Narrator [00:00:00] Successful individuals use coaching and mentorship to help them unlock their potential. Not all coaches are created equal, and that’s why we work with the top 5% of coaches. At ideamix. Welcome to Coaches You Need brought to you by ideamix.
Sam Jayanti [00:00:15] Welcome to the 2023 kick-off of the ideamix Podcast. We’re thrilled to change up our format for you this year. One type of episode will be Innovators to Know. Luminaries from across a variety of fields and disciplines whose work and concepts are essential learning. The second type of episode.
Jamie Kosmar [00:00:42] Are coaching shorts where we aim to demystify coaching, help you understand what it is and how it can help you. And we will feature different ideamix coaches and cover topics as broad as what is coaching. How does it differ from therapy to what makes a client coachable?
Sam Jayanti [00:01:08] We’re going to each host both of those different kinds of shows. So you’ll see both of us over the course of the season. Welcome to our show, and we’re going to kick it off today with a short on how we got started at ideamix Radio.
Jamie Kosmar [00:01:25] Great. So, Sam, what was the inspiration for starting ideamix?
Sam Jayanti [00:01:32] So I think the three of us who co-founded the company Milena, Mahitha, and I had both had different experiences with coaching over the years. In my own case, I had used coaching for the first time on a topic in personal development work-life balance. I was struggling at the time with three kids and a job and just not doing any of those things particularly well. And other time I ended up working with a coach on helping me understand where I was in my own professional development and how I needed to evolve. Yet another time, I brought in a coach to work with a team I was trying to build and grow and actually developed some glue and kinship among them so we could perform better as a team. On each of those occasions, the coaching was hugely valuable, but the process of finding a coach was hugely frustrating. I asked all sorts of people for referrals and recommendations and some of them were good, but equally some of them were not fit for purpose, and I had to sort of go off and spend hours doing all this research to actually find a group of coaches that I could then interview and choose.
Jamie Kosmar [00:02:45] And what? But let’s let’s dissect a little bit what that process was like. I mean, how did you like what was your process for trying to determine whether that coach was going to be able to help you or not?
Sam Jayanti [00:02:56] That’s a great question. So first, I think coaching as an industry and I came to realize this through this research and in some of the market research we did before starting ideamix coaching as an industry has grown tremendously and with that the number of coaches has also grown exponentially inside. As a result, you get every caliber and every quality of coach. And so being able to understand and actually have a platform where you know that you’re getting vetted, quality coaches and you don’t have to worry that these coaches, you know, may not be fit for purpose or may not do the right thing by you. Any of those factors was super important. I thought the other was being able to distinguish among the coaches in terms of what their true expertize actually is. Right. Lots of coaches say they do lots of things, and I, as an individual consumer of coaching, can understand some of those nuances and differences. And so an idea makes me really set out to develop a framework for understanding, categorizing and then presenting those coaches so that they were comprehensible, both as individuals, but also in comparison to other coaches.
Jamie Kosmar [00:04:11] So making the process seamless for clients to be able to find a coach who maybe they will have good chemistry with. Can you talk a little bit about sort of how your process informed the framework, that ideamix established for vetting the coaches?
Sam Jayanti [00:04:30] Yeah, I think it informed it in terms of the macro objectives. Like we knew what the problem was and we didn’t know what the solution needed to look like. Right? So that solution really came from talking to people who had used coaching, people who had no experience of coaching and understanding where they would go and how they would go. About the process of finding coaches, talking to coaches to understand how they found new clients. And it was really through a series of interviews effectively with those two key stakeholders that we said, Hey, as a company, we have to be able to serve those two constituencies and serve them extremely well. Right. To make this compelling for both sides. And it was really those interviews and sort of the inkling of an idea that we had that it could work this way. That was sort of true in the or was correct in terms of the objectives or the solution we thought customers wanted but was totally wrong in terms of how we needed to provide that solution. And it was really market testing the concept and then iterating with those same people by showing them various versions of the prototype that allowed us to arrive at, okay, this is something that’s workable for both sides and is intuitive, easy and seamless for both sides. And so this could be the ideal solution.
Jamie Kosmar [00:06:00] Amazing. And when was sort of the official launch of ideamix?
Sam Jayanti [00:06:06] And we are so if you can believe it, we launched at sort of over Christmas New Year last year, so in 2021. And we had by then spent, you know, many, many months iterating on the product, building it, testing it. And we launched initially the coaches who we had prevented, and we knew it would take, you know, a few months for the coaches to come on to the platform that we wanted to be on the platform and get set up in terms of their profiles, etc. That process took four months and so we launched to consumers really only towards the end of April. And we, you know, let it sort of trickle out organically in the sense of we really wanted to understand from early customers how they felt about their experience, what worked, what didn’t work, what did we what did we gotten right? What hadn’t we got it right? And as with, I think, every product. It’s a living, breathing baby in a sense, you know, and that baby sort of grows and evolves and things go wrong and some things go right with it. And along the way, you know, all of our users, both coaches and clients seeking coaching had excellent feedback for us that really allowed us to keep refining the product to what it is today. And that’s like a continuous process.
Jamie Kosmar [00:07:39] And one of the things that I think is great about idea mix is the organic nature of the way that we approach our work, because it continues to allow us to be open to feedback from everyone, our coaches, our clients, and continually evolve. You know, and just like our clients are coming to coaches so that they can grow. We continue to grow and change. What else would you say we’ll leave with this final note? Is ideamix’s strengths as a coaching company?
Sam Jayanti [00:08:09] So I think our key strength is that we think of technology as an enabling tool to really propagate and share coaching as a deeply human-centric process. Right. Without that fundamental 1-to-1 connection between a coach and a client. Without that, there’s nothing. And technology can be an enabling factor to cut all of the noise and difficulty around. Creating the forum for that interaction and then allowing people to schedule those interactions and making that process super easy. But is that going to substitute for the fundamentally human experience of two people connecting one on one? And I think that really lies. It’s probably our core value and lies at the heart of how all of us think about what we do right. Like it has to serve those two individuals who connect as client and coach in every instance. And I think keeping that at the center of our frame of reference has been so important and will always continue to be so important.
Jamie Kosmar [00:09:20] And so designing a process that is human-centric and maintains that connection, being sort of the most vital element of everything that we do is pretty key. Well, great. That’s all the questions. And we look forward to continuing these short podcasts into 2023.
Sam Jayanti [00:09:41] Enjoy the 2023 season. Thanks for joining us.
Narrator [00:09:46] Thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave us a review. Find your ideal coach at www.theideamix.com. Special thanks to our producer Martin Milewski and singer-songwriter Doug Allen.