You Didn't Become a Coach to Be Your Own IT Department

You didn't become a coach to debug a Zapier integration at 10pm.

You didn't build a practice around guiding people through career pivots, life transitions, and finding what's next so you could spend your Sundays watching tutorials on how to connect your scheduling tool to your payment processor to your email list.

And yet.

Here you are.

Toggling between six, eight, maybe twelve different apps just to keep your coaching business running. Calendly for scheduling. Stripe or PayPal for payments. Mailchimp or ConvertKit for your email list. Google Drive for documents. Zoom for sessions. HubSpot because someone said you need an enterprise-level CRM. Kajabi because it claims to be "for coaches"... even though it was built for course creators and coaching was an afterthought.

And somehow, none of them talk to each other.

"Having too many different tools is what overwhelms me," one life transition coach told us recently. Another described her client onboarding process as "very manual"... a patchwork of copy-paste, double-entry, and hoping nothing falls through the cracks.

You're not imagining it. Coaches commonly juggle six to fifteen different software tools just to do the work they actually trained for.

I get it. Maybe more than you'd expect.

I spent years as a project and program manager in consulting, after leaving corporate management. My job was literally to integrate tools... planning software, budget spreadsheets, workflow systems for tracking what my developers were building. I had to make them all talk to each other, run analytics every week, pull status reports, see the big picture.

And even with corporate budgets, technical know-how, and integration being my actual job... it was still painful. There were always manual workarounds. Always something that didn't quite connect.

Now I watch life transition coaches trying to do the same thing. Only you don't have an IT department. You don't have a budget for enterprise software. And this was never supposed to be your job.

You trained to guide people through the hardest transitions of their lives. Not to become a systems administrator.

The worst part isn't even the time... though that's real too. According to research from UC Irvine, it takes over 23 minutes to fully refocus after switching between tasks. When you're toggling between tools ten times a day, that's hours lost every week.

But it's more than time.

It's the mental weight. The low-grade anxiety of knowing your systems are held together with duct tape and good intentions. The Sunday night dread of remembering you forgot to send that invoice. The creeping feeling that you're failing at something... even though running a tech stack was never supposed to be part of your job description.

You became a life transition coach because you're good with people, not platforms. And yet here you are, troubleshooting why your Zap broke instead of preparing for tomorrow's session.

Gosh, isn't it crazy that you even have to know what a Zap is?

Just this week, I was talking with a coach we're working with. She needed something simple: a landing page with a form so people could sign up for her waitlist.

Simple, right?

Except she has HubSpot. And New Zenler. And a handful of other tools, each with overlapping features. So we spent time untangling which tool could do what. Does HubSpot have landing pages? Yes. Does New Zenler? Also yes. Which one already has her contacts? Which one has fewer integration points that could break?

Here's someone who's great at what she does - helping parents master it all while working - and she's spending her time comparing feature lists across platforms. Not because she wants to. Because there's no other option.

The answer we landed on wasn't "use this shiny new thing." It was: go with what's simple for you. The tool you already know. The one where you've already climbed the learning curve. The one that doesn't require another integration that could break at 10pm on a Sunday.

It's not a glamorous answer. But it's an honest one.

And that's not a strategy anyone should have to figure out alone.

Here's what I want you to know: you shouldn't have to do this.

You shouldn't have to become a part-time systems administrator just to run a coaching practice. You shouldn't have to spend your weekends watching integration tutorials. You shouldn't have to feel like you're failing at something that was never your job in the first place.

We're here to help. And things are changing.

You became a coach to guide people through life's biggest transitions... not to manage a tech stack. And you deserve tools that understand that.

Want to take a closer look at your own tool stack?

We put together The Coach's Tool Trap... a quick guide to help you see where the complexity is hiding and what you can actually let go of.

Successful Life Transition Coaches Run On Sidkik.

Built with 🩵 for heart-centered coaches.