“Working with Mobi was a game changer for my business. As the Founder and CEO of a growing company, I have gotten further and further away from "boots on the ground" team members and workflow. The work that we did ensures that every single person in my company knows and connects with our core values and that is now the basis from which we hold all meetings and conversations. Complete game changer!”

Michelle Cooper, Founder & CEO, Alchemy Accounting

About Alchemy

Alchemy Accounting was founded to help business owners sort out financial chaos and fall in love with their numbers. Founder Michelle Cooper and her team have made it their mission to relieve the stress of entrepreneurs and executives who often struggle and suffer with business finances. Alchemy does your books so you can do you!

Alchemy’s workforce is a team of licensed professionals that perform at a high level, working largely independently with clients. The company has developed an internal LMS and a depth of documentation around professional best practices and accounting rules, but after some instances of inconsistent results for clients and miscommunication among team members, Alchemy’s leadership looked for help. Alchemy was looking for a solution that would help them support their employees in producing exceptional work and also bolster their culture of professional and personal growth, helping them work better together moving forward.

During onboarding with Mobi, leadership at Alchemy described situations where employees had relied too heavily on instruction and not demonstrated proactivity. There were also misalignments around work standards and expectations, and employees were not always acting in ways that kept with the company’s core values. The resources and tools the company had put in place to provide education, training, and enrichment were easily accessible and put together well, but they were not integrated into daily life and practice at Alchemy. Alchemy employees felt instructed to do things without a connection to a greater purpose or ethos for why those behaviors are integral to the success of their business and the experience they aim to deliver to clients. For a company that relies heavily on not only what but HOW they do business to sell their customers, these qualitative details are of the utmost importance.

In the first meeting with the Alchemy leadership team, Mobi coaches took them through a foundational Core Values/Guiding Principles exercise. To better understand what the company’s Values look like in real life, we ask the question, if we walked into your office or watched an employee at work, what sort of things would we see and hear if this value was being practiced fully? Mobi coaches guide this conversation to help produce clear and potent answers, and compile them into a summary underneath each value. After completing the exercise with the leadership team, we set up another session to repeat it with the Alchemy team - leaders only allowed to watch! In Alchemy’s case, employees had a similar view of what the company’s Core Values look like in action, but there were also some key differences that helped the leadership team understand the discrepancies they were seeing, and where additional support was needed. After completing the session with Alchemy’s employees, Mobi coaches merged the two documents, and brought the full team back together for delivery. Everyone on the team printed out and signed the document to signify their support of these shared agreements of how they best want to work together with each other, and deliver great results for their clients. However, the goal of this exercise was not to provide them a neat decoration for their wall and a fuzzy feeling, but to set the stage for a powerful implementation plan that will truly help them grow as a team and exceed the expectations of customers.

To help Alchemy permanently resolve the inconsistencies they were experiencing and help them strengthen their culture around continuous improvement, Mobi coaches delivered a coaching protocol for Alchemy that centered around Inquiry Based Discussion. This employee development tool leverages proven adult learning theory and is predicated on giving employees the agency to find solutions to problems and chart the course of their own development in collaboration with their manager and the company. Mobi coaches provided some training for leadership on how to use the coaching protocol and informed employees what they should expect, and set a time to check in months later to see how things are going.

In a post-delivery check in 6 months after completing the delivery, we met with Alchemy to see how things are going with the coaching protocol. The Alchemy leadership team explained how the tool has helped them resolve the inconsistency issues with clients they were seeing, and how it has also helped them build a better working culture.

Jasleen Kapoor, Operations Director at Alchemy, said the protocol “ has given us a totally different approach. We are now having conversations that help us come up with real solutions, not just in a one sided way, but with a holistic approach”.

Lisa Broome, Head of HR at Alchemy, said, “Now coaching conversations are 2-way, more of a dialogue. Employees are providing more feedback to leadership about their work, helping inform the direction of the company and resource appropriately. It’s also creating a more positive culture - people feel safe in conversations with their superior, more more open to work on solutions”.

As Alchemy continues to grow, their team is confident deploying a coaching protocol from Mobi will allow them to maintain a strong culture, pass innovative ideas up from the frontlines to inform company strategy, and help them achieve their aim of supporting business owners making an impact in the world. Mobi continues to partner with Alchemy to provide them tools to collect data on employee development and use that information to inform resourcing and decision making at their company.