“I Don’t Have Time for Coaching” - Will Business Coaching Take Too Much Time?

“I’d love to work with a coach, but I just don’t have time” is one of the most common objections Sydney business owners raise when considering coaching. You’re already working 55-65 hour weeks. Your calendar is jammed. You can barely keep up with everything on your plate now. How could you possibly add coaching sessions and implementation work on top of that?

Here’s the truth: if you’re too busy for coaching, that’s a symptom of exactly why you need it. This article explains how much time coaching actually requires, why it saves you far more time than it consumes, and how to think about the time investment differently.

How Much Time Does Business Coaching Actually Take?

Let’s be specific about the time commitment so you can make an informed decision.

Coaching Sessions: 1-2 Hours Per Week

Most business coaching programmes involve weekly or fortnightly sessions. A typical session is 60 minutes, though some coaches do 90-minute sessions. At BGB, our Elite programme includes weekly education and coaching sessions, which means roughly 1-2 hours per week of session time.

If you’re doing fortnightly coaching, that’s 2 hours every two weeks, or about 1 hour per week averaged out. This is the time you’re actually in conversation with your coach.

Implementation Time: 1-3 Hours Per Week

Between sessions, you’ll be implementing what you committed to doing. This might be having a conversation with a team member, reviewing your pricing model, documenting a process, or analysing your numbers. The time required varies based on what you’re working on, but expect 1-3 hours per week on average.

Some weeks the implementation is minimal (a 30-minute conversation). Other weeks it might be more substantial (a 3-hour project to build a new system). It averages out to 1-2 hours weekly for most clients.

Total Time Investment: 2-4 Hours Per Week

Add it up and you’re looking at 2-4 hours weekly total. That’s about 3-6% of a 60-hour work week. For most business owners, that’s less time than they spend in unproductive meetings or firefighting problems that proper systems would prevent.

Why “I Don’t Have Time” Usually Means “I’m Doing the Wrong Things”

When business owners say they don’t have time for coaching, they’re usually describing a specific problem: they’re stuck doing low-value work that others should do, firefighting constantly instead of preventing fires, saying yes to everything instead of being strategic about priorities, or working in the business instead of on it.

These are precisely the problems coaching fixes. The reason you don’t have time is that you’re not spending your time on the right things. Coaching helps you identify what to stop doing, what to delegate, and where to focus. That creates time.

Consider this: if you’re spending 10 hours per week doing work that a team member could handle, coaching that helps you delegate effectively will reclaim those 10 hours. You invest 2-4 hours in coaching to gain back 10 hours. That’s a 250-500% time ROI before you even count the business performance improvements.

The Time Paradox: Coaching Saves More Time Than It Takes

Research on business coaching shows that effective coaching creates significant time savings for business owners. While specific studies vary, the pattern is consistent: clients reclaim substantial time within the first few months of coaching.

Most BGB clients report reclaiming 10-20 hours per week within 3-6 months of starting coaching. That happens through better delegation (team members handling work the owner used to do), eliminating low-value activities (stopping things that don’t move the needle), systemizing repetitive work (reducing time spent on recurring tasks), preventing fires (fewer crises to manage because systems are stronger), and making faster decisions (less time spinning on choices).

Let’s do the maths. If you invest 3 hours per week in coaching and implementation, that’s 156 hours per year. If coaching helps you reclaim 15 hours per week, that’s 780 hours per year. Net time gain: 624 hours. That’s more than 15 full work weeks of time back.

Even if you only reclaim 5 hours per week, you’re still net positive on time within a few months. And that’s before counting the value of redirecting your time to higher-impact work.

What You’re Actually Trading: Low-Value Time for High-Value Time

The time objection often misses a crucial point: not all hours are equal. Working 60 hours per week on low-value activities (admin, firefighting, doing work your team should do) is less valuable than working 45 hours on high-impact activities (strategy, business development, coaching your team).

Good coaching doesn’t just free up time—it helps you redirect your time to higher-value work. You trade 2 hours of coaching plus 2 hours of implementation for 10 hours of low-value work you stop doing. Then you redirect that 10 hours to strategic work that grows the business.

At Building Great Businesses, Stephen O’Sullivan runs his business in 45 minutes per week because he built the team and systems to handle everything else. That level of time optimisation doesn’t happen without intentional work—exactly what coaching facilitates.

How Coaching Actually Creates Time Savings

Let’s get specific about how coaching reclaims time for business owners.

Better Delegation

Most business owners are terrible at delegating. They hold onto tasks they should hand off, don’t trust their team to execute, or haven’t built the systems to delegate effectively. This keeps them doing $50/hour work when they should be doing $500/hour work.

Coaching helps you identify what to delegate, build the systems and training so delegation works, hold team members accountable for executing, and let go psychologically so you’re not micromanaging. This delegation shift alone can reclaim 10-15 hours weekly.

Eliminating Time-Wasting Activities

Business owners often spend time on activities that don’t drive results: meetings that could be emails, reports that no one reads, busywork that feels productive but isn’t, or low-value clients who consume disproportionate time.

A coach helps you audit how you’re spending time, identify what’s not contributing to your goals, and make decisions about what to stop. Cutting just 3-4 low-value activities can free up 5-8 hours per week.

Preventing Fires vs Fighting Them

When you’re constantly firefighting, you never have time to build the systems that would prevent fires. It’s the classic urgent-important paradox: urgent tasks (fires) always push out important tasks (building systems).

Coaching creates accountability for working on those important-but-not-urgent tasks like building processes, strengthening team capability, and fixing root causes. As systems improve, fires decrease. Less firefighting means more available time.

Faster, Better Decision-Making

Indecision is a time killer. Business owners often spend days or weeks agonizing over decisions that should take hours. Why? They lack frameworks for evaluating options, they’re afraid of making mistakes, or they don’t have anyone to think through decisions with.

Coaching provides frameworks for decision-making, helps you think through options faster, builds confidence so you decide and move on, and serves as a sounding board for major choices. Faster decision-making saves hours every week.

The First 90 Days: What the Time Investment Actually Looks Like

Let’s walk through what the time commitment looks like in practice during the first three months of coaching.

Month 1: You’re investing the full 3-4 hours weekly (1-2 hours sessions, 2 hours implementation). You’re learning your coach’s frameworks, identifying priorities, and starting to make changes. Time savings are minimal this month—maybe 2-3 hours reclaimed. Net time investment: 1-2 hours weekly.

Month 2: Still investing 3-4 hours weekly in coaching. But now delegation is starting to work, you’ve eliminated a few time-wasting activities, and you’re making decisions faster. Time savings: 5-8 hours weekly. Net time gain: 1-4 hours weekly.

Month 3: Coaching time remains 3-4 hours weekly. Systems are working, team is stepping up, fires are less frequent. Time savings: 10-15 hours weekly. Net time gain: 6-11 hours weekly.

By month three, most clients are working fewer total hours than before coaching started, even including the coaching time. And the hours they are working are more focused on high-value activities.

How to Make Time for Coaching When You’re Genuinely Swamped

If you’re convinced coaching would help but truly can’t see how to fit it in, here’s what to do.

Start By Blocking the Coaching Time

Put your coaching sessions in your calendar as non-negotiable appointments. Treat them like you’d treat a major client meeting—they don’t get moved or cancelled except for genuine emergencies. Once the time is blocked, you’ll find ways to work around it.

Use Coaching to Identify What to Stop

In your first few coaching sessions, focus specifically on time audit and prioritisation. Your coach can help you identify what to stop doing, what to delegate, and what to defer. Use the insights from coaching to create the time for coaching.

Reduce Something Else Temporarily

If your calendar is truly maxed out, you might need to reduce something temporarily to make room for coaching. Maybe you defer a non-critical project for two months. Maybe you skip a weekly meeting that’s not essential. The time you invest in coaching will pay back by helping you be more strategic about all your time.

Start With Less Frequent Sessions

If weekly coaching feels impossible, start with fortnightly sessions. That’s 1-2 hours every two weeks instead of every week. Less time commitment, though also potentially slower progress. You can always increase frequency once you’re seeing the time benefits.

What Happens If You Keep Saying “I Don’t Have Time”

The alternative to investing time in coaching is continuing as you are. What does that look like? You’ll still be working 60+ hour weeks a year from now. You’ll still be stuck doing work others should do. You’ll still be firefighting instead of building systems. Your business will still depend entirely on you.

The opportunity cost of not investing time in coaching is staying stuck in a time trap indefinitely. How many more months or years do you want to work these hours? At some point, you need to invest time in changing the pattern.

Many business owners wish they’d started coaching 2-3 years earlier. The time they “saved” by not doing coaching was actually time they wasted staying stuck. Don’t let that be you.

The Bottom Line: The Time Objection Is Usually a Symptom

When you say “I don’t have time for coaching,” what you’re really saying is “My time is completely consumed by urgency and I have no space for the important work that would change my situation.” That’s not a reason to avoid coaching—it’s the primary reason to pursue it.

Good coaching requires 2-4 hours weekly. It saves you 10-20 hours weekly within a few months. The time ROI is compelling. But more importantly, it shifts how you use your time from low-value urgency to high-value strategy.

If you’re genuinely too busy to invest 3 hours per week in improving your business, your business has a serious problem. Coaching is how you fix it.

Book a Quick Fit Call with BGB and let’s talk about how to make time for coaching and what time savings you can expect.

Related Reading:

• Is Business Coaching Worth the Investment?
• How to Make the Most of Business Coaching
• Top 10 Benefits of Business Coaching