I've felt guilty for ages that I've not done more with AI. And I won't be the only person that says that.
Michael is a UK-based business and personal coach. His practice is still in start-up phase, but growing well. What the HoursBack assessment helped him see was how much time he was already losing to admin.
Before each new client engagement, Michael was spending around three hours on the mechanics: preparing notes, writing up the contract, chasing the return of the document, confirming the schedule, and eventually issuing the invoice and managing payment. Each step was done manually, in isolation, and worked well enough in its own right. The issue was that there was no thread between them. Every completed step required him to remember to trigger the next one.
He had been using good tools for years. He had a document manager for contracts. He had a clear process for invoicing. He wasn't doing anything wrong. He was just doing all of it by hand.
As he put it:
It's death by a thousand tiny incremental tasks.
The diagnosis
The HoursBack Assessment maps workflows first, tools second. The tool stack is usually fine. The toll on time is almost always in the joins between tools: the five-minute tasks that nobody tracks, because they're too small to measure, too frequent to ignore, and too scattered to see as a system.
For Michael, the assessment identified three workflows sitting underneath his coaching practice that were eating his week.
The first was discovery and contracting. Every new client meant a manually prepared discovery summary, a contract written from scratch, and a follow-up sequence dependent on human effort.
The second was invoicing. Invoice timing was tracked mentally against the contract schedule. If he was busy, invoices went out late. The follow-up, when needed, was another manual task on his list.
The third was making notes during the contracting session, the meeting where coach and client agree how the coaching relationship will work. Michael's training taught him not to record coaching sessions or take substantive notes, both because confidentiality matters and because attention belongs with the client. But contracting serves a different purpose. It's the practical conversation that establishes the boundaries and structure of the work. It's an operational input.
None of these three workflows was broken. Each one worked. Together, they added up to roughly three hours of admin per client engagement.
The recommendations
The report delivered three specific recommendations, one for each of the workflows above.
For discovery and contracting: a connected flow in which the contracting conversation is automatically transcribed, the transcript feeds a contract-drafting prompt, the contract goes out via DocHub for signing, and a confirmation email triggers when it returns signed. Michael triggers one action at the start of the process. Everything else runs.
For invoicing: an AI-monitored schedule that tracks when invoices are due against the contract terms and issues them automatically, with a check that the invoice matches what was agreed. That last step, the validation, was surfaced during the assessment as a way to avoid the situation where the schedule in the contract doesn't match what was discussed on the call.
For meeting notes: selective recording of contracting sessions, with AI summarisation to produce a structured client brief where the output is an operational input rather than a coaching moment.
Total monthly tool cost across all three workflows: approximately £64.
HoursBack is consulting, not button-pressing.
That line came from Michael, not from us. It's also the clearest summary of what the assessment is trying to do: not hand over a list of tools, but show a practitioner how their practice actually works, so they can spend more of it doing the thing they enjoy.
The outcome
Michael now gets 2.5 hours back per client engagement.
On the question of whether it was worth £799:
Speaking as a consultant, and knowing the value of good consultancy, looking at an hourly rate of the consultant, and looking at the value of the information given to me? Yes. The £799 is already paying for itself.
The takeaway
The pattern in coaching businesses is consistent: the time actually spent coaching is prized. The drag is in the three connective workflows that wrap every client, contracting, invoicing, and capture. Each step works in isolation. The problem is that none of them talks to the next one.
When they do, the time saving is not a single large block. It arrives in small bursts, every time one of those previously manual steps runs on its own. That's what Michael now feels in his week.
Where HoursBack helps is to make sure that everything is captured and everything is automated around that, so that the time you're spending on the client is in service of the client rather than in service of the admin of serving the client.
The second thing the assessment did for Michael was harder to put in a report. He arrived carrying guilt about being a late, manual operator in a world that talked nonstop about AI. He left with a specific view of which three problems he had, what to do about them, and in what order.
The most valuable thing was helping me to reset how I feel about AI and my coaching practice.
That's not a number. But it is, for a lot of the business owners we work with, the thing that actually had to happen first.
Case study subject: Michael Storey.