The CoachAccountable Blog

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!

A few weeks ago I reached out to a coach who was new to the system to see how it was going for him.

Though “so far so good” was the overall message, part the feedback was this:

There are a few issues. Can I send Audio (.mp3) or videos thru the system? It would be terrific to integrate links to sugar sync or dropbox folders so as to not get heavy on the files I send.

At first glance my answer was clear, of course!  I proudly began to type out my reply:

You’ve got a few options for sending audio and video though the system.  You can upload those files into your library once (My CA >> My Library) and then share them with clients with a few clicks on the Files tab of their respective client pages.  Or in your case (and this might be better as you’ve already got your files already online) you can share links to those files with your clients via CA in, say, a journal entry or as part of a worksheet assignment, or in a Stream comment.

As I wrote this I got to thinking this was actually a lackluster answer, and I was surprised to realize it.

So I continued with the next paragraph:

(You know, as I’m thinking about how to do this I’m struck by how there isn’t a really great way to share files via URL, just a few okay ways.  I think I’ll add “Share by URL” as an option in the file sharing system today, which I think will be a really good fit for your setup–stay tuned!)

Now we’re talking.  I sent off my reply, and inspired at the realization of a juicy bit of lacking functionality of CoachAccountable, I set off to make good on my word.

Later that day I wrote:

…
I’ve added the ability to share files by URL.  For now it’s limited to just library files, I figure I’ll let this play out in the wild a little and then extend it to one-off client file sharings once the current setup is vetted as solidly on the right track.

Give it a try: you’ll note the new “Add a File Hosted Elsewhere Online” section under My CA >> My Library.  You can add files that are themselves links to other files (say, ones hosted at dropbox) or even external webpages that have one or more files there to download.  This is nice because you still get the organization of having the file in the files tab, notification emails, commenting on the file in the stream & by email, and the system will track when they have most recently accessed the file, if at all.

I hope that serves, and thanks for the inspiration!  I bet a lot of other coaches will find this similarly useful.

The reply was a treat.  Assurance that, yep, I’d gotten it right:

This is a terrific update. I, for sure, will use this.

It wasn’t long after I added this ability that another user of CoachAccountable chimed in some insightful thoughts:

A quick note to say thanks for the adding files from other sources… now I think I can make my courses self-contained within CA and thus a little more idiot proof. Just one thing, can we please add a title for linked files – otherwise they see the file link – which is rarely obvious what it is and it would help when they are searching in the library for a particular file – for those that don’t follow the notification link.

Good point.  Direct links to files hosted with services like DropBox or Evernote are often garbled messes.   I set about adding titles to library files, including files uploaded the “old fashioned” way:

What I really like about this is that it allows coaches to share many megabytes worth of files with their clients without bumping up against their plan’s disk space quota.  There are so many services online that are better for big file hosting, I see no reason for CoachAccountable to try taking their place!

My thanks go out to both coaches, whose use of other file hosting services for their coaching resources made it clear how to best roll roll such file sharing into CoachAccountable.

As a single coach, my experiences can run a reasonable size of the gamut of all possible coaching scenarios, techniques, and structural setups.  Still, there’s no question that my familiarity falls well short of the 100% mark: there are a ton of ways of doing things that I’ve just never considered.  Thus it is delightful with other coaches share with me what they’re doing in their practice, insomuch as CoachAccountable might be able to help.

The Delightful Collaboration Series is accounts of when users of CoachAccountable reach out to me and say things to the tune of “Hey, this is nice but can you make it do…”.  On these occasions I get a glimpse into the coaching practices of others, and get familiar with [potential] uses for the software that I hadn’t considered myself but would be a big win for someone else.  I take these as suggestions of how I might tweak or build upon the current CoachAccountable.

Now then, by default it’s my duty to be super selective about which suggestions I take to heart.  In software development there’s a concept called “feature dilution”.  We all have limited attention to give to the software tools we use, and every feature that is added necessarily dilutes the attention we can give to all the others.

This is most easily recognized in software that is bloated, over complicated, and ultimately not fun to use.  Sure it does everything, but in trying to be all things to all people it ends up loved by no one.  MS Word has like a million features, only about 6 of which you need.

So I must carefully weigh suggestions for new features against the impact of feature dilution, and do my best to make additions to the system that make it more powerful without making it more complex.    Even if I could assume all coaches using this thing were willing to take on being technically savvy, the ease and joy of using CoachAcountable cannot be compromised for the many more who are coached.

This tale of delightful collaboration is about long term goals and progress, and comes from Twila Gates of the ADHD Success Network.  During an exchange by email, Twila said to me:

In the future would it be possible to have a section specifically for major goals for the coaching.  In my second session with clients we focus completely on setting these major goals, many of which are long term and not something I would necessarily set up as a metric, but rather as an item that would be subjectively rated possibly every 8-10 weeks. …

This to me sounded like it was indeed a fit for Metrics (ratings on a 1-10 scale, subjective elements captured as comments), but they might require some finessing to make them really work for what she was looking for.  I replied:

Let me mull on this, but I think an 80% solution might be as simple as letting you set the sort order of metrics as they appear in the Metrics tab.  That way you could put all those long range ones towards the bottom, and group ’em all together for easy inspection.

I got back:

Yes, sorting, field identifying type of goal for sorting, or any easy way to separate the goals like “daily planning” (a daily goal) at top from “I follow through consistently” (a less specific goal – assessed every 2-3 months)  visually would be great!  I could make do with that and be happy and leave you alone for a while.

Someday, maybe you might consider having  the goals just be a list with a drop-down graphic view so it is easier to see just a list of the goals to easily find the one you want to update.

And then also:

Oops forgot to ask… could a metric “frequency” be added for every 2 months or 8 weeks.  Once a month would be too frequent for these major goals.

Hmmm… the option to have metrics that called for bi-monthly reporting was easy enough to add, created no real clutter, and would serve longer term goals.  Done and done.  Then Twila generously provided me with a visual mockup of what she had in mind, illustrating the “drop-down graphic view”:

Ahhh… now I get it.  Looks nice, too!  Right then, bi-monthly metrics plus the ability to visually move those less-frequent, more “big-picture” out of the way so they don’t clutter the more regular coaching activities is looking like the right path to nicely supporting long range goals.

Rather than making something fancy and complicated like labeling and grouping for metrics (which would be heavy handed and require coaches to think up fitting organizational schemes), the ability to sort and collapse metrics will make a nice, light way to organize things.  After a bit of prodding (“Just wondering how you are coming with the changes for the major goals (metrics)…”), I added sorting and a little arrow to expand or collapse a given metric, and we’re set:

My gratitude goes out to Twila who let me know what she wanted to accomplish, and engaging me in a dialog about how to cook that up in a way that makes the system generally better.  Delightful collaboration indeed!

A fast, responsive user experience is one of those things that never goes out of style in software.

The CoachAccountable user base and database are getting large enough that certain processing bottlenecks are starting to become noticeable, and thus the system is ripe for a bit of tuning and optimization.

After a fine session of profiling the performance of database interactions that happen with software, I’ve identified a number of wins.  It used to be that a coach with 10 clients would require about 190 queries for data from the database to render the dashboard screen (about 40 of them were to fetch, over and over, the symbol of the currency chosen by the coach–yeesh!).

Now it’s down to about 70.  About 0.5 seconds of total database work to load that page has been reduced to around 0.039 seconds.  Similar wins were reached for loading client pages.  Saving half a second in load time may sound minor, but this amounts to about a 10x increase in the capacity to comfortably and speedily serve users.

More optimization tricks up my sleeve to come over the next month.   Making the system zippier and more responsive is fun and super satisfying, and I know you and your clients appreciate software that is just plain fast.

Have you ever thought about what coaching looks like?  Or, more to the point, what YOUR coaching looks like?

It’s more worth pondering than you might imagine.

Coaching by its very nature is a rather abstract process: you would be hard pressed to fill a box with “coaching”, point to it and say “Here, this is what coaching looks like.”  It’s more elusive than that.  Most coaching relationships (even the really good ones), appear on the surface to be a jumble of documents, a few email exchanges, and memories of some good sessions (plus notes about them, maybe).

They appear that way because that’s what they are.

This poses a problem of presentation for any given coach, and for coaching in general.  To the people who hire you, external appearances often form a huge basis for choosing a coach, and even choosing whether to be coached at all.  It’s hard to show off something that is inherently so abstract, and smooth glossy brochures (and their digital analogs) are generally met with at least some skepticism.   You might not trust them to mean anything more than a good design budget, and the same applies for your would-be clients.

This problem gives way to an upshot of using CoachAccountable that is easy to overlook, namely: CoachAccountable is designed to be a professional representation of the quality coaching you do.  The structure and documentation of the happenings between you and your clients takes an abstract process and organizes it into something tangible.

Tangible representation of your coaching means your clients get something that is easy to review and revisit, and makes the value and results of your coaching evident (both during and after your coaching engagements).

This tangible representation that CoachAccountable provides also happens to be interactive, and so will be a component of your clients’ overall experience of working with you.  This fact is taken very seriously: if CoachAccountable is non-trivially part of the coaching you give, CoachAccountable better be darn good.

Every aspect of the system has been carefully crafted to be aesthetically appealing and inviting to use.  It’s not just a matter of pretty pixels, but rather serious recognition that visual impressions matter.  Having a system that just plain looks good and feels good to use sets clients up to appreciate your coaching as equally professional and polished.

As a showcase of your work this becomes so much more than a brochure.  Instead, it’s the real this is what my coaching looks like and this is how it works.  As I detailed in the guide to coaching with CoachAccountable, there are a number of ways to do this:

• Set up a demo account of a typical coaching client relationship, complete with actions, worksheets and/or whatever else shows of the sort of work you do.  Share the login or screenshots however you see fit.
• Set up a new (or prospective) client with an account ready for their coaching relationship day 1, including any items that mark the onset of your process (intake forms, first actions, goals, etc.).  Walk them through where things are and how things will work.  Let them see your process and experience firsthand what it will be like to work within it.
• Use embedded metrics to showcase results that are typical of your coaching work (possibly pulled from past coaching work, anonymized as appropriate).

CoachAccountable lets you go one step further as a professional representation of your coaching.  If the core system makes your coaching [process and results] more tangible, custom branding makes it more your own.  At your option, you may essentially white-label the platform and brand it as though it were your own, giving a further degree of professionalism to the presentation of your coaching.

So what does your coaching look like?  If you’ve never given it any serious thought, CoachAccountable might offer you a nice path to answer that question.  Your clients, especially future ones, are truly interested to know. Try CA free for 30 days.

Sometimes in a coaching session you might determine that you want your coachee to take on a regular practice for the coming week.  It might be some new habit that will be most beneficial by becoming engrained, or just something that simply deserves to be more than a one-time good idea.

I had this with one of my coachees, Tim, last week.  He’s exploring a new way of offering and selling his services as he moves beyond offering commodity technical services and into more sophisticated consulting.

“Try this”, I said.  “Over the next week, I want you to find 5 occasions to take just 10 minutes and ponder who you might pitch to and what you might present.  Then journal about those 10 minutes, either the ideas you got, the insights you had, or the actions you took.  Just 10 minutes, do it 5 times.”

It should be noted that this sort of thing is generally a lot to ask of someone you coach.  They have to remember to follow through not just once but on five separate occasions, and do so with a behavior that, by its very nature, is not yet natural.

But this is also very powerful: it’s building a practice that sets your coachee up to shift things on an ongoing basis.

Tim said it would be really nice if CoachAccountable had recurring actions.  I suppose it would be, but then again that sort of thing might be cumbersome and complicated to set up.  Then I realized there was a nice way to do it.

I created a single action, and then with a few clicks made a sequence of regular reminders, like so:

This way we had everything we needed to set Tim up to regularly do his thing.  Regular reminders would prompt him to take those 10 minutes on a daily basis.  From the reminder email he could click into CoachAccountable and make his journal entries.

The regular practice ending up bearing real fruit as he gradually trained his mind to regularly look for opportunities to play with his new style of sales.  Tim ended up completing 4 of those journal entries during the week, and having the system remind him to take the time on a regular basis got way more follow through on this exercise than could usually be expected.

I dub these “pseudo-recurring actions”: they aren’t recurring actions per-se, but by smartly setting up a set of reminders for a single, ongoing action you can get the people you coach to follow through a lot more in their practice of new habits.