A Dubai coaching founder got 20 hours a week back and put it into strategy.
Elena Buriani was building one of the most respected coaching practices in the UAE. The admin load was the only thing keeping her from scaling it.
A Dubai-based coaching firm scaling globally, with the founder running the practice and the back office.
Elena Buriani runs LEA Growing People, an HR consulting, coaching, and mentoring firm based in Sharjah. The practice serves entrepreneurs, C-suite executives, and global teams across the UAE, Europe, and beyond.
The model is high-touch. Every engagement starts with a free discovery session, runs through multilingual one-on-one coaching, and continues through corporate programs. The quality bar is the whole business. So is the volume of admin it takes to keep it running.
The founder was spending 20 hours a week on work that did not require a founder.
Twenty hours a week. That was Elena's estimate of the time she was losing to inbox triage, session scheduling across UAE, European, and Asian time zones, client follow-ups, and the daily ops of running a global coaching practice. Half her working week, gone before strategic work could begin.
The problem with admin at her level was not the volume. It was the cost. Every hour spent confirming a session was an hour not spent designing the next corporate program, recruiting a new coach to the LEA network, or building the partnerships that grow the practice.
She had tried hiring help before. Quality was the issue. A coaching business runs on trust, and a careless calendar reply or a misrouted client email costs more than a missed task. She needed someone who would protect the brand, not just clear the inbox.
We placed a senior Executive Assistant in Johannesburg who absorbed the entire admin load in four weeks.
Discovery to first day was about four weeks. We screened for two things: coaching or professional services experience, and the judgment to handle client communications without a script. The shortlist was small. The hire was a Johannesburg-based EA with five years supporting global founders.
The placement owns Elena's calendar across three time zones, runs the client inbox, manages session scheduling and confirmations, handles follow-ups on the Coach Assistant platform, and keeps the CRM clean. Twenty hours a week of Elena's old work is now someone else's primary work.
We held bi-weekly check-ins through the first ninety days. Elena flagged them as one of the most valuable parts of the engagement. They caught small workflow gaps early — a follow-up template that needed tightening, a routing question on Italian-speaking clients — before they became real problems.
The integration was the whole point. Elena described the placement as "truly integrated into how I work." That is not an outsourcing relationship. That is staffing.
- Role
- Executive Assistant
- Tier
- Operator
- Hours
- 20 hrs/week
- Location
- Johannesburg, South Africa
- Time to first day
- 4 weeks
"They're professional and truly integrated into how I work. Honestly the best quality VAs I've worked with."
Elena now spends her weeks on strategy, not on the inbox that used to eat them.
Twenty hours a week came back. Elena reinvests them where they compound: designing new coaching programs, recruiting partner coaches into the LEA network, and building the practice into the markets it has not reached yet.
The placement is not a temporary fix. It is the operational foundation under the next chapter of LEA. When Elena scales the practice, the back office is already built to scale with her.
