publicly vocal fan of the system since.  Some days, in fact, I wonder if people think I contrived him as a character with which to have conversations in the comment threads on this blog.

He is very consistently pro CoachAccountable, after all.

But no, it turns out he is quite real indeed.  Despite the fact that we share the same first name, further supporting speculation that he is but a CA-promoting figment of my imagination, Dr. John lives in Singapore.

Now then, Tracy (my wife) and I are based in Denver, USA. but we are in the middle of a year’s worth of travel around the world.  So when Dr. John casually mentioned we come visit back in October (when we were then living in Nicaragua), I gave him a non-committal “Hey that would be cool, if we make it there I’d love to meet you!”.

Three weeks ago we managed to swing on by and visit the city-state of Singapore, and finally have lunch with the man.  Among a lot of things we talked about the origins of CA, how I came up with Metrics, and what’s next for the platform.  I even told him about the secret gallery feature which allows the embedding of images into worksheets, session notes, and so forth.  It’s a feature which entails a lot of complexity to make user friendly for folks who aren’t savvy to HTML, but that Dr. John has asked me for on a nearly monthly basis since the beginning.  (I’ve since enabled it for his account alone as an experimental feature.)

I also busted him on plagiarizing a paragraph or two of mine from the CoachAccountable manual in his new book, What’s Better Today, and he promptly busted me for forgetting that I gave him permission to do it months ago.

All in all we had a delightful time meeting after months of emailing back and forth.  The best (and most surprising) was hearing that about the time I’d saved him.  He said simply “You’ve saved me 15 hours, John”, to which I replied “Well cool, may it save you 15 hours more!”

“No, you’ve saved me 15 hours per week.”  15 hours to do other things every week because of the automated reminders, assignments, and follow ups, both in and out of courses.

Wow.

When I launched this thing from my kitchen table in Cusco, Peru I couldn’t really know exactly how it was going to go.  Dr. John’s fandom in those early days made it all the easier to keep the faith as I progressed in relative obscurity.  While visiting over lunch it was my absolute delight to tell him as much and thank him accordingly.

Leadership from a Dancing Guy is an apt metaphor for how this all went down: I was the dancing nut, and he’s the first guy to join me, transforming an individual’s quirky behavior into a movement for the masses.

Thanks, Dr. John.

Well, technically speaking CoachAccountable is about the same size.  But the server on which it is hosted is bigger, and sure enough the CoachAccountable application runs noticeably faster.

On the heels of a pair of downtime issues with the previous hosting provider over the last 7 days, I decided CoachAccountable has outgrown its modest hosting home and deserves a little faster & more reliable hardware on which to run.  Just a few hours ago I switched things over during a maintenance window of just 12 minutes, and things are up and zooming delightfully faster than before.

The difference is most noticeable when you first log in!