How The Life Coach School Solved Their Employee Onboarding and Training Woes.

Last Updated on October 4, 2019 by Owen McGab Enaohwo

Summary:

The Life Coach School is a B2C company with 12 full-time employees in the personal development space. They offer a monthly membership program that teaches clients how to coach themselves, manage their minds, and control their thoughts to create the results they want in their lives. They also have a coach certification program for people who want to become life coaches themselves.

The company’s next big goal is to make $100 million in revenue by 2028. The Life Coach School was first established in 2007.

Highlights of Results The Life Coach School Got from Using SweetProcess:

Cut down on wasted time and productivity loss.
Simplified training to the point where employees can train themselves.
Streamlined their detailed selling process for all products.

Listen to the audio interview:

Remote Working Remorse

Kimberly Job is the executive director of marketing and customer support of The Life Coach School.

She’s responsible for ensuring everything works smoothly in the company and nothing gets missed.

Their company of 12 full-time employees works remotely, which at times has been the culprit of costly obstacles and mistakes. Specifically, they’ve experienced challenges with training new employees due to communication and a lack of formalized procedures.

And since team members had a lot of knowledge in their heads that wasn’t documented, if they left the company and moved onto a new position, the processes left with the employee.

Further compounding the issue was a high turnover rate. In a fast-paced industry like personal development, many employees simply don’t survive, and again take whatever they learned with them without passing it on. So Job found that they constantly had to recreate processes that either should have already been documented or had left with a team member.

But the trials didn’t stop there. The company started growing at a rapid pace, and they tried to keep up by giving each employee more tasks. They would speak individually with each employee, meet with them, and train them on new tasks but this did not solve the underlying issues.

Looking for Solutions

Job was clear that something needed to change. She recounts a scenario in which a new employee was hired, and The Life Coach School owner Brooke Castillo told the new hire’s manager not to communicate with him in any other way besides video.

That was the start of something new, as the company started creating process videos for every task. Videos were stored within Basecamp, where all processes were documented. Job says,

“Video processes were helpful because the information was repeatable without managers having to repeat instructions to employees over and over.”

This, in effect, was the biggest cost of trying to systemize the company.

But there were still some difficulties with their new system’s infrastructure. For one, it required that team members sit through five- to 10-minute videos for every process they wanted to perform. Because there wasn’t any written documentation, there was a time cost associated with relying on video processes.

Trailblazing a New Path

It was Castillo and her husband who originally came across SweetProcess because of their involvement with a mastermind group. Once Castillo saw what could be done with SweetProcess, she immediately advised her team to implement the solution.

Job was skeptical because the company was already using Basecamp to store all their processes, and if they switched over to SweetProcess, they would have to waste time and energy moving all their processes over to the new platform.

Ultimately it was Castillo who made the decision to move forward with SweetProcess and her team yielded to her wisdom. Once Job spent more time with the app and saw what it could do for the company, she was sold on it too.

The Sweet Solution

The video processes that the company originally created remain intact. The difference now is that they’ve been able to organize these videos within SweetProcess such that they can easily find what they’re looking for. They’ve also added written documentation, especially for simple procedures that can benefit from being presented as a step-by-step checklist. That has been a major time saver.

Additionally, Job shared that for every product they sell, they have what they refer to as a “narrative.” The narrative details the customer’s journey, from becoming aware of the company’s offerings to purchase, delivery, and follow-up for those who choose to leave the program. The narrative also includes every step the employee needs to take during the process.

Job explained,

“It’s like a table of contents that we can click through and see everything that needs to get done.”

In the personal development space, employers value resourceful employees.

“The fact that they can look up everything they need to do has saved us a lot of time communicating during the training process,”

offered Job.

“Our customer support team can look up all the documentation and figure things out on their own.”

With SweetProcess implemented, The Life Coach School has introduced a 30-, 60-, and 90-day delegation process for new hires. For the first 30 days, new hires use existing processes, and this allows managers to ensure they can follow processes. During the second 30-day period, new hires can begin creating processes. But their processes will not be implemented without first being reviewed. In the final 30 days, if they’ve proven themselves capable of creating and following processes, they can begin creating their own processes. Job found it helpful to be able to see that progression.

“Having everything documented guides everybody’s mindset about how we create processes, how we document them, and how we follow them. It keeps the whole company cohesive because everyone can fall back on the documentation.”