Dashboard Index

An Issue is something you need to do something about. There can be lots of ways to describe an issue, and most of them are optional.  The more information you can gather about an issue, the more likely it is that you will resolve it successfully; however, gathering lots of information and putting it into the right field takes time. So there is a trade off here  between time / cost to describe the issue and t time / work it will take to resolve it.

• Categorization - put the issue into a box that contains other issues that may involve the same people to resolve them.
• Topic (*) - a brief description of the issue
• Priority (*) - how important is this issue to you?
• Description(*) - what can you say that will help you resolve  this issue?

Relationship Management

Relationships are the heart of personal, business, cultural and even institutional communications. Relationships can exist between people and other people, between people and organizations or between organizations and other organizations.

All relationships have a simple structure: <subject type> <verb phrase> <object type> where <subject type > and <object type> can be either Person or Organization. So a relationship type definition will look like:

• Person reports to Person
• Person is customer of Organization
• Organization is department of Organization

Once a relationship type has been defined, specific relationships can be created using the Person or Organization dashboards.

This dashboard is for coaches, especially Certified Clear Beliefs Coaches. It contains tools that help you conduct processes AND take notes at the same time.

The tabs are constructed in a logical sequence:

1. People – everything begins with people you know or get to know.
2. Candidates identifies people who might become clients, but are not yet real prospects
3. Prospects are the people you want to follow up with to see if the want to become clients.
4. Clients are people who have become clients.
5. An Intake happens when a person becomes a client.
6. Client Sessions track what happened with this client during each coaching session
7. During sessions, you may use processes from this list.
8. You may also want quick access to references that you want to either review or share.
9. And when you get stuck, you come to this page and wish I had taken more time to describe each tool.

People

This tool (also called the Persons tool) tracks bask contact information the people you know, It adds one important piece of information: what role they play in your life. They may be a friend, family member, co-worker, someone you met at the gym or online. They roles they play help determine what additional information you want to keep about them.  Here is an example:

I have been a member of The Mankind Project for 20 years. I know lots of men (and some women) through the various experiences I have had with them over the years. These men are ideal potential clients for me, so anybody who is somehow connected with The Mankind Project is a candidate for my services. These people will show up in  the Candidates list simply by virtue of the fact that they are connected somehow with The Mankind Project.

The People tool allows you to add, find, update and even delete people very easily.

Candidates

Candidates are simply people who play a role in your life that suggests they may need your services at some time. Each candidate has the word “Prospect” next to their name. Clicking on the word “Prospect” will open the Prospects form and ask you a few questions that will help you follow up with them.

Prospects

The Prospects tool is one of the most important tools in this dashboard. It makes it both possible and EASY to create a list of who you want to contact, how and when you will make that contact.

Clients

This the list that identifies people you consider to be clients.

Intake

At present, there is only one client intake form available. It is easily altered to meet specific needs, and eventually, I may add the ability to have multiple intake forms available.

Once entered, an intake form can be edited and updated as needed.

Session Notes

Taking notes with each client session is very important. This tool makes it easy. There are four sets of information it tracks:

• Session notes that you type in during or shortly after a client session
• Promises you made to send or give something to your client daring this session
• Assignments you gave your client that you want them to accomplish.
• Links to videos of the session you just completed (optional).

Processes

This tool is a simple repository of the coaching processes you use in your practice.

References

This is a wonderful library of research that I have developed over the years. It has been dormant as I searched for a way to bring it out of its coma. I solved that problem recently and am now in the process of adding new material to this library.

People and organizations relate in many ways. This dashboard makes it simple and easy to define and document relationships, There are four basic types of relationship:

• Person to Person
• Person to Organization
• Organization to Organization

Each of these types of relationship can have a distinct verb phrase that defines the nature of the relationship. For example:

• Bob (Person) has coaching client Zack (person)
• Bob (Person) is owner of Coaches Back Office (organization)
• Coaches back office (org) is customer of Gravity Forms (org)
• Gravity Views is spin-off from Gravity Forms
• Zack is owner of Gravity Views
• Gravity Perks is spin-off from Gravity Forms
• Dave is owner of Gravity Perks
• Zack is friends with Dave
• Coaches Back Office is customer of Gravity Views
• Coaches Back Office is customer of Gravity Perks

This list can go on and on. You can define a new relationship type by supplying only three pieces of information:

• Is the left side of the verb a person or an organization
• Is the right side of the verb a person or an organization
• What is the verb  phrase that links the two?

You can then define a new relationship simply by selecting the left and right side person or object and the berb phrase that links them.

Navigating the Courses Dashboard is more complicated than most of the rest of the dashboards. To understand how the navigation works, you will need to understand the data behind the dashboard.

This dashboard provides a collection of tools that help merging the Back Office dashboards and the products that support them.  It also provides Procedure documentation that documents how to perform that various procedures that help run your business.

Products

This tool has several uses:

1. Identify the products that help support your Back Office.
2. Document the monthly and annual costs of maintaining any licenses these tools may require.
3. Capture support contact information for each product.

Some vendors will provide multiple products. For example, Gravity Perks and Gravity Forms each provide numerous plugins that are used heavily in this site. In cases like this, remove the Product Name from the Organization record and simply supply it for each product you use from that vendor.

Procedures

This tab is where you capture the procedures that you use over and over. For example, every few weeks, it is important for a systems administrator to scan your site and make sure that plugins are up to date. In most cases, they will update themselves automatically; however this is not always true and you don't want to have a critical plugin stop working because it wasn't updated.

Take your time with documenting these procedures. Start simply by naming each procedure document you will have to create. If you already have some available, you can upload them easily so that you don't have to type everything all over.

Once you have them defined, test them and see what works and what doesn't. Then update your documentation accordingly.

Costs

This tool tracks the licensing costs of the various elements of the Back Office.

References

This tab is where you can capture web links of documents that you use as a reference materials. Since everything you enter is searchable, finding what you are searching for can be quite easy.

Any time you come across a web page that contains information that relates to running your business and you want to remember this page, just add a record here.

Additional Tools

Tools tend to accumulate. As I type thins, I have a bunch more tools I want to build and add to the back office. If a tool helps you run your business better, add it to this page.

A project is a collection of tasks conducted by one or more people that delivers meaningful results. A project typically has one or more goals. It also produces results that can be delivered to others. These are called "Deliverables" and can take the form of a document, a working system or just about anything that is created and delivered to people during the life of the project.

The librarian's job is to improve the accuracy and content of the Research Library, one of the most powerful tools in the entire site. This is a collection of articles, videos, websites dedicated to specific topics of relevance to coaches and counselors.  There are hundreds, if not thousands of articles of content I want to add to this library, If you have a recommendation, please share it and the librarian will (still just me) will get on it ASAP.

People and organizations relate in many ways. This dashboard makes it simple and easy to define and document relationships, There are four basic types of relationship:

• Person to Person
• Person to Organization
• Organization to Person
• Organization to Organization

Each of these types of relationship can have a distinct verb phrase that defines the nature of the relationship. For example:

• Bob (Person) has coaching client Zack (person)
• Bob (Person) is owner of Coaches Back Office (organizaiton)
• Coaches back office (org) is customer of Gravity Forms (org)
• Gravity Views is spin-off from GravityForms
• Zack is owner of Gravity Views
• Gravity Perks is spin-off from Gravity Forms
• Dave is owner of Gravity Perks
• Zack is friends with Dave
• Coaches backoffice is customer of Gravity Views
• Coaches backoffice is customer of Gravity Perks

This list can go on and on. You can define a new relationship type by supplying only three pieces of information:

• Is the left side of the verb a person or an organization
• Is the right side of the verb a person or an organization
• What is the verb  phrase that links the two?

You can then define a new relationship simply by selecting the left and right side person or object and the berb phrase that links them.

The marketing process starts by recognizing that most of  the people I know could be coaching candidates. The job of this process is to qualify and filter out those people who will not (for whatever reason) become clients.

This process makes it easy to simply label a person as a Candidate, determine which candidates are really Prospects, then identify and (hopefully) remove any hurdles preventing them from becoming Clients.

To accomplish this,  I make a series of Touches with each person . A touch can be as simple as an email or a phone call. As people progress through the Marketing Funnel, the conversations get deeper.

Importing and Identifying Candidates

I have dozens (if not hundreds) of lists of people I have met in various ways.  The process starts by  identifying possible lists of people who many be candidates, putting those people into an Excel spreadsheet, and then importing those lists into the Person table in the Dashboard.   Make sure to label each list with a brief description of the source so these people will be easily identified once they are in the dashboard.

Review and Prioritize New Contacts

Once contacts form each source have been imported, filter the person list  by source and take a look at each contact to assign values to Coaching Status and Priority. by asking these questions:

This dashboard allows you to edit all of the properties of all dashboards, show that status for all dashboards in a formatted report, and (finally) show help information like this.

These tools are restricted to certified Clear Beliefs Coaches.

Contacts are People (not Organizations)

Everybody I deal with on any regulars bassos is a contact, and every contact just might be a coaching candidate. This dashboard maintains all of the information about a contact that directly identifies that person. It also tracks touches and reminders for all contacts.

Although this system is centered around my coaching practice, it can still be used to maintain information about family, friends, business associates and and any people you want to stay in contact with.

These people play roles in your life and you can define what those roles are. For example, a person can be a friend, a client, a referral source, etc.

You can even define the nature of your relationships with these people.  For example, you want to capture who works for whom (an org chart) or who is friends with whom.

Organizations are Not People

Contrary to the US Supreme Court, organizations are not people. Organizations are a collection of people and other organizations that have their own identity, but birth date and sexual preferences are not a part of that identity.

Organizations play roles such as Financial Services or Shipping. Organizational roles are created by this dashboard.

Organizations can have relationships with other organizations such as Hardware Sales  is a supplier of products from Bosch Tools. Organizations can also be defined as an hierarchy like Bosch Sales is a department of Bosch Tools  and US Sales is a department of Bosch Sales. This gives you the capability of defining entire organizational structures.

Organizations and people can have relationships too. For example, Bob Jones is a customer of Hardware Sales. Organizational relationships can be created with this dashboard  These relationships can be defined with the Relationships dashboard.

Clients can be active or inactive.  They each have their own service rates (what I charge them) and payment terms.

This dashboard tracks the parameters of their coaching agreement, active clients, all clients and payments type.

Tabs:

• Active Paying Clients - defines payment terms and creates new client billing record
• Active Client Billings - lists all active paying clients and their billings
• All Client Billings - List all client billings and payments
• Client Payments Due - who still owes me money