Happy 5th Birthday to Coaching on Demand

Written by Chris Woodman

It was back in the summer of 2019 before anyone had heard of covid or lockdowns, that we were having a conversation about how to develop the Leadenhall coaching practice.  One of my colleagues waved a phone in the air and said, ‘people will want to be coached on this, not in their offices, particularly the younger generation’.    After some discussion we decided to build a coaching platform.

In September, Liz Codd and I began to work with a developer and a business analyst to build what would become Coaching on Demand.  Shortly after we started work, we discovered that BetterUp had already launched a platform and as we got close to having our demonstration version ready, we heard about an app called Ezra and not long after, CoachHub.  The world of digital coaching was emerging!

In January 2020 we began to book meetings with our clients to introduce them to our new creation.  Liz and I would conduct a demo of the platform where we would set up a mini coaching session and one of us would leave the room with our laptop and who how you could book and hold coaching sessions via the platform (which has Zoom built into the platform).   Many people hadn’t really heard of Zoom in those halcyon pre- lockdown days!

We had decided to launch our new service in April, and we were full of enthusiasm running around the city demonstrating our new coaching platform.  Like everyone else, I was reading the news about the new virus discovered in China and then following its’ progress to Italy and then the UK – and the now famous announcement from Boris Johnson for all of us to ‘stay at home’.

We decided that we would go ahead and launch Coaching on Demand on 1^st April (I know it is April Fools Day!) regardless of world events.  We worked with our agency Insight Creative to put together a video in a week, all of us working from home.  Here it is, still on YouTube, and looking back on it, not bad in the circumstances we found ourselves:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgAiHfzRByU&t=3s

One of the early decisions that we needed to make was where did we fit in the market.  It was apparent that other platforms that were emerging at the time were well-funded, with BetterUp, CoachHub and Ezra funded to the tune millions of dollars/euros compared to our self-invested model (bootstrapping is the expression, I believe).  We decided that we would have a very different approach.

We saw ourselves as a high-quality coaching practice and the thought of paying coaches low hourly rates and scaling up with large volume contracts was an antithetical to our coaching practice.  As a former Group HRD for companies such as Fidelity International, COLT Telecom and Aspen Insurance, I would not have wanted a platform with low paid coaches providing coaching to the analysts, underwriters, managers, traders, sales, risk and compliance professionals that would have been my client base back in the day.  We decided to go for a totally different business model, away from the subscription model of the commodity providers:

• Leadenhall Coaches were businesspeople who had held significant responsibilities in business, usually financial services, who were qualified (often to master’s level in coaching) and had significant coaching experience.
• So, the coaches on the platform would be the same coaches that provided our existing in-person full-service coaching service – we were a coaching practice with a platform – not a pure play coaching platform provider.
• The clients and the coachees would choose the coaches (not an algorithm) which could include chemistry meetings via the platform. We hold a briefing meeting between the coaches and the client before we begin a programme so everyone can get to know what is expected.
• We also decided that we would not go for the subscription model but base our fees on the services that we provide (coaching, communications, support and reporting) and that these would be transparent. We would not charge for coaching that did not happen (just transfer the hours to a different coachee).
• We would give the client up to two years to use the coaching booked via the platform (not six months).
• The platform would have a clean and simple design, be easy to use and not be tempted to add layers of complexity that were not adding value.
• As one potential client said back in 2020 – ‘so you have a platform, I’m sure it works, what I’m interested in is the quality of your coaches’

Our first Coaching on Demand client was from our existing client relationships.  Rothschild & Co were looking for a cost-effective solution to provide coaching to their people and we will always be appreciative of the team there for taking a chance on our platform.  We are still working together five years later.

Since 2020, we have gone from strength to strength partnering with clients, most of whom are looking for a range of coaching services whether it be in-person, platform coaching, team coaching, group coaching or leadership development.  We have continued to refine the platform with additional features but always with a view to keeping the platform clean and simple in design and easy to use.  The Leadenhall Coaching Community is now nearly 100 coaches strong and based in the US, UK, Continental Europe, Asia and Australia – meet some of them here:

https://www.leadenhallconsulting.com/about/the-leadenhall-coaching-community/

If you would like to know more, please get in touch below: