The admin almost cost me the coaching.

The part nobody trained me for.

I earned my International Coaching Federation ACC designation, and I'm working toward PCC now. The coaching was never the hard part. I love the work. The problem was everything around it.

Booking. Notes. Invoices. Logged hours. Reminders. Follow-ups. The actual business of running a practice. None of it was hard on its own. It was the volume, and the fact that it all lived in different places, that wore me down.

Five tools, none of them talking.

My clients lived in a CRM built for sales teams, where I lost weeks to features I'd never use. Booking ran through one app. ICF and reciprocal hours went in a spreadsheet. Session notes in a doc. Invoices in another doc, and one more spreadsheet just to track which I'd actually sent and been paid for.

I kept a whole browser tab group open just to flip between them, and I still scrambled to find my notes and trust my memory before every session. I dropped balls. It was a real mess.

The certification was the breaking point.

Chasing the credential is what finally broke it. Logging every coaching hour, tracking CCEUs, keeping client records straight enough to stand behind, all through a setup this unwieldy. I had two choices: find something built for this, or accept that the admin would keep crowding out the work.

So I went looking for the tool that did it all. Most of the tools I tried either limited the free tier hard or charged for each feature, and none did the whole job. Every one left gaps I'd still be patching with spreadsheets and docs. The one that actually did the whole job didn't exist.

So I stopped duct-taping tools together, taught myself to build, and made the thing I kept wishing for. Then I cancelled the other five subscriptions one by one.

That's CoachTide.

Everything I'd cobbled together, rebuilt to think as one system: a booking page, a client pipeline, session prep, invoicing, ICF hour tracking, and a built-in assistant for the how-does-this-work questions. It's the tool I wish I'd had from day 1.

And here's the part that I'm most proud of. Most of the tools I tried either limited the free tier hard or charged for each feature you actually need. I put all of it behind one considered price. No locked features, no hidden upsells, no “upgrade to unlock.”

I still coach. I still use it every day. And I'm still building it, for the coaches who'd rather coach than spend their spare moments trying to stay on top of all the necessary admin work that keeps a coaching business healthy, compliant, and thriving.