The Bits That Will Bankrupt Me ??

I have one particularly lovely member of The Coaching Revolution who has recently referred a new client to me. He and I were talking about the things that The Coaching Revolution offers above and beyond the mentoring and he said these are the things that put you a head and shoulders above everyone else out there Sarah, the things that no one else bothers with.

I keep thinking about this. About the stuff that we do that is over and above our bread and butter offering of a mentoring programme and he's right, we offer an awful lot of things.

Let me tell you what they all are.

INCROWD

The centre of our universe is our members-only Facebook group INCROWD. This is where we hang out and share on a continual basis. It's the place to go when you need help about pretty much anything at all (and not always coaching business related!).

It's a place where you can let off steam if it's not going well, where you don't have to wear your game face.

It's a place where you can celebrate your successes with a whole group of cheerleaders and champions.

Without exception our mentees say that the sense of community that starts with INCROWD was the biggest unexpected bonus of their membership of The Coaching Revolution.

Monday Night Live

On a Monday evening at 8pm UK time, most Mondays of the year (not bank holidays and we have a break for Christmas) we run Monday Night Live.

It's one hour of education on a marketing topic. Each week we look at something pertinant to marketing your coaching business. We record all of the sessions and add them to The Vault, our training area that has hour upon hour of marketing training. New mentees should attend at least 10 of these sessions and are welcome to all of them, for as long as they want to attend.

We have covered

• how-tos for most social media platforms
• podcasting
• how to record and caption videos
• writing with purpose
• how tos for various bits of software (Mailchimp, Canva, etc)
• websites - what they should say and what they absolutely and most definitely shouldn't!
• crafting a Golden Sentence, a one-sentence answer to the question what do you do

I could go on. We have hours and hours of training recorded and we add an hour every week.

Trevor The Bot

Worthy of a little mention; Trevor our sunny little Messenger bot. He drops into your Messenger inbox with exactly the right link at the right time and he keeps you fully inofrmed of what's going on and when.

The Vault

Online and unlimited access to The Vault which contains all of the recordings of all the training sessions we've delivered over the past 3+ years. It contains hours and hours of value on just about any coaching business marketing topic you can think of.

Zoom Café

Every weekday we have an hour set aside to just chill. It's nothing to do with work, it's an opportunity to shoot the breeze about nothing at all if that's what you feel like.

Someone described it as being like having work colleagues to hang out with, but ones that I actually like!

The Zoom Café started during lockdown one to provide all our coaches with some different faces to chat to (and look at!) for an hour a day. We have a number of members who live alone and there was no way I was leaving them on their own all day every day.

The Zoom Café was so popular that we still run it to this day (although at the time of writing, we've just entered into lockdown 3.0 so it's needed more than ever!)

Accountability Call

A quick and dirty 30 minute Zoom call at 7:30am (UK) on a Monday. No one is camera ready, most of us are a bit bleary eyed and clutching our first cuppa of the day and we sit together and one by one, run through our goals for the week. They're not all work goals either. Going back to the weird year we have had, many mentees like to include a health goal and maybe a personal goal too.

The Accountability Call is perfect for those of us who are procrastinators and for whom saying out loud what our intentions are for the week (in front of our peers) is a boost to productivity.

However, as one of our more introverted mentees said it's worth being on this call for 30 minutes on a Monday for all the fabulous marketing ideas that are being discussed. I don't need to be held accountable, I'm good at doing that myself, but these calls are pure gold.

Word Of The Day

When I told a group of members that I was going to write this, they reminded me of our daft little daily game: Word Of The Day.

The point of Word Of The Day is that we are given a single word each day and we have to get it into a social media post. We share a link to our posts in the comments under the daily word post.

As everyone has their own ideal client and unique marketing message, the social media posts are always vastly different. It's really interesting - and often amusing - to see the clever ways in which people weave a random word into a meaningful post.

Pub Quiz

In the first lockdown, we started running a Saturday night pub quiz. It was intended as a social event for us when social events weren't possible. It was designed to bring those who wanted to join in together for an evening of wine and fun. And indeed it did.

Anyone could come, my mum and my brother and his wife came, the bloke who looks after our website came - and brought his wife. You didn't have to come as a team, because teams were random and allocated at the touch of a button. It meant that you got to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday with people you'd never normally get to hang our with. It was awesome.

We loved it!

We ran it for the whole of the first lockdown. It was sorely missed when it was done.

The second lockdown wasn't really as severe as the first and so the pub quiz wasn't revived.

However, lockdown 3.0 has seen the pub quiz resurrected and I for one am delighted. My Saturday night social event is back!

It's Supposed To Be Fun!

Some of the 'extras' that The Coaching Revolution provides have sound busines purposes.

Many of the things that I've written about are just for fun. And that's the whole point!

If we wanted boring work lives, we could go and work for someone else, right? If we're going to work for ourselves, then it should be fun. At the very least it should have some fun highlights.

Bankrupt ??

As I said at the beginning of this article, I joked with my colleague that the bits I've written about are the bits that will bankrupt me - the bits that are simply included in our offering, the extras that are provided as part of the programme.

But they won't. It's all about balance.

They are the reason that we have such a tight-knit community and that community is the reason that The Coaching Revolution thrives!