Jerry is an entrepreneur & life coach who does 1-on-1 coaching. Prior to using CoachAccountable she felt frustrated by the difficulty she faced in effectively serving a large number of coachees. In her words:

"I recall sitting in my office in NYC … as I considered throwing in the towel on my coaching career. The challenge wasn't that I didn't have enough clients, it was that the ones I DID have, I could not keep track of! There is no way to be a deep listener and take notes at the same time. Scheduling sessions felt like playing ping pong, back and forth with dates and times. I couldn't recall what forms I'd sent to whom, and had to spend 3-5 minutes following old email trails right before an upcoming session."

The beneficial ways that Jerry has employed CoachAccountable in her practice include:

1. Appointments have made scheduling with her clients effortless and easily manageable.
2. She has the system send follow-up forms to her coachees 3 hours after her sessions, which helps motivate them, reminds them of what to do, and lets them take stock of all they've accomplished.
3. She has a ritual of spending 10-20 minutes every few days writing little emails to her coachees (via the system) acknowledging their progress. Because she can see accurately right there what they've done it's a quick task for her that keeps clients excited and bolsters their motivation.
4. By having her key files and worksheets loaded into the system she's able to easily react to wherever her coachee is, sending them with just a few clicks whatever would make a difference.
5. Her clients love using it because everything is in one place. "My client had even written in to our coaching agreement that she could opt to bow out of using any platform to communicate, but now she's a total convert!"

Jerry estimates the system saves her 5-6 hours per week. The automation provided by the system gives her coachees the experience of Jerry being with & supporting them, even when she's instead walking her dog on the beach. In her words, "CoachAccountable LITERALLY saved my business. Since using the platform, in less than a year I've served over 30 clients with ease and grace, and continue with many of them today."

Greg is a sales coach. In one of his programs he coaches high-end management consultants to be themselves effective sales people, a critical component of biz dev within consulting firms. Over an 8-week program Greg teaches them skill sets that are typically way outside of their comfort zone—sales mindset and strategy.

With CoachAccountable Courses Greg has his program participants receive an email every morning with an audio segment and an accompanying worksheet or task. In Greg's words:

"It really sets up their day. These people are busy and are able to take just 20 minutes per day to do their learning. The mobile app is huge for them, letting them listen to the lesson for the day like it's a podcast, and then do their worksheet to reflect and solidify what they just learned."

In another program for sales people Greg makes extensive use of Metrics, having them track KPIs around their sales funnel as well as for building habits, like mastering elevator pitches and handling common objections for smoothness that only muscle memory can provide. CoachAccountable helps build those habits by routine Metric reminders ("How many times did you practice your pitch today?"), and as Greg puts it "because they can just reply to the email reminder with their number, they actually do it".

At the end of week Greg has CA setup to send a "how's it going" survey to all his coachees, which effectively collects testimonials for him as well as lets coachees appreciate their own progress of what they got recently. "It never works as well to ask them to take stock at the end of the program, they forget all of the progress and wins that happened earlier. This way they really appreciate the progress as they're making it."

Before CoachAccountable Greg could coach around 10 coachees simultaneously before quality started to suffer: he used to have to comb through many docs and past emails to prep, and lack of clear awareness of where a coachee was (and what he'd done or not made) made calls take longer and be less focused on what the coachee needed. "There was no visibility or accountability, it was hard to know where they were."

Now Greg can coach up to 60 people at a time. He structures the weeks for his coachees to be heavy on learning towards the beginning of the week and does his 1-on-1 calls on Thursday and Friday. "Those days are packed, and I can make it work because I can do lightning fast prep for each call by pulling up the record in CoachAccountable, and because of the reminders my clients always come on time and prepared. It wouldn't be possible to do it this way without CA."

Do you scratch your head wondering how other coaching businesses scale beyond just one coach, and whether CoachAccountable can help you get there? Anissa Fulbright of Icenhower Coaching and Consulting graciously offered an inside peek into their rapid development. We’ve edited Anissa’s words below for length and clarity.

Life Before CoachAccountable

[At the very beginning, Brian] was spending much more like three hours a week with [each] client then. Now it’s closer to 30 minutes, and we’re able to get more clients [and] spend less time while giving them more value.

With CoachAccountable in place, our number of clients has gone up over five times the number we had just last year, and we have been able to add more coaches to the team, too. We have had incredible growth that we wouldn’t have been able to do without CoachAccountable, especially onboarding [clients] and getting them into a system where they can feel the value. They don’t feel like they’re getting just a 30-minute phone call; they feel like they’re getting a lot more.

Icenhower Coaching + CoachAccountable

We’re branching out, but the bread and butter of our business is [still] one-on-one coaching. It’s the most effective way for people to grow; we’re seeing a 39 percent increase in our agents’ GCI (gross commission income) after one year of coaching.

These people are busy and they’ve been in the business for a while. They just need structure and a coach that can help them hire someone effective – not their sister who needs part time work.

We take them out of the “traditional age”; they don’t have business training, so we’re taking them to that level.

Communication

Poignant reminders – e-mails, texts – [are] important because they are texters.

They don’t want more e-mails, so I can customize [the customer experience] with texts. We [as coaches] don’t work out of email anymore, because stuff is going to get lost.

A Client’s Full Picture

My favorite part about CoachAccountable is that it’s a centralized place for us to work with clients. On a daily basis, I can check progress and history. It’s a customized experience.

[Session] Notes have been really helpful. We actually started recording our calls. We just drop the [recorded] file right into the Stream when we’re done, so [both coaches and clients] can always reference [it]. It’s helpful for the coach to be able to make those Notes quickly right on the call. The function to add Notes that are either private or [visible] is really helpful.

[Using] the Stream, the files, and the Session Notes, you can see the trajectory of where the [client is] headed. [In the Stream,] you can also look back to see what they’ve been working on and the notes from each call.

The pre-check-in [Worksheet] is helpful for Brian and [the other] coaches, because it gets people in the right mind-state. They write down anything they were working on or struggling with this week, and they know exactly what they’re going to address on the call. So, [during a coaching call], they’ll do “old business”, then jump right into the “new business”.

Scaling a Coaching Business

CoachAccountable has allowed us to kind of duplicate [Brian]; we are able to scale because we can send actions and reminders and tasks to do between calls week to week instead of him having to spend more time on the phone [creating these systems].

Now that we’ve built out the Library, we can get 10 more coaches and they can all have at least 10 clients, then slowly work Brian out of the process. He’ll [instead] go into creating training materials. It’s really exciting to have that big-picture outlook. He’s going to be much more like, “I just get to write and build [programs].”

Coaching Client Feedback

We haven’t done a ton of marketing, but through CoachAccountable we’re able to impress the agents [who are our potential clients].

The feedback we get from our clients is that it’s a centralized place. They love working out of [CoachAccountable instead of] e-mail, because their email’s flooded. It’s really easy to use the [CoachAccountable] app. They often want to pull something up at a meeting, and they have that PDF right there.

When we unload the Library to them [in CoachAccountable], they’re stunned by the amount of [answers] they’ve been searching for. We have job descriptions and everything they need to hire, train, and grow a team. [We have the resources to] get their business plan on track and start turning their business into a machine.

Some of our agents are the top agents across the country. They’re selling 400 to 1000 homes a year and [because of our coaching], they’re spending their marketing dollars in ways that previously real estate agents weren’t doing.