What did you do before upcoach? 

I was building a very ad hoc system and we were using Microsoft Office, Zoho and a lot of off-the-shelf, software products, which in and of themselves worked very well, but I was winding up with silos of information all over the place.

I was forgetting – “Okay, where did I put this information? Or “Where were the notes from that conversation that I had with that client?”, and that was causing problems with our ability to execute. 

So before we found upcoach being a former tech entrepreneur, I of course said, well, I can do this myself. And I started trying to piece together other platforms that allowed you to do customization and then looking to tie them together with different products like Zapier. While this solved a bit of the problem, it just wasn’t as cohesive as I wanted it to be.

What were the issues you wanted to solve?

Not having access to information at our fingertips really creates an image that’s less professional than what we wanted to achieve and also makes the time that we spend with our clients less efficient. And, being an entrepreneur, everything’s about efficiency.

We have a limited amount of time that we can get business owners to focus. I wanted to make sure that when I finally get their attention we use that time as wisely as possible and not searching for the notes from the last time we talked, or looking for documents.

What were you looking for in a solution?

I was really looking for a way that I could have a single point of truth for the information that we were gathering from our clients. I wanted to be able to log into one place, know when our appointments are, what we had discussed, what we’re planning to discuss in the future, what the client’s issues were…

I also wanted to have a place where the clients could go in in-between meetings and review things that we had discussed and to have access to information. I wanted to provide them with educational content that we had created without them having to run around and go through multiple sites.

What is your favorite part of upcoach?

Anytime you go into a new platform, there’s always a hesitation of, is it going to really do everything or, I’m going to find the thing that I get stuck on. But upcoach has done a great job of pulling all the information together and allowing our clients to have a single portal to go to for everything that revolves around our services with them.

Now I can have all the materials right there, along with my notes, agendas for the meeting, etc. The nice thing is the business owner can go into upcoach before the meeting and they can put in things that they want to discuss.

Another beautiful thing about upcoach is that it’s very customizable. You’re not stuck with their terminology. They give you a platform that you can fully customize. 

Lastly, a great thing about upcoach is not only the platform, but the people behind it. The upcoach team is very open to suggestions and feedback. They take my feedback and I do see changes that come based on it. The platform is evolving very nicely at a fairly rapid pace to meet the needs of the client. They were always readily available with any questions. That told me a lot about their company culture.

The team takes great personal pride in their onboarding and making sure that their clients have a really good experience, which to me was really telling a lot.

Why did you choose upcoach?

We looked at several other products. We looked at things that we could customize. I don’t know that I found anything that was specifically a coaching platform, but when I saw upcoach, it was kind of that aha moment. And I said, okay, this is the place because it combined our scheduling, meetings, group coaching and had the ability to do our individual coaching as well.

The piece that has been really important to me is the fact that it has Courses section. So it basically got an integrated LMS, which we were also looking at bringing in a separate platform for. Once we saw upoach, we said “Well, hey, not only can it handle all the meetings on the client data, but we’ve also got this great learning management system for our educational material.

Also, one of the things that immediately struck me was that it’s a standardized platform. All the pieces are there, but yet it still allows me to customize it to my way of doing things. So I wasn’t stuck having to follow somebody else’s workflow. And again, being very entrepreneurial I have my ideas about the way things should be done. upcoach gives me the best of all worlds. It is a very holistic, cohesive platform, but with enough ability to customize it. It’s doing what I wanted to do, and I’m not changing my work to adapt to the platform.

How do you use upcoach?

We primarily use upcoach for both group sessions and one-on-one sessions and I’ve been able to create different templates for whether I’m dealing with a one-on-one coaching session or I’m dealing with a group coaching session.

Typically they follow a fairly standardized format, but occasionally we have a unique situation and this is where the ability to customize the platform and customize the way each program looks is if we have a one-off engagement, I can recreate the agendas and the modules that we’re using to fit that.

The team likes it a lot. They can just go in and do their job, and they can do it well, without having to jump into other programs or other platforms. We have a good record of the work that they’re doing. So the meetings are tracked, we have notes from the meetings, we know who attended the meetings, we’re able to get good data and feedback, which allows us to serve our clients better…

upcoach has some good templates that provide us with good starting points. I was able to jump in and create a program for my group coaching clients. Uh, I think within five to 10 minutes. It was that quick and easy.

Results

Our business has definitely grown because of upcoach. We are able to service more clients more efficiently. It’s allowed us to standardize how we run the meetings. Between all our coaches, we get a very consistent experience for the clients, regardless of which coach they’re working with.

Again, the efficiencies we gained by having everything in one place and accessible have helped us tremendously. We’ve also built out programs that are self-serve where our clients can go to with all the courses and learning material, which allows them to also adapt when they’re learning to the time that’s convenient for them, and not just when their coaches are available

While I think it was originally intended as a coaching and consulting platform, the capabilities of up coach go well beyond that because of the ability to customize it. So it really opens it up to any organization that has a need to collaborate and share educational information.