Chris Taylor: Founder & President of Actionable.co

A conversation with Chris Taylor, the founder of Actionable.co.

Chris discusses his evolution from film school to entrepreneurship in coaching and facilitation, and emphasizes the importance of translating inspiration into actual behavior change. 

He introduces the "Knowing Doing Gap" concept in his initial project, a book summary service, aimed at helping people apply key ideas from books in real life.

Transitioning into training and facilitation, Taylor highlights his experiences interviewing influential authors like Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. He stresses the significance of measuring training and coaching impacts. 

His current venture, Actionable.co, assists facilitators, consultants, and coaches in scaling their impact and revenue, which is accomplished by showcasing the effectiveness of their programs in bringing about behavioral changes. 

Taylor emphasizes the importance of not just imparting knowledge but also ensuring that it translates into tangible actions and results for clients. He also discusses the alignment of training programs with organizational strategies and the importance of measuring their impact for continuous improvement.

Taylor's journey reflects a deep understanding of the challenges in bridging the gap between knowing and doing, highlighting the value of actionable insights in both personal growth and organizational development.

Transcript

Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee
Chris Taylor

(interview blurb)

Chris: One of the big sort of realizations for me was that if we want individual change to happen, fundamentally, two things needs to be true. The participants need to understand how to change, understand at a logical level this is what I need to shift, but they also need to have a strong reason to want to change.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is the founder of Actionable.co. He helps facilitators, consultants, trainers, and coaches scale their impact in revenue by proving the behavior change impact of their programming. He’s a highly sought after speaker and he hosted the number 2 iTunes-ranked podcast, 21st Century Workplace. Please welcome Chris Taylor.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Chris.

Chris: Hello, Alex, how are you?

Alex: I’m doing great. It’s great to have you. Thanks for joining me today. 

Chris: Likewise. Thanks for having me.

Alex: Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. We don’t always drink coffee but we always start asking what we’re drinking. What are we drinking, Chris? 

Chris: We are drinking — brand is called Rewind. It’s a superfoods mix. This is the Asahi Blueberry Bliss, it’s called, and it’s delicious. 

Alex: It sounds a lot better than mine. I like mine but it’s maybe too healthy. It’s like Erewhon’s Hardcore Greens. So we’re matching in shade but yours, I’m feeling like it has a little more flavor.

Chris: Blueberry and Asahi, it’s hard to go wrong with that. Cheers.

Alex: Cheers. But we’re both going on the healthy route, right? I love it. 

Chris: I turned 40 couple years ago and, suddenly, I couldn’t drink coffee after 10 a.m. I just — I’m wired for the rest of the day so I switched to lots of water and then these things, which has been great. 

Alex: Yeah, I’m about to turn 40. Actually, we just recorded another episode this week and it was a lot about midlife and I guess I’m entering midlife. I’ve never thought about my age so much, now I’m 39 and at the cusp of 40 so it feels like a momentous birthday, doesn’t it? 

Chris: It really does. I think similar to you, I work with folks that are in many cases 10 or 15 or 20 years my senior and they’re looking at me like I’m crazy, right? Like, you know, I got so much life to go. But, yeah, 40 was a big deal for me. There was a whole lot of thinking about what I want and what I want for my kids and where I’m supposed to be and all of that. It needed a lot of sort of internal work, which was unexpected.

Alex: Yeah, I know. Makes a lot of sense, but exciting time. Forty is the new twenty, from what I hear. 

Chris: That’s right, you’re an adult now. That’s right.

Alex: Yeah, right, love it. One of the things we always like to do in this podcast is, of course, share nice drink at a distance which makes you feel like you’re closer than you actually are, although I’ve recorded some episodes here with people in LA, which is kind of interesting. Might as well just do it in person almost, right?

Chris: Exactly. 

Alex: But I’m always fascinated by people’s journeys, especially people that play in the learning and development and coaching space. It’s relatively a new space, a couple generations ago, maybe one or two, people weren’t really specializing in this so please tell me about your journey, how you ended up doing what you’re doing today, which is actually super interesting and I know that coaches will be very, very excited to hear more about. 

Chris: Yeah, it’s been a series of serendipitous events, largely driven by following curiosity is the way I would describe that at a high level. If I go way back, I went to film school so I had dreams of being the next Steven Spielberg, graduated film school and started selling knives, which is the natural progression from film school, you go into — no, but, no, I worked for Cutco when I was in my early 20s and I was a sales manager teaching other kids how to sell knives. And I didn’t know to call it that at the time but the part that I enjoyed most in the work was the coaching, was working through with these kids, really, because most of them were in their late teens, early 20s, through, yeah, how to sell more effectively but it was really life stuff and so I really enjoyed the nature of that work. And then I became kind of obsessed and have been since with what happens after inspiration. So, people in a coaching session, they get that light bulb moment, they’ve got this great intention to go out and change things, and then what happens? Sometimes, it does, sometimes, it doesn’t, but we know a lot of times that new inspiration fades. And so I became really obsessed with what Bob Sutton calls the Knowing-Doing Gap, how do we go from learned it to applied it to leveled up, and I started a book summary service, this is 20 years ago now, where it was — I wasn’t interested in summarizing the book in the traditional sense but what I really wanted to do was take one great idea from good to great, let’s say, by Jim Collins, take the hedgehog concept. There’s 16 other good ideas in that book, but take the one and say what would I do with this? How would I actually use this in my life? And the book summary service became that. It was around not a summary of good to great, it was around the hedgehog concept and how I was going to apply it. And that sort of led me on this path where I started connecting with a lot of consultants, coaches, facilitators, a lot of the people that read business books and personal development books are in the space, and so I really found that I had found my tribe, that these were the people I loved hanging out with, those that believed their purpose was to enable other people’s purposes. And so I ran that book summary service for a better part of six or seven years. I started getting asked by people to come speak, because I’ve written about 300 or 400 book summaries personally at that point.

Alex: Wow, you’re like a one-man Blinkist. 

Chris: That’s right, I know, and then Blinkist came out and turned into an eight-, nine-figure business, I went, oh, I missed the business model part of it. But, yeah, I loved doing it and people would ask me to speak on some of the topics that I was writing about. The theory in my back of the head was that they’d called Simon Sinek to come speak and Simon had quoted his outrageous and appropriate fee, they go, “Maybe we’ll get Chris to do it.”

Alex: Hey, that’s awesome, following on Simon’s coattails, probably a good business and fun. Yeah, I love Simon.

Chris: Me too, totally. So the book summary services led to facilitation and training work. It also led me to interviewing authors because I — I’ll never forget this, it was back in 2011, 2010, I had finished every book that Seth Godin had written and I had gotten in the habit of sending each of the authors a really quick email after I wrote a summary saying, basically, “Hey, read your book, loved your book, wrote about your book, here’s the link. Thanks for all your great work.” That was it, there’s no ask, it was just letting them know that I appreciated their work. And Seth, and I know Seth and others on this call, probably, if you email Seth, he replies, as do a lot of these authors, but Seth replied and I remember he was like, and still is, one of my idols and mentors, and he’d written me back, but when I finished all of Seth’s books at the time, I’d come to appreciate that when a book is freshly published, the thinking is actually two years old or more, right? Took time to draft the manuscript, to get the thing published, go through the machine and get it out the door, and so I reached out to Seth and I said, and we’d had a bunch of one-line correspondences at that point, I said, “Hey, I’ve finished your most recent book, I’d love to know what’s in your head now. Would you be open to me coming to you to sit down for an interview?” and about six minutes later, I get an email back saying, “Sure, how’s Thursday?” Seth’s just north of Manhattan, New York City, I’m in Toronto, geographically, it’s close but still I got to get on a plane, and I had no money at the time and never met Seth, so I rented a video camera, like one of the big, sort of shoulder mount video cameras, and I bought my plane ticket and then I thought, okay, well, I should double up here. I’m not just going to go to New York for one author interview. Who else do I know? I just read this book by this guy, Gary Vayner-something, that might be open to it and, yeah, at the time, Vaynerchuk had just had Crush It! come out, he was just on his meteoric rise, and he was agreeing to basically anybody and anything and so his people said, “For sure, come,” and so I went to Gary’s office midtown Manhattan, like insane energy of all of that, Gary and Manhattan and this tiny office and the agency vibe, and did the interview there, and then I got in a rental car and I drove to Hastings-on-Hudson and sat down in Seth’s spacious office where it was just him and 10,000 books and interviewed him. And that was a real turning point for me in my career, the openness of these subject matter experts, just that accessibility piece, but also now I had these bookends where basically any author I wanted to talk to fit somewhere in the spectrum between Gary and Seth and so I went on this two-year pilgrimage of interviewing authors. And then I guess all of that, I was running this happy little training company and it was very much a lifestyle business but I was enjoying the lifestyle, and then this was probably about nine years ago, I had trained a group of participants. The feedback had been great. I had gotten home feeling good about myself. About six months later, I got a call from the owner of that company, small company, saying, “Hey, we want you back.” Said, “Great, what do want me to talk about?” “Sell the same stuff.” I’m like, “Oh, you’ve got different employees you want to talk to you?” “No, no, same employees. It was really good the first time.” There is a misalignment here, because up until that time, I thought that I was driving change but what I was actually doing was entertaining people and that schism for me really opened my eyes to the challenges in the industry of people development, where $300 billion spent last year on the development of employees through training and coaching and interventions of various type, less than 11 percent was the last stat from the Association of Training and Development, less than 11 percent has any way of measuring the impact of that investment beyond happy sheets, did people like the session. And I think that’s a waste, I think it’s a travesty because I think it’s financially irresponsible of brands to spend money on training without actually — like let’s spend money on anything without knowing what the impact is going to be. But I also think it’s a real shame for the practitioners because those that are good at what they do have massive impact on the organizations that they do it for and if it’s not being measured, there’s no way to prove that. And so that really became my mission was how do we prove the behavior change impact of coaching, consulting, facilitation work done well in organizations, and that’s what I do now. 

Alex: That’s awesome. It’s a great journey, and measurement is so key now, organizations have become savvy around ROI. I think this inflection point with AI and those capabilities are also pushing organizations and training leadership providers, coaches to be more mindful and attentive to impact so it’s a very timely topic. Tell me a little more about like the origin story of Actionable.co. I love how you frame it like you’re entertaining people but you really kind of wanted to help people change and those are two very different things. 

Chris: Yeah. 

Alex: How did you go from that realization to actually packaging it up as a business and the technology? 

Chris: Yeah, I think the blessing and curse of my path was that I didn’t come from a formal training or L&D or OD or HR or any other acronyms in the space background.

Alex: We can spend a whole podcast just with acronyms in this industry, right?

Chris: Yeah. I like it when they make words, like CHRP, that’s one of my favorite, certified HR professional, CHRP. 

Alex: Well, you mentioned ATD, ATD used to be pretty unfortunate. ASTD, not great, but they’re ATD, much better, right? 

Chris: Much, much better. Because we had, yeah, and being in Canada, where I am, it was the CSTD and ASTD had both going there, yeah, it was great. 

Alex: And their conferences. So the connotation is like, because conferences are kind of like spring break for adults so I’ll stop there because we like to keep our PG rating on Apple podcasts or wherever you listening. But, yeah, it’s pretty fun.

Chris: The blessing and curse is that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know that the idea of having an ROI on training had been sort of talked about and abandoned and picked up and abandoned about six times over 50 years. So I became a student. I deep dove into understanding how impact is measured currently, came to understand the Kirkpatrick Phillips model in great depth and detail, both proponents and those against it and some of the limitations. And I really zeroed in on behavior change as being the bridge between what HR typically measures, which is participant satisfaction and knowledge retention, and what the C-suite actually cares about, ROI and business impact. And behavior change on an individual level is the bridge. And so that became my working thesis. And I am not a coder but I invested some personal money and then raised a little bit of money to build out a very rudimentary tool that facilitators could use at the end of their sessions to do two things, to support and to measure the behavior change impact of their programming. Sort of the growth of Actionable has largely come I believe due to that duality, the fact that we’re not just measuring, that we are actually supporting and enhancing behavior change. Because what I found doesn’t work is trying to measure something that people don’t care about. When employees are being asked to submit data on an increased frequency without any sort of benefit to them, you end up with deteriorating data, both in volume and in equality, and so the piece for me was how do we make this something that is done for the employees and participants, not done to them, and that’s been really the magic for us. 

Alex: That’s awesome. Tell me a little bit about how it works. And, by the way, that’s fascinating, you didn’t come from that background and just the entrepreneurial pursuit of like a business model, making it happen, taking a risk. You didn’t get the right business model with the book summaries but it seems like you’ve honed your skills on the business model side of things. 

Chris: Totally, and the past gets painted with a complimentary brush. I mean, there’s been — I can’t even count how many pivots and iterations there’s been over the last 16 years within the Actionable sort of journey, but I think it’s relatively well-dialed in now, thankfully. Twenty-eighth time’s the charm. How does it work? Really basic, we look at the experience that the participant has in the room and then the subsequent behavior change efforts. So we work with consultants and facilitators in two parts. One is to help them bring impact measurement, impact certainty into their entire client experience so that’s how they position, how they design programs. One of the big sort of realizations for me was that if we want individual change to happen, fundamentally, two things needs to be true. The participants need to understand how to change, understand at a logical level this is what I need to shift, but they also need to have a strong reason to want to change. And good facilitators do this really well. So they get people to a place of inspiration. I want to go be a better leader, what have you. That’s great, but you don’t be a better leader overnight, you do different things to become a better leader. And it was our mutual friend, Michael Bungay Stanier, in his book, The Coaching Habit, wrote about the new habit formula, largely based on BJ Foggs’s work, popularized by Charles Duhigg, the whole idea of habits has become a really big thing. But we saw that as a bridge where individuals that are inspired to be a better leader can translate that inspiration into a daily practice. When I’m meeting with a colleague, instead of leading with my opinion, I will ask one clarifying question or one personal question because — and then their purpose, their reason for doing it, so I know you’re well familiar with it, so with Michael’s blessing, we have that built into our tech, so at the end of a session, participants scan a QR code, it takes them to a page where they’re going to choose a new habit formula statement that they’re going to work on based on the content, then they leave the session, and in the days following the session, on a schedule they chose, they get a nudge from Actionable, it’s either a text message or Slack or email, whatever they want, but it would say, “Hey, Alex, you said you wanted to ask better questions. How’s it going today?” Alex rates himself 1 to 10, Alex can journal, that’s it. Alex does that a couple times a week. And when you look at that on an individual basis, the individual feels supported, their coach can engage in digital coaching through that, they can build accountability, so for the individual, it feels like this is something for me around something that matters to me. When you zoom out and look at the population of that organization, you can start to look at trends and themes. Which behaviors are being advanced and how do those align back to the strategic priorities of the organization? It gives them visibility into the leading indicators around where change initiatives are likely to succeed or fail.

Alex: That’s awesome. How has the journey been kind of like evolving the solution, kind of from where you started to where you are now? 

Chris: Yeah, it was a massive uphill battle until COVID. I was going on sort of pure belief that this was the way we can and should think about training programs and I was saying that to anyone who would listen. And we had enough early adopters that we kept the lights on but it was very much like hand to mouth. And then COVID happened and, suddenly, HR was thrust into the spotlight in companies around the globe, for nothing to do with training but, suddenly, they’re in the spotlight around how do we work now with our global employee base being at home, which highlighted the fact that HR largely is swimming in data but doesn’t have a lot of insight around how does the HR initiatives, particularly training, are advancing the strategic priorities. And so we had suddenly this relatively large influx of organizations and consulting firms and training firms reaching out to us because we were quite literally the only player in town that was doing what we were doing, which was really exciting, and there’s also — anybody who’s been on the receiving end of suddenly a hit of clients, there were some there’s some systems to work out but we navigated that and it’s been really interesting to see since, in the last two years, that the focus on measurement has remained and now is we’re, whatever we’re doing. Is this a recession? I don’t know. But anywhere that there’s sort of that constriction on spend, the need to be able to demonstrate impact has become sort of a prerequisite. I really believe, Alex, that — I don’t know what the timeline is, three years, five years, eight years, but I believe that there’s a time in the near future where the idea of proposing a people development program that doesn’t include some form of impact measurement of behavior change or higher will be laughable. It won’t make any sense. It’d be like we’re going to spend some money on some newspaper ads. How are we going to track it? I don’t know. That’s not what you do in marketing. And I think we’re entering that space in training and development.

Alex: The linking of these initiatives to strategy as well, like you can see it from both perspectives, is foundational, yet in the history of learning leadership development programs, it was more the standalone content. Maybe you diagnose an individual as being a good candidate for a specific program, maybe you exclusively work, as an HR department, you work with a specific vendor so you just source the programs based on the fact that they’re coming from that vendor. Now, there seems to be a more definite focus to be more strategic around the organization’s objectives, how they go about looking at things from different perspectives, what their overall strategy is, what their learning strategy is, where they are, meeting them where they are, having a lot more diversity of approaches so I think we are living in a new stage of learning and development where it’s more dynamic, it’s more tailored to the individual, and it’s also more connected to the overarching strategic goals of the organization. And I agree 100 percent around measurement. I mean, it’s hard — just to be the case that it was just send someone to — I used to work at CCL, send someone to CCL, they’ll come back and have a better sense of who they are and increased self-awareness and they’ll have some coaching to map some of those objectives to their day to day and that’s it. And I think there’s always been talk about connecting that to strategy but we are living, I think, in the golden age of actually being able to do that because of the reach of technology and our ability to keep track of learners across time and map it out learning out to the daily operational-related aspects of their work and, ultimately, how those cascade into the overarching goals of the organization. It’s a really interesting time for people interested in measurement and training and linking it to business results. 

Chris: There’s two pieces for me in there. One is there is a time and a place for programs that are for the entertainment or the experience value and it is not about creating change. I used to sort of rail against that but I’ve matured in my old age, Alex. I’ve come to appreciate that there’s a time and place for that, but we need to ask the question, whether we’re internal or external, when the program is sort of being ideated, to say what’s the goal here? Is it to provide an experience or is it to drive change? They’re not mutually exclusive but being clear on what the primary driver is helps to align intention. And then we don’t want to measure impact if it’s about the experience, that’s not the point in that case, but let’s get clear on that. And then if it is the point, then, yeah, let’s double down on that. I think, and this is somewhat self-serving, but if you’re planning on driving change, then maybe you should invest a portion of the budget in the sustainment and activation of the change as opposed to putting all the money into the experience, like let’s allocate resources appropriately. The second thing I want to hit on here, if the — we live, as you well know, we live in a very heart-centered industry. We, as practitioners, care about the work that we do, we believe that this is our purpose. This is not language that CFOs typically use. This is language that we in this space use. And I think that there is a conscious or unconscious fear or resistance to measurement because it has that cold calculating feel to it, and what I would encourage anyone that feels that resistance to it is I’d invite you to consider the fact that this is actually in support of your coachee or your student, your participant. If you have taken them in the room to a place where they understand the concepts and they care about them enough that they want change to happen, then we need to acknowledge that change is hard and that, as individuals, we benefit from tools and systems that can help us realize that change. If there’s a measurement component to it, that’s a happy benefit, but that the act of measuring, in the case of Actionable, at least, reinforces the act of practice for the participant and that is an act of generosity, not some calculating thing that we’re doing to them. 

Alex: How did you go about going from division to actually designing? Like, okay, how does measurement work? How does it work for, let’s say, leadership development program? What is it being done now? What’s your innovative approach? Tell me a little bit more about the actual design of how you get a sense of impact and the stickiness of learning.

Chris: Sure, yeah, absolutely. So, on a micro level or on a macro? Like you want to talk about specific instance or do you want to look at the theory?

Alex: Well, how did you go about implementing what you knew from theory into a product? I think the art of productization oftentimes provides good entertainment value and an applied way to think about that underlying theory. 

Chris: I did it entirely the wrong way the first time around. I went off with a reasonable degree of hubris and spent gobs of money to build out this incredibly complex system that was based all around my hypothesis that I had told my— I told myself the hypothesis so many times that it had become fact in my brain, but it was in fact a hypothesis and it was in fact wrong. Blew that up, started over literally from scratch. 

Alex: What was the hypothesis? 

Chris: At the time, the hypothesis was that there would be enough self-motivation on the part of the individual that they would make their own commitment each month and pursue it and the whole product was built around individuals picking up a new commitment each month on their own and that just doesn’t work. At least I couldn’t figure out how to make it work. 

Alex: Well, I love how optimistic you are about human nature. 

Chris: Exactly, yeah, exactly. Like, well, I would use this except I wouldn’t. Anyway, like convince myself I would. Second go around, the best thing I did was surround myself with the innovative consulting and training companies that wanted to come on the journey with me. So we assembled, they were clients but so much more than that, about, I don’t know, probably two dozen training companies, all founder led, small, like sub a million training companies, that would use our very rudimentary sort of chewing gum and duct tape version of the next iteration of the software and provide feedback. And so we iterated, iterated, iterated, iterated for about two years on making small tweaks and improvements as we went until we found something that really stuck. And what we found that stuck was actually built into a model that we call the Insight Action Flywheel, where it suggests that people being exposed to content and then taking action doesn’t work, that hearing the content or seeing the content needs to be contextualized not for us but by us. We need to have the time and the space and the prompts to turn over the concept until we get to a place where it actually connects for us. I do this all the time because it’s my mental anchors, is that I understand it at a cerebral level, I care enough about at an individual level. It was masked for me because good facilitators do that almost unconsciously. The nature of their work is that they’re sharing information in a way that is contextualized for the individual. And I completely missed that in the original version. It was, well, they’re sharing content and then people are taking action so what’s the problem? That was where we introduced a model called Actionable Conversations, which borrows elements from appreciative inquiry but it basically puts groups of participants into a discussion that’s content light, context heavy. Here’s a single idea, maybe it’s even revisited, it’s not net new content, but it’s LMS, thin slice-type stuff, here’s the five-minute hit on this thing. If we just send them the five-minute hit, they don’t do anything with it. This has been well documented. We’re getting like, yeah, anyway, apart that. However, if everyone gets the single hit and then they’re brought together to have a discussion about that single hit, most of them will consume it, and through dialogue, almost all of them, in my experience, will find enough relevance in it to want to change, and so that was a big piece for us was we need to provide the opportunity for them to contextualize and then support the behavior change.

Alex: Makes a lot of sense. 

Chris: I build up that out. We just — the other thing we do and we publish this every year, its free on Actionable.co, is our annual Insights report where we look at all of the behavior change commitments that have been made through the platform and we look at the levers that statistically improve the likelihood that someone will realize change.

Alex: What’s the number one? Or what was the number one, let’s say, this year?

Chris: So this year, it had largely to do with accountability partners. It was the level of ongoing — the frequency of ongoing support from other people in their life was a major component on the platform. 

Alex: Cool. So part of what you do is also scale and I know that coaches are always thinking about how they can scale their practice, how they can package their offering, and I know that’s something that you do with coaches. So, how did that come about? 

Chris: It was in the same space where I’ve had now, probably like you, I’ve had conversations with about 4,000 facilitators and trainers and coaches over the last 10 years. In there, I found that people were using language to describe what they were selling and it tended to fall on a bell curve. At the lower end, you’ve got people selling time, like I’m available as a coach, I’ll do whatever you need me to do. That’s the lowest end and it’s where they’re getting ground down because they’re commoditized. Then the next level up is where they’re really building off their IP. So they’ve written a book or they’ve got a model and they’ve got something that they’re known for around that space. People come to them for that. Then they move from there into a reputation space where Pat Lencioni doesn’t have to consult on the five dysfunctions model or whatever he calls it now, he’s Pat and so people want to work with them, so reputation built. There’s a fourth category though which is when you’re actually trading on impact. When you’re able to demonstrate impact to your clients, they actually don’t care as much about your individual reputation or the IP that you’re bringing or the time that you’re putting in, they care about the return on investment and the impact. And so that, for me, became a really interesting North Star, to say can we help coaches, consultants, facilitators shift the value proposition in their clients’ mind from buying time to buying IP to buying impact? And when you do that, you know you’ve decoupled time from value, meaning that if you can continue to drive impact without being on site, you can scale without building out a whole team. So we’ve helped, I honestly don’t even know at this point, several dozen consultants move from mid six figures or lower to well north of seven figures without adding to their team by integrating impact measurement into their work. I feel like it’s very self-serving to talk about this, Alex. If anybody else was doing this, I could talk about sort of all the companies doing impact measurement but, for now, it’s a bit of a blue ocean. But it’s amazing what it does, like there was this gentleman, Todd, we’re working with, he took a $14,000 request for facilitating leadership off site and turned it into a $480,000 per year, multi-year engagement with that client where he spent about a day a month on site. The work was done through scale and through him being at the epicenter of the impact data so he was coaching the executive team around how to keep their organization on board with this strategic direction, with moving things forward. So that’s largely the space we play in. On the lower end, we also support consultants and coaches in being diligent and simplifying their offering, packaging, productizing, but let’s go less things. You don’t need to be six things out there, it confuses the market and doesn’t actually give you the ability to scale.

Alex: Yeah, no, absolutely. Packaging coaching, it’s hard because sometimes you have to distill your services, it really makes you — puts you in a position where you have to think about value and the value proposition that you’re putting forth with clients, and then you have to operationalize it, how much is it, how long is it, do we have different variants of that. A lot of coaches feel the pressure to specialize and to be known by something so how do you go about the process? Do you write a book? How do you specialize without a book and how do you package that? I mean, there’s an art to packaging coaching offerings and — so, oftentimes, I think that the people that are making the most money in the world in coaching are the people that are, they hit you up on LinkedIn, “I help consultants drive six- and seven-figure consulting businesses just by attending this $5,000 workshop,” like there’s people doing that well, but my sense is that most people that do that don’t do it well and people pay and then they don’t get those seven- or eight-figure consulting practices. What do you think of that?

Chris: Yes, 100 percent. I think there’s exceptions, I think, what Taki Moore does with Million Dollar Coaches, a really strong program, but there’s a whole lot of Taki lookalikes running around and it’s like that coaches teaching coaches how to sell coaching to coaches, like how far down do the shells go? So, yeah, I think probably like most industries, there’s some scammy stuff there. 

Alex: But that’s why anchoring it on measurement is such a strong differentiator.

Chris: It just gets you out of it completely, like you’re not — because I think that’s the thing, everyone’s trying to — not everyone, but if you’re not selling time and you’re trying to sell IP, you need the model that you built out or the approach, that specialization you’re talking about. My concern with that is that that can be brittle or it’s crowded. You’re either so niche that it might be a flavor of the month or you’re doing leadership, it’s like everyone’s doing leadership, so keep moving. Keep growing it into something that is going to be sort of antifragile, which, for me, is around impact, yeah.

Alex: Antifragile, not the same as resilient, if you read the book. It’s a good book. The long, sometimes interesting books. Yeah, are you looking for it over there?

Chris: Yeah, I’ve got it, it’s on here somewhere, I don’t know if it’s right there or not.

Alex: The Black Swan, Antifragile, I think, what is it? Nassim Nicholas Taleb or something?

Chris: Yeah.

Alex: Yeah. Good writer.

Chris: No kidding.

Alex: What are you really excited about? As we’re getting towards that part of the year where we’re thinking about the next year, what are you excited about?

Chris: I’m excited — everyone’s talking about AI and I really held off —

Alex: Really?

Chris: Yeah.

Alex: I’m kidding.

Chris: Oh, that part, yeah, I thought you meant that I held off.

Alex: AI? No, no, no, come on.

Chris: I’ve heard of this machine learning fad. I didn’t want to just rush into it because, it’s interesting, we used to have this fairly complex algorithm, I wouldn’t call it AI but this algorithm that drove when people got nudged by the Actionable platform, and on a hunch several years ago we ripped it out and we put in choice for participants and engagement went way up, and so, since then, I’ve been hyperaware of the fact that there’s the right time and place for AI, and so what I’m really excited about this year coming is that we have some machine learning components built into the reporting side of things, so sentiment analysis and key language analysis, basically being able to see on an employee base of any size what are people talking about, what are their wins, how are they slipping, so that you can, as a coach or consultant with limited resources, know where to troubleshoot. So, within the business, I’m excited about that. Within my own life, I’m excited to be traveling again. We are spending with the family in Australia and I’m going to be in Bali for a bit — Fiji, sorry, not Bali, Fiji, and a couple other spots so I’m really looking forward to that.

Alex: That sounds amazing.

Chris: What about you, Alex? What are you excited about?

Alex: You know, I’m excited, always talking about travel, it’s always fun. This year, I got to travel a lot, and I like working from anywhere, it’s so nice, and I like the change of time zone because it’s nice to do work when everyone’s asleep in the company.

Chris: So you’ve got a team all over the world, don’t you?

Alex: We’re pretty global, yeah, but there are — I mean, most people work kind of like let’s say East Coast to kind of European time zone. I’m in the West Coast, so, yeah, I was in Japan this year and it was during the day to have this space where you’re not getting Slack messages, you’re not getting emails, so I’m excited a little bit of travel. We have a lot of really cool things we’re releasing, programs that we’re launching, the Coaching.com AI strategy being unfolded, so there’s a lot of really cool things. But right now, I’m excited for a little bit of the slowdown of the holiday season as well. I don’t know when people will be listening to this podcast but we can all agree that the holiday season has a nice feel to it, doesn’t it?

Chris: Absolutely. Yeah, and we tend to alternate, my folks live across the country and so every other year, we’re traveling and we’re staying because my wife’s family is here —

Alex: And here is Toronto?

Chris: Here is Toronto, that’s right, yeah. And this year we’re staying put, which is nice. Get a chance to actually sort of — I love my family dearly, miss seeing them, and, sorry, Mom, if you’re listening, it’s nice to have the stability for a couple days, at least.

Alex: Hey, I’m not going to do anything for New Year’s, I’m going to go down to San Diego, visit the family. It’s nice to stay local sometimes.

Chris: Yeah, totally. For all the travel, also nice to stay local, yeah, for sure.

Alex: Chris, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s fun to talk to you. Looking forward to you staying in touch.

Chris: Likewise, my friend. Thank you so much.