The CoachAccountable Blog

A few weeks ago I got a request from one of the coaches on CoachAccountable:

I set myself up as a client and am essentially coaching myself.  I setup metrics to daily enter things from productivity level to weight lost.  I wondered if there was a way to have ourselves in the system but have it not count against our total clients?  It has helped me better understand how to use the tool with clients but as I get closer to ten clients I hate to have to pay for the higher tier.  Is there already a way to use the tool for ourselves or is this a possibility in the future?

At first I didn’t give this request much heed: doing extra coding and adding complexity to the system to have it track which client is technically the coach him or herself didn’t seem appealing, just to accommodate the (overall) rare event that a coach coaching themselves would push them over the threshold of the next subscription level.

But then I meditated on it, quite literally.

During some of my time in silence in a meditation course at the Kopan Monestary in Nepal I mused how good an idea it truly was, to encourage coaches to coach themselves within the system.  Even my biggest fan commented back in February how important doing this was for appreciating how useful the system is is from a client perspective.

Indeed, this freebie client would encourage something that is very much to be encouraged.  So after coming down from the mountain (again, quite literally), I added this as quickly as my travel schedule and Nepalese internet connections would allow.

Now when you add a new client whose email address matches your own, a quick little popup will give you the option to set that client as your “this is me coaching myself” client.  It’s your freebie client, and if you take CoachAccountable up on the offer, the system will offer to setup a few things to get you started, whichever bits you like.

A few quick steps give you the option to set up a few things, each of which are designed to help you get familiar with the system.

It’s a fine experience of the system early on, allowing a coach to see firsthand what it’s going to be like to work through actions, worksheet assignments, and tracking Metrics in CoachAccountable.  This is an important thing, considering that a coach trying CoachAccountable is, essentially, contemplating setting up his or her own clients for the very same experience.

My thanks go out to the coach whose inquiry sparked such inspired thought!

Hot of the heels of the release of in-system messaging within CoachAccountable, I’ve already had a number of requests that it be possible to send a message to some or all clients at once.

I never meant for CoachAccountable to serve as anything resembling a email broadcast platform, but when I see what a natural fit it is to build upon the in-system messaging (with all of it’s perks) I see this as a rather nice fit after all.

You can personalize your bulk message by inserting your client’s name and a magic login link.

In the wake of the two substantial outages earlier during my 10 days offline (I tell you, nothing takes away the peace of mind feeling from a meditation course quite like learning that your server was offline for a total of 11 hours while you were away), I see now that there is to again upgrade CoachAccountable’s hosting setup.

During the outages, the VPS (stands for “Virtual Private Server”) environment suffered from the impacts of other tenants on the machine.  Between downtime and occasionally VERY SLOW performance, I’m clear that this mission critical application for a growing number of coaches is no longer suitable for that kind of vulnerability (indeed, things were simpler when I had more like four customers!).

To that end, CoachAccountable has now just been moved to its new home: a fully dedicated server with a quad core processor, 8GB of memory, and a zippy SSD hard drive.

My sincerest apologies to those coaches (and their clients) who were affected by the outage times earlier this month.  To them and everyone else I sincerely thank you for your patience during the growing pains of CoachAccountable.  I take reliability of the platform very seriously, and am happy to have taken the suitable (and indeed necessary!) measures for greater reliability and speed as things continue to unfold.

It’s hard for me to know for sure as my shaky internet connection here in Nepal has every page taking some 10 seconds or more to load, but I’m told that things are running much faster than there were before.

Right then, back to developing more useful new features!

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.