In the mid-2000’s PayPal was in a unique position. 

They had survived the dot com crash and were growing - fast. 

While they were helping small businesses operate and collect money from customers, there was one major threat to their business - fraudulent charges. 

They were losing close to $10million in fraudulent charges every month. 

Throwing more people at the program wasn’t an option. 

They were processing 100-1000 transactions per minute. 

No matter how many people they had, quality control couldn’t keep up. 

So they turned to software. 

After analyzing past transactions, they wrote software to automatically flag and cancel bonus charges. 

While this allowed them to process more data, they ran into a new problem. 

They were dealing with an adaptive enemy.

After an hour or two, the thieves would catch on to the algorthym and change their tactic. 

The software couldn’t keep up. 

They were reactionary - not proactively blocking transactions. 

What PayPal figured out was the theives could fool the computer but not nearly as easily fool a real person. 

This called for a hybrid approach. 

They re-wrote the software to flag suspicious transactions that would show up for human operators. 

People would make the final call on if the transaction was legit or not. 

Putting both computers and humans together gave them a power much greater than either one could achieve on their own. 

And this alone allowed PayPal to become profitable for the first time in its history and stay in business. 

This story is almost identical to what we see in the coaching industry. 

In fact, I went through the same path. 

When my gym was starting to grow, we hit a point where I couldn’t always keep up with all our new clients. 

I would forget to send a resource to someone. 

Or miss a message that came in. 

Things would slip through the cracks trying to manage so much in my business. 

So I turned to software. 

I tried to automate all our client check-ins. 

I figured that would be a great way to scale my business. 

While it worked for a bit, what I realized was eventually, clients just tuned it out. 

They knew it was automated. 

It wasn’t personal. 

It felt like a computer - because it was. 

So after a while, clients stopped interacting with their checkins. 

I stopped getting the data I needed and results started to slip again. 

Just like PayPal, I saw an opportunity for a hybrid approach. 

While I didn’t need to be the one to personally send checkin’s every day, clients needed a human behind it interacting with them. 

That was the start of Coach Catalyst. 

A system that didn’t replace the human element of coaching. 

But instead enhanced it. 

Created something that neither just a person or just software could achieve alone. 

A way to truly scale your coaching business without losing the personal touch. 

And guess what - it worked! 

As soon as a client would miss a few checkin’s, I’d get an alert as coach and was able to reach out to them. 

The most common answer I received back was, “Oh I didn’t realized anyone was watching this!” 

And right after, compliance soared. 

In fact, in our first 6 week challenge after implementing Coach Catalyst, we had 95% of participants complete the full challenge. 

This was unheard of. 

Before using the hybrid approach we never had more the 50% of participants complete the full six weeks. 

But now, we knew what could be done. 

Instead of capping our programs at 15 or 20 participants, we were able to scale them to 200+… all without adding a single hour of extra work for our staff. 

This meant more revenue, a better business and happier clients (and coaches!). 

You can use software in your business and not become cold.