The importance of tracking true "utilization" in a coaching practice.

I have the things I value most, which are autonomy and creative freedom. On the other hand, I don't have what I perceive to be some of the compounding benefits that accrue. To peers of mine, friends of mine whom I've watched build businesses, careers in the more traditional sense. And so nothing's ever simple, right? I want to be careful not to be too reductive in my observations of my own life or of theirs. But I do sit here and look over there and see what looks like green grass.

And I think it probably is green grass. Of course we know the way life works. And if I went over to that green grass, I'd look back and find that where I was has green grass too. So. These realizations, these explorations, they don't mean that anything is going particularly wrong.

What they mean is I have an opportunity to explore and analyze and consider whether my way of being would benefit from some tweaks that would allow me to keep being me and maybe accrue some of the rewards, the compounding rewards. That I see other people experiencing. Could I go on the way I am forever?

I've told you before in this podcast that I can imagine myself being 80 years old, and on a Tuesday morning waking up and saying, yep, I've got six calls today with clients looking forward to catching up with them and seeing how I can help today. I look at my bookkeeping business and most of my job in my bookkeeping business is programming software, building tools that. Make my bookkeeping more automated. That seems to be an itch I continue. Enjoy scratching.

I've opened the office hours membership now, and that's where I get to be a teacher and a facilitator. And that's a job I love. I said to Kate the other day, I think part of the reason I'm opening office hours is because I do have a deep down desire to be a school teacher, like a high school teacher. But being a high school teacher doesn't really fit in our life. And so instead I open up a membership called office hours and it lets me be a teacher and I've loved teaching for ever.

And I think I will continue to love it. So none of these things need to go away. It may be true that none of them even need to significantly change. I would probably benefit. This is most likely the understatement of the century. I would probably benefit from looking farther out into the future and figuring out how today's activities relate to that future reality, because I tend to be a person who just says, what are we doing today? And maybe what are we doing tomorrow?

And maybe what are we doing next week? But for the most part, it's just sort of, what are we doing today? What problem is there to be solved today? What thing is there to be made today that could be kind of fun and interesting. But I don't tend to think in terms of where am I headed and how am I headed there and why am I headed there? And so I'm trying to figure out, all right, what do I tweak here? I think I need a better system for tracking.

I think I want a system that helps me understand how my recent activity relates to my long term goals. Now this is one on one level stuff that your favorite business coach would have talked about on her podcast and webinars and courses and whatever else. And of course I will fully ignore all of it.

Um, but I'm thinking about how having a longer term goal or set of goals and understanding exactly how they relate to my personal mission and priorities, and then measuring my performance and my results against those longterm priorities would have a positive effect on me. It's so funny to say all that out loud, because again, this feels like one of those things that everybody else knows, but I don't. And I'm sure not everybody else knows it, but I can name a few people who clearly know it.

And so they probably loom large in my mind as having figured it all out. And then I'm making them a proxy for all of the rest of humanity. And so it, it can have this effect where you put yourself on an Island all alone and say, well, everyone else has it. And I don't, Oh, well, I guess it'll all work out or not.

And of course that's not, I mean, it will all work out or not, but I think It's not practical to say that I'm the only one who hasn't figured out how to relate today's activity to a long term vision for my life. So today I've got myself thinking, well, what would I measure? What would I measure as a way of checking in with today's activities, specifically my coaching practice? We'll just limit it to that one sort of Mark side hustle called coaching. Cause that's what this podcast is about.

What would I measure in my coaching practice that would have a clear relevance and importance to my vision for my life? Here's what I got. I'll share it with you. those of you who know me best know that this whole set of ideas may barely survive the completion of this episode, which then leads me to a thought of, uh, it's really probably time to hire some sort of an assistant, someone who Plug these holes in my skills and my thinking. Okay. Quick tangent.

I don't want you to email me an offer to be my assistant, not because I think that you're deficient in some way. It's because I have no confidence in myself at this point to productively engage any assistant, no matter how qualified, capable and brilliant. And also if you email me, that's just one more email I'm not responding to. So let's just let it settle. Let's just let it breathe. If an assistant happens, it happens. And if not, whatever.

I have actually reached out to a friend though, and I've asked that friend to coach me in becoming a person who could hire a person. I think that would be, boy, that would be a big win. Anyway. So even acknowledging that maybe these ideas won't survive past the end of this episode, I think it's a worthwhile thought experiment and I think I'm better off for having done it. And then I think it's execution, will bubble into my life in some way.

So here's what I'm thinking about tracking in my coaching practice as a way of improving it. And as a way of more fully living the values that I have that caused me to be in coaching in the first place. Okay. Here we go. I think I could be tracking.

The actual revenue collected in my coaching practice and The revenue owed to me in my coaching practice now You're laughing because I own a bookkeeping business and what I do is I track people's revenue for them And yes, I do actually have my revenue tracked. Of course I do. I don't let that fall behind What I'm talking about here is not just tracking it, but making it available to myself in a way that's so quick and so easy that there's really no friction between me and knowing my number.

Now, I may still only look at it every three, four, six weeks, but any amount of friction between me and that number will make it less likely for me to look at it and less likely, therefore, for me to benefit from it. So just a number that says, This is how many dollars I've collected in 2024 from my coaching practice. And here's how many dollars my existing coaching relationships will be paying me by agreement in the months to come. So that looks like, Oh yeah.

And in November, this client's going to pay. And in December that client's going to pay and et cetera. Just so I have a little bit of a dashboard about, how much money is already here and how much money is on its way. This is the easiest, simplest, and I think very useful thing for me to be tracking,, and looking at regularly. I, of course, would also want to look at how my time is being occupied by the coaching practice.

You've heard me talk about inventory, and some of you have thanked me for this idea, this concept of inventory, and I like it too. I think it would be even more powerful if I tracked it in any way. Um, if I looked at like my friend, Melissa, who, who you've heard on this podcast before, Melissa has this tool that she uses to track capacity in her practice and in her clients practice where she can look at, this is how many hours are in the calendar that could be used for coaching.

And this is how many hours that are actually being used for coaching we could call this a utilization. So in Mark Butler's coaching practice, what is his utilization? Meaning of all the hours that are available for coaching, how many are being used for coaching? That would be a useful number for me to track over time because if that number is trending downward, however, slowly, that's important information.

Also, if that number is trending upward, however, slowly, that's important information to the business. As one on one coaches, we are in a session based hourly business. Which is why I don't usually call it a business because it's a practice. it's a technician's practice. And if I don't have any idea what my utilization is or what the trend in my utilization is, then I could be caught off guard when suddenly money starts to feel tight.

And I'm not sure why, because maybe my emotional sense, my vague sense of how things are going is generally positive, which it is. But maybe the indicators aren't there to support my good expectations, my positive outlook. Maybe my utilization is trending downward, which means I've got a problem to solve in my coaching practice if I want my coaching practice to contribute in a meaningful way, to my family's finances. So I'm calling that utilization.

How much coaching capacity do I have and how much of it is actually being occupied. By paying clients. Now there's another piece here to utilization that sometimes I acknowledge and oftentimes I don't want to acknowledge because there can be some discomfort for me in what I'm about to tell you. And it is this in any given month, I can look at the amount of money that I collect from paying clients. And I can use that money as a buffer or as a boon to my mental state and my emotional state.

It's a hack. It's a crutch to be able to say, Oh, look, some people paid me. So I guess all is well in the world. And that's not totally untrue. Collecting money is a positive thing in my practice. I can also look at my calendar and I can say, Oh, look at all these appointments on my calendar. Look how well things are going. I can say that I'm full or I'm close to full.

That's also a boon to my psyche., but there's a number that represents where the rubber really meets the road in a coaching practice. And this tends to be one that I want to ignore. And it is the number of sessions that actually happen, which sounds really funny when you say it out loud. It's one thing to look at your calendar and see 12 or 14 sessions scheduled for the week.

But then at the end of the week, maybe only nine, 10 or 11 of those 12, 13 or 14 sessions actually delivered, they actually happened. Now, why does that matter? The reason it matters is that in a session based coaching practice like mine, I don't really earn the money until I deliver the session. So it doesn't matter if someone pays me, let's say it's some crazy number, 50, 000 for coaching until I deliver all of the sessions that 50, 000 commits me to. I haven't really earned the money.

And we know that's true because if I were to accumulate a whole bunch of undelivered sessions and then For some reason, it's just a thought experiment. All those clients came at the same time and said, we're ready for all of our sessions. And if I then couldn't deliver the sessions I'd committed myself to because I don't have the capacity in my week, well, now I've got a problem.

So in a session based practice, it's not enough to just get yeses and celebrate the yeses and celebrate the deposits of the money into the bank account. And it's not enough to just look at the calendar. And in my case, see a bunch of green spots because I highlight my coaching clients, hours green. It's not enough to see a green wall in my calendar. What really matters is what percentage of my capacity, not just was spoken for, but was actually used.

Because one of the most painful things to me about a coaching practice, which I've just had to accept as a cost of doing business, is that if a client cancels, 24, 48 hours, 72 hours, maybe even two weeks. It's not like I have some line of people that I'm aware of who are banging down the door to try to get that extra session if one opens up. But if a client cancels, it's more than likely that I lose the opportunity to translate that hour into its corresponding rate.

And I probably won't get that hour back, nor will I get that money back. So it's not enough to sell an hour and collect the money. The hour has to be delivered to the client. No, all of our friends on the course creation and mastermind selling and whatever world, they're all saying, yeah, exactly. This is why you shouldn't be in a one on one coaching practice. Well, they can take the rest of the episodes on my podcast and that those are my, my counterpoint to what they're saying.

This is not a deal breaker to me. It's simply a reality of a session based practice. And I have to build it into the model. I have to acknowledge that even when people have purchased, let's say 80 or 90 percent of my inventory,, they will use in any given week, some percentage lower than that, which then flows all the way through. To my personal income, which then flows through to my ability to live my values and desires in my personal life and pretending it's not that way is, not wise.

It's not practical. So in my business, yes, I want to track revenue collected. I want to track revenue still owed to me. I want to track My Availability as a percentage of capacity. And then I have to have a true utilization number that acknowledges that in any given week for the number of hours that I intended to coach a certain amount of dollars, a certain amount of value was actually delivered. So just using round numbers, It doesn't matter if I've sold 3, 000 worth of sessions in a week.

What matters is how many dollars worth of sessions did I deliver? That is my actual income for lack of a better word, or my actual revenue in a pure accounting sense, by the way, welcome to the world of nerdy accountants. What I'm talking about is the more precise way of tracking revenue. You don't get to call it revenue until you've delivered the services. So these are numbers that I would track.

And if I had a little dashboard that allowed me to look at the last three weeks or three months or nine months and to see trends in all of these numbers, revenue collected, revenue owed to me, Sessions committed sessions, completed some utilization number. Then I would have an easier time saying what's actually going on with the health of my coaching practice. And is it actually carrying its weight along with my other side hustles?

Is it actually pulling its weight in terms of my households consumption desires? We can look at all of those numbers as the ones that come after the transaction, after the person says yes, and they pay an invoice, depending on what we see in the trends in the post transaction data, like, you know, collected revenue and all of that, that I just talked about. Then we got to look at the pre transaction numbers. We have to look at the numbers that we believe contribute to transactions.

Now this for me is, it's one of those old novels where it says like, here be dragons, because in the pre transaction space, there are at least dozens of numbers you could track, and it might be hundreds. I've worked on some reports for clients of mine who tend to be more advertising driven, more funnel style businesses, and the variety and the quantity of numbers that they can track can be kind of staggering and it can be kind of overwhelming. And I'm a nerd. I'm, I'm a numbers guy.

I not afraid of math. I'm not afraid of statistics, but the numbers you can track in a marketing game are potentially overwhelming. Well, if you've listened to the podcast, you know, my strategy, my strategy is talking to a microphone, wait for an email to land in my inbox requesting coaching. That's my strategy. So when I'm looking at what I track in the pre transaction space, I look at how often am I hitting publish after talking into a microphone?

And in fact, I just signed into my podcast host. Before recording this episode, because I wanted to make sure that I haven't spoken directly about this topic. And I realized that my trend is downward in terms of frequency of publishing. I had a vague awareness of that, but it's a little bit worse than I thought. maybe I don't want to put a value judgment on that and say it's worse, but it's definitely becoming less frequent.

Well, if my strategy is to talk into a microphone and then wait for an email, the part of that I can control is talking into the microphone. And it's all fair and well and great for me to say today, all things are good. The practice is full. The practice is healthy. But if I'm talking into the microphone less and less often, and if I believe talking into the microphone matters, then I have to believe.

That whatever comes from talking into a microphone will decrease and that that will decrease the health of the practice. The only way I can pretend that's not the case is if I say, Oh, I was probably talking into the microphone way more than I needed to before. And now I'm just seeking some sort of steady state where, Oh, maybe I publish every other week. Maybe I publish every three weeks, but the emails still land in the inbox and the practice still stays healthy. That might be true.

And then the question becomes, how much am I willing to risk on that being true? Am I willing to risk incurring debt while I find out whether I can get away with publishing only once every three weeks, once every four weeks, I mean, I could take that risk. I reopened this podcast at the beginning of this year saying that I hadn't really published in the whole previous year and things had worked out fine. But is that the game I want to play?

Or do I want to acknowledge that the cost of producing a podcast episode is for me very low. And so there's no significant benefit to not Publishing a podcast in terms of costs saved. It doesn't take me a whole day. It doesn't cost me a thousand dollars. So why actually would I not do it? Got to ask the question.

And the answer to that question will inform how frequently I hit publish and reflect how confident I am that pushing publish will positively correlate with more emails in my inbox, more happy clients, more renewals, more referrals, and everything down the line. So for me, really the only pre transaction number that I'm tracking is podcast episodes It's pretty easy to keep track of that. Now I do have this membership now and I'm excited about it.

I love being a teacher and that's primarily what the membership offers me, teaching and facilitation. I don't think you can pretend you're going to grow a membership, publishing a podcast every week or every three or four weeks. I think if I want to really commit to the membership, what comes with that as a commitment to be in more places, more often extending people, an invitation to come into that membership. There will need to be more things to track. I'm not sure what those are yet.

More content, more content in more places. Ugh, but not so much that it takes over my life. These are the things to be explored, things to be balanced. But where that all leads me is, I want there to be just a small handful of numbers that I'm tracking post transaction. Meaning after people say yes and pay me, okay, what comes after that? I want to keep track of those things. So I know that the practice is staying healthy.

And then there are going to be a small handful of things pre transaction that I track frequency of content production, maybe new types of content production. I really shouldn't rule out advertising, even though it's kind of my brand. It's mostly that I'm anti Facebook ads. I'm anti social media advertising. I'm kind of psychotic about it, but I'm open to sponsorships. I'm open to affiliate arrangements where I pay my members to get me members.

So there's places to explore there, and I think some amount of this tracking could influence me to become a person who actually starts to reap longterm compounding rewards from all these little gigs I start. That I love I'll try to be back again soon because yeah, pushing publish on this podcast is my main strategy, so I will talk to you next week. See ya.