I have delayed a response to this review dated 28th December 2018 because I wanted to give Kate the option to remove this post (and the other copies of it she has placed online) because I have no interest in damaging her brand or reputation. However, the statements made are untrue and I need to be clear on the facts that have been left out.
I will now share a more accurate explanation of what happened, all of which is backed up by written evidence. I do this for myself, but to also show how easy it is to take these types of posts on face value and immediately think badly of the person being reviewed. When in fact, many of them are not true and can greatly, and unjustly, damage a reputation and business
Before this review, Kate had been emailing her accusations and threats to me. I made it clear to Kate that her they were unfounded in our emails, and if she decided to publish them, as she was threatening to do, I would seek legal advice for slander and libel. I suggested that she base any review on fact and fact alone. Sadly she has not.
The £10,500 fee for 6 months coaching was inclusive of tax. The actual price of the coaching was £8,700. The agreed services for this fee were:
Full day face to face strategy intensive plus lunch and refreshments at a hotel
Business Strategy
Marketing System
90 Day Planning System
2x coaching calls per month
90 Day Plan Review
Email support
Membership of my Simply Smart Business Academy
All of which were delivered, aside from the final 4 coaching sessions over 2 months that were due to be delivered after her requested break.
Our work together started on the 18th May 2018, with the strategy intensive day, where we created her strategy and income plan together based on the offers she planned to launch her business with (this was a soft launch, as per her brief). The strategy and income targets were based on this and both were agreed by Kate. Kate isn’t new to business, she has run a business before and, indeed, offers small business coaching on her website. She was very happy with my advice, the strategy, income plan and implementation plan and could see how it would get her to where she needed to be.
In month one of our coaching, Kate decided to add in a new offer, at a lower price point than the original income streams she had wanted to launch with. Thus changing the plan altogether. This affected the potential income and took us off course from the targets set out in the income plan and strategy, and also delayed the process as she needed to get the messaging and copy ready for the new offer. This wasn’t a bad idea, but it did delay the work we were doing and would, ultimately, affect the results.
There was also a delay in proceedings because she was waiting for her website to be completed, thus delaying the soft launch of the business. This delay was around one month and of course was not Kate’s fault, however this did, again, delay the results.
Sadly Kate did not follow my actions to the letter as stated. She did very well in creating content and making herself visible on her social media profiles, but she did not do the launch training I suggested to help support her, she only responded a few times to my twice weekly accountability emails throughout the whole of the coaching period (which would enable her to get more support for her weekly tasks), and she did not complete a number of tasks we agreed in her 90 day plan. She missed one of her coaching calls completely. She needed to turn another into a personal conversation instead of business coaching. She moved one at the last minute and she took another from her car as she’d double booked and had a meeting with a client.
Kate started the soft launch of her business finally on the 26th July 2018 (over 2 months into our work together) and ran it for around 3 weeks with no sales. I made a number of suggestions to Kate to follow up this activity to bring the sales in, but these were ignored.
As shared by Kate herself in her Facebook Live here https://gwent.co/KHLaunching, she was suffering from mindset issues around this time, as many of us do in business (myself included). She brought those to me and we turned our attention to that as I wanted to be sure she worked through these so that they didn’t hinder her in the future. These became a priority for her. I was supporting her myself with this, for which she was very thankful at the time, and I also offered two alternative options for extra support. These were things I’d used myself that helped me. One being an EFT session and the other an RTT session.
On the 6th September 2018, Kate emailed me and asked me if I would allow a break in the program for 2 months as she felt that the personal and health problems she was dealing was stopping her from fully committing to the work and was wasting my time, her time and her investment. We had worked together for just under 4 months by this point, although she had been largely absent for the previous 3 weeks. I’ve never allowed this before but I wanted to support Kate as I could see she was struggling, and agreed in writing that we would take a break until 1st November so long as she settled the outstanding amount owed - which was £1000 - when we would start again and complete the coaching by the end of the year. My assistant chased her to settle the outstanding amount many times, which was ignored.
Despite not settling the outstanding amount as agreed, I emailed Kate numerous times towards the end of October 2018 to set up the calls and get started for the final two months, which I’d booked out for her in November and December. These were all ignored. One of these emails suggested that if she was struggling with time, we could look to push the coaching to after Christmas, this email was dated 31st October 2018 and was, again, ignored.
I already had other projects that I needed to book in to my schedule and knew I would struggle to work with Kate in the New Year as I was due to start these in January 2019. After not hearing back from Kate for a week after my offer of pushing the coaching to after Christmas, I booked in the other work. At this point I’d already decided that a way forward would be to offer her a refund for the final two months if we could not agree to a time that would work for us, even though at this point I’d still not heard from her.
At no point did I offer or agree to start the coaching in January and considering Kate had a trip booked to Florida in January, I would be surprised that she would even want to restart the coaching then.
Kate finally emailed me on the 20th November 2018 to say that she wanted to have a chat about the lack of progress on the program as she had paid 1000s of pounds, was no further forward and felt resistance to paying more.
Considering the history above, I was shocked and disappointed at this. It felt like she was blaming the program for her lack of results, without taking into account any of the other factors. I wanted to make it clear that there were a number of reasons why she may not be any further forward, which I laid out in my email dated 20th November 2018. There was no blaming, no accusations, just a clear statement of where we were and what had happened. I then said I was very keen to resolve this, and offered her times to jump on a call that week. My aim was to understand why she was unhappy and come to a resolution that would be positive for both of us and was very clear about that.
I had no response to my November 20th 2018 email. So I followed up again offering the call times. She also ignored that email of 22nd November 2018.
At this point I knew I unable to work with Kate going forwards as we were almost at the end of November 2018 and I didn’t feel I had the time available to support her in 2019. This had nothing to do with her challenging me. I’d made this decision because she had missed the agreed start time for our coaching, hadn’t paid the outstanding amount as agreed and I had already booked work in. I did try to move a few things around in my schedule, but I wasn‘t able to. I did not dump her as she claims, and did not offer or agree to a January 2019 start date at any time.
I emailed on the 26th November 2018 and made it clear that the time I had booked out to work with her had now passed and I didn’t feel able to continue. I suggested that the fairest way forwards would be for me to refund the remaining two months, even though the contract, signed by Kate, states that full payment for the entire coaching is due, regardless of whether the coaching is completed or you discontinue participation, and even though I had lost income as I was unable to replace Kate with a new one to one client in the 2 months break or the 2 months following that, as I had kept that period free for her. The refund was a goodwill gesture, and she agreed to this by sending me her bank details. The refund was made the following week.
On the 16th December 2018, Kate emailed with inaccurate and untrue accusations, demanding a full refund because I had given her ‘bad business advice’, despite agreeing to my previous offer of a two month refund and despite being very happy with my advice throughout the time she was working with me. She threatened to take me to court, to report me to trading standards and to post about her “experience” of working with me. She demanded I pay this by the 27th December. The day after Boxing Day, or she would take action.
At this point I removed her from my Facebook Group and other social profiles as the situation felt toxic, which in her next email she complained about because that Group could support her. This I found interesting considering she felt I gave bad business advice, why on earth would she want to be in my Group for support?
I refused the demand for a refund and Kate then emailed me on Christmas Eve with more threats. Again, I refused the demand and advised that if she did want to take this further, then we should leave it in the hands of our solicitors.
The next step for Kate was to publish this review in three places online,
I didn’t want to share this, and gave Kate every opportunity to avoid it, but she’s left me no choice. I feel I have acted with integrity and care - even after receiving the accusations - by offering to get on a call to chat it through and reach a resolution.
I am saddened that it has come to this. During our time together, I went above and beyond with extra support, I checked in on Kate during the period we weren’t working together, I chased her to start working again and after she missed the deadline for us to start working together, gave her a refund for those missed two months.
The advice I gave during the time we were working together has been proven to work for me and hundreds of other clients, which is backed up by many testimonials and a long list of results. I am very sorry that Kate feels the way she does and has decided to take this course of action.