Coaching practices run on the calendar. Sessions get booked, moved and rescheduled constantly, and every one of those changes needs a confirmation, a reminder and a client who turns up in the right place at the right time. Done by hand, it eats the day.
A Brisbane business coaching practice came to us with exactly that problem. This is what we built, and how it was tuned to fit the way the practice actually runs. The client is not named here at their request.
The problem: confirmations and reminders were all manual
The coach and her executive assistant were handling meeting admin between them. Every booking needed a confirmation email. Sessions needed reminders beforehand, or clients forgot. Calendar entries sometimes went out with no location attached, which meant clients turned up not knowing where to go, or called the EA to ask.
None of it was complicated work. It was just constant, and it landed on the two people whose time was worth the most to the business.
What we built
A set of Make.com scenarios connected to the practice calendar and email, handling three jobs:
- A confirmation email to the client when a session is booked
- Reminders to the client ahead of the session, at 24 hours and one hour
- A check that flags any upcoming calendar event with no location on it, so the EA can fix it before the client ever notices
Everything was built in the client's own Make.com account, under their own credentials, so the practice owns it outright.
Tuning it to the practice
Building the scenarios is the straightforward half. Getting the notification rules right for one specific practice takes a round of real use, and that is where most of the value sat on this build.
Once it was running we tuned it against how the practice actually operates. The coach did not need email alerts about her own calendar, so those came off. The client-facing reminders stayed, because those were the ones doing the work. The scope narrowed to sessions in the next seven days rather than the whole calendar, and the missing-location check was consolidated into one weekly run for the EA rather than firing every time an event changed.
The principle worth taking from it: with this kind of automation, fewer and better-targeted notifications beat more of them. You want a system people stop noticing, not one that keeps reminding them it is there.
What to take from it if you run a coaching practice
Start with one process that genuinely hurts rather than automating everything at once. Meeting admin is usually a good first candidate, because it is high-frequency, low-judgement and visible to clients when it goes wrong.
Budget for a tuning round after go-live. Notification rules are hard to get exactly right on paper, and the practical difference comes from having someone who will adjust them quickly once real sessions are flowing through the system.
Build it in your own accounts. Everything we build sits under the client's credentials from day one, with the workflows and documentation handed over at the end. No licence, no lock-in, nothing stops working if we stop working together.
If you are running your coaching admin by hand and want to know what is worth automating first, book a call and we will go through it.
