Imran Football Coaching

A coaching business runs on a phone. Parents message on WhatsApp to book, cancel and ask about kit, payments arrive by bank transfer with a reference that may or may not identify the child, and the record of who attended what is a coach’s memory plus a notes app.

That works until it does not, and the failure mode is always the same: a session gets doubled booked, or a term of fees goes uncollected because nobody could reconstruct who came.

The site

The straightforward half. What is offered, when and where, who it is for, and how to get in touch, built to be found by a parent searching for coaching in the area. Fast, mobile-first, and honest about the fact that most visitors will be on a phone in a car park.

The CRM

The half that changes the business.

Players and guardians, sessions and schedules, attendance, and payments reconciled against sessions rather than tracked as a running balance. The essential feature is not any one of those: it is that they are the same record, so “who owes for last term” and “who has not attended in a month” become queries instead of archaeology.

Meeting him where he already works

The design constraint that matters. A CRM that requires a coach to stop using WhatsApp will not be used, because WhatsApp is what the parents use and he does not get to change that.

So the integration goes the other way. WhatsApp threads link to the player record, so the conversation history sits alongside the attendance and payment history rather than in a different app. Booking and cancellation messages are parsed into proposed changes that he confirms rather than retypes. Session reminders and payment nudges send from the channel parents already read, with the awkward but necessary detail that WhatsApp Business templates have to be approved in advance, so the message catalogue is part of the build rather than an afterthought.

Gmail is connected on the same principle: enquiries land as leads against a record instead of sitting in an inbox, and invoices and receipts thread against the player they belong to.

Status

Site first, CRM second, because the site earns enquiries immediately and the CRM only pays off once there is enough activity to lose track of. Building the CRM before the demand exists would be building the wrong thing carefully.

The integrations are the risk, and it is worth stating plainly: WhatsApp Business API access has real approval requirements and per-message costs, and both need to be settled before that part of the design is committed to rather than assumed.