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Successful individuals use coaching and mentorship to
help them unlock their potential. Not all

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coaches are created equal, and that's
why we work with the top five percent

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of coaches at Idemics. Welcome to
Coaches you Need, brought to you by

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Idemics. Welcome to the twenty twenty
three kickoff of the Idea Mix podcast.

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We're thrilled to change up our format
for you this year. One type of

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episode will be Innovators to Know luminaries
from across a variety of fields and disciplines

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whose work and concepts are essential learning. The second type of episode are coaching

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shorts, where we aim to demystify
coaching, help you understand what it is

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and how it can help you.
And we will feature different Idea Mixed coaches

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and cover topics as broad as what
is coach sing, how does it differ

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from therapy to what makes a client
coachable? We're going to each host both

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of those different kinds of shows,
so you'll see both of us over the

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course of the season. Welcome to
our show, and we're going to kick

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it off today with a short on
how we got started at Idea Max Great,

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So, Sam, what was the
inspiration for starting idea Max. So

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I think the three of us who
co founded the company, Milanamhita and I

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had both had different experiences with coaching
over the years. In my own case,

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I had used coaching for the first
time on a topic in personal development

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work life balance. I was struggling
at the time with three kids and a

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job and just not doing any of
those things particularly well. Another time,

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I ended up working with a code
on helping me understand where I was in

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my own professional development and how I
needed to evolve. Yet another time,

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I brought in a coach to work
with a team I was trying to build

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and grow and actually developed some some
glue and kinship among them so we could

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perform better as a team. On
each of those occasions, the coaching was

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hugely valuable, but the process of
finding a coach was hugely frustrating. I

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asked all sorts of people for referrals
and recommendations, and some of them were

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good, but equally some of them
were not fit for purpose, and I

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had to sort of go off and
spend hours during all this research to actually

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find a group of coaches that I
could then interview and choose. But let's

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dissect a little bit what that process
was like. I mean, how did

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you like, what was your process
for trying to determine whether that coach was

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going to be able to help you
or not. That's a great question.

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So first, I think coaching as
an industry, and I came to realize

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this through this research and in some
of the market research we did before starting

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Idea makes coaching as an industry has
grown tremendously, and with that, the

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number of coaches has also grown exponentially. In fact, as a result,

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you get every caliber and every quality
of coach, and so being able to

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understand and actually have a platform where
you know that you're getting vetted quality coaches

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and you don't have to worry that
these coaches may not be fit for purpose

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or may not do the right thing
by you. Any of those factors was

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super important. I thought. The
other was being able to distinguish among the

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coaches in terms of what their true
expertise actually is. Right, lots of

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coaches say they do lots of things, and I, as an individual consumer

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of coaching, can't understand some of
those nuances and differences. And so an

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Idea Mix we really set out to
develop a framework for understanding, categorizing,

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and then presenting those coaches so that
they were comprehensible both as individuals but also

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in comparison other coaches, So making
the process seamless for clients to be able

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to find a coach who maybe they
will have good chemistry with. Can you

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talk a little bit about sort of
how your process informed the framework that idea

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has established for vetting the coaches.
Yeah, I think it informed it in

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terms of the macro objectives, Like
we knew what the problem was, and

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we didn't know what the solution needed
to look like, right, So that

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solution really came from talking to people
who had used coaching, people who had

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no experience of coaching, and understanding
where they would go and how they would

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go about the process of finding coaches, talking to coaches to understand how they

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found new clients. And it was
really through a series of interviews effectively with

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those two key stakeholders that we said, hey, as a company, we

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have to be able to serve those
two constituencies and serve them extremely well,

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right to make this compelling for both
sides. And it was really those interviews

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and sort of the inkling of an
idea that we had that it could work

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this way. That was sort of
true in the or was correct in terms

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of the objectives or the solution we
thought customers wanted, but was totally wrong

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in terms of how we needed to
provide that solution. And it was really

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market testing the concept and then iterating
with those same people by showing them various

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versions of the prototype that allowed us
to arrive at okay, this is something

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that's workable for both sides and as
intuitive, easy and seamless for both sides,

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and so this could be the ideal. So amazing, And when was

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sort of the official launch of ideo
mix and we so, if you can

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believe it, we launched at sort
of over Christmas New Year's last year,

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so in twenty twenty one, and
we had um I then spent you know,

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many many months iterating on the product, building it, testing it,

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and we launched initially to coaches who
we had pre vetted and we knew it

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would take you know a few months
for the coaches to come onto the platform

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that we wanted to be on the
platform and get set up in terms of

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their profiles, et cetera. That
process took four months, and so we

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launched two consumers really only towards the
end of April, and we you know,

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let it sort of trickle out organically
in the sense of we really wanted

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to understand from early customers how they
felt about their experience, what worked,

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what didn't work, what did What
did we gotten right? What hadn't we

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gotten right? And as with I
think every product, it's a living,

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breathing baby in a sense, you
know, and that baby sort of grows

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and evolves and things go wrong and
some things go right with it. And

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along the way, you know,
all of our users, both coaches and

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client seeking coaching, had excellent feedback
for us that really allowed us to keep

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refining the product to what it is
today. And that's like a continuous process.

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And one of the things that I
think is great about ID MIX is

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the organic nature of the way that
we approach our work because it continues to

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allow us to be open to feedback
from everyone, our coaches, our clients,

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and continually evolve, you know.
And just like our clients are coming

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to coaches so that they can grow, we continue to grow and change.

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What else would you say We'll leave
with this final note is IDEA mixes strengths

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as a coaching company. So I
think our key strength is that we think

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of technology as an enabling tool to
really propagate and share coaching as a deeply

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human centric process. Right without that
fundamental one to one connection between a coach

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and a client. Without that,
there's nothing, And technology can be an

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enabling factor to cut all of the
noise and difficulty around creating the form for

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that interaction and then allowing people to
schedule those interactions and making that process super

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easy. But is there going to
substitute for the fundamentally human experience of two

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people connecting one on one? And
I think that really lies It's probably our

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core value and lies at the heart
of how all of us think about what

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we do, right like it has
to serve those two individuals who connect as

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client and coach in every instance,
and I think keeping that at the center

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of our frame of reference has been
so important and will always continue to be

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so important, And so designing a
process that is human centric and maintains that

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connection being sort of the most vital
element of everything that we do is pretty

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key. Well great, that's all
the questions, and we look forward to

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continuing these short podcasts into twenty twenty
three. Enjoy the Twin Trains few season.

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Thanks for joining us, Thanks for
listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen

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and leave us a review. Find
your ideal coach at www dot vidmx dot

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com. Special thanks to our producer
Martin Maluski and singer songwriter Doug Allen.