The part a booking page does not do
A booking page does its job well: a student who has already decided can choose a slot and pay. But most bookings do not start that way. They start with a question:
- "Have you anything Thursday after work?"
- "What is the difference between the 30- and 60-minute lesson?"
- "Is the junior clinic still running in the holidays?"
- "Can I move Saturday to Sunday?"
Each one arrives by phone, text, WhatsApp or email, usually while you are teaching. Each one needs a reply, a look at the diary and often a follow-up. None of that is done by the booking page, however good it is.
Work out your own number
You need three numbers.
- Hours a week on booking admin. Include replying to enquiries, confirming and moving lessons, chasing payments, sending reminders by hand and updating the diary. Count the evening catch-up as well as the minutes between lessons. If you are unsure, keep a tally for one normal week.
- What an hour of your time is worth. Your standard hourly lesson rate is a fair measure: it is what that hour would earn if you were teaching instead.
- Working weeks a year. Most pros would use somewhere between 44 and 50.
Multiply them together.
A worked example
These are assumptions, not anyone's real figures:
- 30 minutes a day, six days a week, on messages and diary changes = 3 hours a week
- Hourly lesson rate = £50
- Working weeks = 48
3 × £50 × 48 = £7,200 a year of teaching-rate time spent on admin.
Change the assumptions to your own. Even at one hour a week the figure is £2,400 a year at £50 an hour.
What you can do with that number
You do not have to spend money to act on it. Some of the admin can be reduced with habits: fixed reply times, a standard price message, a clear cancellation policy. But the biggest part, answering questions and taking bookings while you are busy, only goes away if something else answers.
That is the job nooQ was built to take off you. Cadd-AI, nooQ's AI assistant, answers students' questions from your own price list and books them into your real diary on your website and, on the Academy and Performance Centre packages, on WhatsApp. Reminders go out automatically by email, SMS and WhatsApp.
Compare the cost of your own number with the price of a package on the golf professionals page. Every package has a 14-day free trial, which is long enough to see how many messages you no longer have to answer.
When a free booking page is the right answer
If you teach a handful of lessons a week, your students book themselves without asking, and you rarely miss a call, a free or very cheap booking page is the sensible choice. The calculation above is worth doing precisely because it tells you whether that is you.