Content team coaching

What content team coaching is

Content team coaching is a standing fortnightly session with the two to five people in your business who write, edit or publish content, spent on the work they have in front of them that week. There are no exercises and no syllabus. We open the half-finished service page, the post that has been rewritten four times, the newsletter that has to go out on Thursday, and work on those. Between sessions I edit what they send me.

It is not a training course and it is not an editing retainer with lessons attached. A course runs its material whether the room needs it or not. A retainer continues for as long as you keep paying it. This is built to finish: the sessions exist to make the team able to do without them, and an arrangement with no end is a dependency, not coaching.

Who this is for

A business where content is spread across a few people who have never agreed what good looks like. A marketing coordinator writes, the owner approves, a technician supplies the facts, somebody in sales wants case studies. Each is competent alone. Together they produce drafts that go round three times and a website that sounds like three different companies.

If only one person writes, this is the wrong shape and in-house writer coaching costs less for the same rhythm. If the team has the skill but genuinely has no hours in the week, coaching will not create them, and content production management is the honest alternative. If you want one afternoon rather than a programme, take a half-day workshop and accept what a half day can do.

What goes in it

• The fortnightly session. Sixty minutes on video with everyone present, every second week, on a fixed day. One piece of the team’s own work is on screen and we take it apart: what the reader needs, what the opening two sentences should say, what to cut, what to check before it goes live.
• Edits between sessions. Up to six drafts a fortnight, returned within two working days with tracked changes and a short note on each change saying why it was made. The notes are the teaching; the corrected draft on its own teaches nobody.
• One written standard. In the first month the team writes down, in their own words, what good means here. It becomes the beginning of a style guide they will keep arguing with, which is the point of having one.
• Roles settled in writing. Who briefs, who writes, who checks facts, who approves, and how long each has. Most rework in a small team comes from that being unspoken rather than from bad writing.
• A rotation. Everyone is edited in front of everyone else at some stage. It is uncomfortable once, and it is the fastest way a team stops disagreeing in private and starts fixing things in the draft.

What you get, and how it ends

Published work from the first fortnight. The sessions run on live pieces, so pages and posts go out while the coaching is happening rather than after it.

A one-page standard and a settled process. The rules the team wrote, the roles they agreed, and the review step they now do without being asked. All of it in your files, in their words.

The edit record. Every draft I returned, filed in order, so somebody who joins in two years can read how the writing here got better and why.

A stated end. I watch for three consecutive fortnights in which no draft needs a structural change, the team catches in its own review what I would have caught, and nobody asks me whether something is allowed. When those three have happened I say so, we hold a final session, and the arrangement stops. Most teams reach it between the fourth and the seventh month. If a team is not getting there, I would rather tell you that than keep invoicing.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A commercial landscaping firm with twenty-two staff has four people touching content: an office manager who writes the posts, an estimator who knows the technical answers, the owner who approves everything, and a part-time marketing student who publishes. Eighteen service pages exist, six of them near-duplicates, and a post takes five weeks from idea to live.

The first three sessions work on one snow-clearing contract page, and the argument that surfaces is that the estimator and the owner disagree about what the company will commit to in writing. That gets settled, on the page, in session two. Session four writes the standard: every page answers one question in its first two sentences, and the owner approves on facts only, within three working days. Over five months the team merges the six duplicate pages into two, publishes nine posts, and gets idea-to-live down to nine days. In month five I send a note saying the last three fortnights met the test, and the sessions stop.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. With whoever is paying and, if possible, one of the people who writes. What the team produces, where it stalls, and who disagrees with whom. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. The monthly figure, the number of people and the drafts covered, agreed before the first session.
3. The first session. A real piece of the team’s work, on screen, and the fortnightly day fixed for the whole programme.
4. The rhythm. A session every second week, drafts edited between, and a short monthly note to you on what the team can now do unaided.
5. The last session. Called by me when the test is met. The standard, the roles and the edit record are handed over and the invoicing stops.

What it costs

The pricing page shows the published band for coaching an in-house person: $500 to $1,200 CAD per month, fixed and agreed in writing. A team sits in the upper part of that band rather than the lower, because there are more drafts and more people in the room. There is no minimum term beyond the first two months, and no clause that keeps it running once the work is done.

What happens next

Teams that finish usually want the output planned rather than improvised, which is a dated publishing schedule. Some keep a one-page monthly report so they can see what their pieces are doing. If I have also been running the pipeline, the documented handover covers the process itself. None of that is assumed. The coaching is complete on its own, and finishing it is the whole point of buying it.