Coaching business time audit
Split your working week across six categories. See which hours a platform could reclaim, and what that time is actually costing you every month.
Your effective hourly rate
Use your session fee ÷ session length, or total monthly revenue ÷ monthly hours worked.
Hours per week by category
What this means for your business
You're spending 16.5 hours a week on tasks a platform could handle. At your rate, that's £10,717 a month of your time allocated to work that doesn't need to stay manual.
Automation percentages reflect realistic estimates for coaching businesses at your stage. Actual potential depends on how systematised your current workflows already are.
Breakdown by category
Coaching calls
Live 1-on-1 or group delivery
Live delivery stays live. But check-ins, progress nudges, and session prep notes can run on autopilot. That's the 25%.
Admin & scheduling
Email, invoicing, booking, CRM
Scheduling, invoicing, onboarding sequences, and client comms. If it happens the same way every time, a platform handles it. 80% of your admin qualifies.
Sales & outreach
Discovery calls, proposals, follow-ups
Lead nurturing and follow-up sequences can be systematised. Discovery conversations still need you — that's the irreducible 50%.
Content creation
Writing, recording, distributing
Repurposing, distribution, SEO writeups, and social scheduling hand off cleanly. First-draft thinking and perspective don't.
Operations
Client onboarding, tools, setup
Onboarding flows, progress tracking, automated reporting, and tool setup belong in a platform. The 30% that stays is judgment calls and relationship management.
Learning & CPD
Reading, courses, conferences
AI can surface reading lists and summarise papers. The integration of ideas into your practice stays human.
Ready to move those automatable hours off your plate?
Book a free architecture audit. We'll map exactly which parts of your delivery, admin, and ops can move into a platform — and what it would take to build it.
Who should use the coaching time audit
This tool is for coaches and consultants who suspect their working week is less productive than it looks. If you're putting in 40-plus hours and can't pinpoint where the time goes, or you've felt the gap between the hours you bill and the hours you actually work, the audit gives you a concrete map.
It's particularly useful before any conversation about hiring, delegating, or building a platform. Knowing which categories eat your time — and how much of that time follows a repeatable pattern — is the starting point for any sensible automation decision.
If you're curious what the revenue impact of that time looks like, run the numbers through our coaching revenue ceiling calculator to see what your calendar is actually capping you at — and what breaking through it could be worth.
How the automation percentages are calculated
The automation percentages are based on the coaching businesses we've architected platforms for, not on theoretical benchmarks. Admin comes in highest at 80% because scheduling, invoicing, onboarding, and client comms follow repeatable patterns that software handles cleanly. Operations sits at 70% for the same reason: client setup flows, progress tracking, and automated reporting are exactly the kind of systematic work a platform replaces.
Coaching calls themselves sit at 25% because live delivery stays live. The automatable portion covers the surrounding workflow: pre-session context loading, post-session notes, accountability nudges, and progress summaries that would otherwise require manual effort after every call.
If your frankenstack is particularly chaotic, run your tools through the frankenstack cost auditor to see what your current tooling actually costs before deciding whether consolidating into a single platform makes financial sense.
Everything coaches ask us about this tool
How do I work out my effective hourly rate for this tool?
Take your total monthly revenue and divide it by the total hours you worked that month. That gives you a blended effective rate across all activities, not just coaching calls. It's a more honest number than your headline session rate, because it accounts for all the unpaid-feeling hours that actually generate that revenue.
What does 'automatable' mean in this context?
Automatable means the task follows a predictable pattern that software can handle without your direct involvement. Scheduling confirmation emails, onboarding sequences, invoicing reminders, progress check-ins, and client reporting all qualify. Tasks that require your judgment, your relationships, or your original thinking — discovery calls, live coaching, building your methodology — don't.
Why are coaching calls listed as only 25% automatable?
Live coaching calls themselves aren't automatable in any meaningful sense — that's the point of coaching. The 25% represents the surrounding logistics: pre-session prep notes, post-session summaries, accountability nudges between calls, and progress tracking. A well-built platform handles those automatically so you show up to each call with context already loaded.
What would a custom coaching platform actually automate for me?
The best targets are admin and operations. Onboarding sequences that walk new clients through setup without your input, scheduling that syncs and confirms without back-and-forth, invoicing that triggers automatically on the right date, progress dashboards that update without you logging anything, and weekly check-in nudges that keep clients accountable between sessions. For content, repurposing and distribution workflows can largely run on autopilot once set up.
How accurate are the automation percentages?
They're realistic estimates based on the coaching businesses we've worked with, not theoretical maximums. The actual percentage you can automate depends on how systematised your current workflows already are, how repeatable your client journey is, and how much of your value sits in relationships versus information delivery. Use the figures as a directional benchmark, not a guarantee.
Can I share my time audit results with someone else?
Yes. Hit 'Share your audit' and the tool copies the current URL to your clipboard with all your inputs encoded as query parameters. Anyone who opens that link lands on the tool with your exact breakdown pre-loaded. Useful for sharing with a business partner, a VA, or as a starting point before a strategy conversation.