Do less. Do more.
Do less of the crap.Do more than you could before. Start with the data.
SystemsToolsWorkflowsApps
What I’m after is getting you time back. It’s the closest thing to a time machine I’ve seen in my lifetime. And it isn’t just the hours. It’s not wasting mental energy on things that don’t need it, and putting that energy in other places.
Give me 30 minutes, I’ll give you three hours back a week, every week.That’s one tool, built on your screen and running by the following Monday. Then we go find the next three hours.
Never student records, and you know what a tool can and can’t touch. There’s always a human in the loop.
Book a 30 minute call (opens in a new tab) Free, and useful either way.
AI can be scary, confusing, a pain in the ass, and actually pretty damn bad if we’re not careful. Used right, it puts your brain on the biggest problems.
This is high-stakes work. It needs a human in the loop, and it needs to be done incredibly well. It’s not as simple as asking ChatGPT. It also doesn’t need to be much more complicated than setting up a custom AI workflow or system. That’s exactly what I do.
Tools I’ve built
I build them, install them, and hand them off so they run without me.
Individualized Data Reports For academic leaders and principal managers
Takes schoolwide data and makes individualized reports somebody can act on, and tracks progress over time.
Academic Health Coach Live, and free to try
Talks you through your own data and the next move. Paste in what your data shows. It walks you through the read, then coaches the conversation you need to have, with one teacher, a grade-level team, or your own routine, and ends on a one-week action plan with owners.
What’s in there is the judgment I’d bring to that conversation. A principal gets the read in one question instead of digging for it in a spreadsheet.
One, Start to Finish
See A Real One The ninth grade build, start to finish
Coverage Schedule Maker For ops directors
Does the schedule Jenga. Someone calls out. Type or dictate who’s out, and it builds the whole day’s coverage from very clear, specific rules you set up and can change. Co-teaching, intervention that’s sacred, six people on the floor for lunch, the person you never want to pull, no one teaching too many in a row. Anywhere it’s not perfectly clear, you get to choose, and nothing goes out until a person approves it.
It also makes coverage fairer, because it spreads the load equally. It runs entirely in your Google Docs, and you don’t need an AI account to make it run.
The first one started over coffee with an ops director. Smart, incredibly hardworking, didn’t know where to start with AI, and didn’t trust it. I realized how much time she was spending on this. I went home and made it. We went back and forth, getting her logic right, troubleshooting, refining.
Built on two schools’ real master schedules.
Communications Engine For principals, deans and APs
Writes the email you’ve been putting off, in your voice. Tell it who’s writing, what the objective is, who the audience is, and what you’re worried about. Feed it your questions, your fears, your brain dump. It’s informed by hundreds of school leader emails, so it understands the language and the things that really matter to you, which a normal chatbot doesn’t.
You get a starting point you can move the dials on, up and down. Your tweaks feed back in until it runs in your voice and your preferences. We also build personas of the people you write to and use them in the editing.
Meeting Suite For anyone who runs the week in meetings
Agendas, next steps, calendar invites, reminders and the follow-up email, from a few keystrokes. No more clicking through multiple links for agendas, next steps, trackers and the email follow-up. It builds a public agenda and a facilitator’s agenda, with one-page data slices that focus people on exactly the right data.
Give it your notes or a transcript and it produces the next steps. You confirm them, and it calendars them, puts them on a tracker, and makes them the jumping-off point for next week’s meeting. Your team shows up more prepared than they ever have.
Ask The Handbook For anyone tired of hearing “I didn’t know”
A custom chatbot that answers any question about policies and procedures, out of your own handbook. No more “I don’t know” or “I have to go find it in a deck.”
Enrollment and Retention For enrollment leads and COOs
Shows you where families are falling out of the funnel, by campus and by grade, against the same week last year. So you can tell a real drop from a normal week before anyone acts on it.
PD Planning and Production Assistant For anyone who runs PD for adults
Talk through the agenda and the activities, attach your resources and your rubrics, and it comes back with a practice-based outline for the time you actually have. Then it builds the branded deck, with the speaker notes already in it.
Walkthrough Coaching For principals and principal managers
Feed in your low-inference notes, your feedback, the arc of the year and the focus areas. It looks across all of it, plus what they’ve been working on, and finds the patterns in the school.
Upcoming
A month and a half ago I couldn’t have built the coverage tool. Things are moving fast.
Attendance Suite
Family communications, data analysis, and a tracker showing who you flagged against who you actually reached. Also flags the days that run low before they arrive.
Chief of Staff
Everything a leader owes, what matters today, what’s coming, and what somebody outside is waiting on.
Weekly Staff Update Builder
Interviews the leader, builds the format with them, produces a sectioned update they can send. Pulls only from sources they’ve said are safe.
Vendor Evaluation Tool
A cost-benefit read on a vendor, for that school.
Transportation Manager
Routes and coverage when a driver is out.
Development and Grants Tracker
Grant tracking, reporting, POs.
The hundred different options
A tool can do every one of these.
- Building the deck for Wednesday’s PD.
- Writing the weekly team email, four drafts in, still not right.
- From your coaching tracker to the PD. The questions you’re getting, the trends, and the work that matters most for the grade team or department.
- Campus coordination. Email to calendar to the daily, weekly and monthly look-ahead.
- A thought partner that knows your people. A page per key person, so the hard calls come back specific.
- Hiring season. Rec letters, interview rubrics, the resume pile, and structured questions tied to your own standards. It doesn’t screen resumes.
- School culture. Everything from flyers, to incentives, to routines and procedures. PD, and the design of complete systems, routines and policies.
- Run it through the rubric. Anything you write, run against the five to twenty documents that rule your life: policies, goals, feedback, mandates, manuals, rubrics, playbooks.
- Long-term planning. Big dreams into goals, goals into milestones, milestones into actions, actions into a weekly reflection cycle.
- Evaluating products, tools, curriculum and other purchases. Due diligence, and investigating impact.
- Budget exceptions. Finance reading a whole export to find the few lines that moved.
- Meeting commitments. Turning meeting notes into who owes what by when.
- Handbook conflicts. Reconciling family handbooks, staff handbooks and board policy across campuses.
- Weekly PD build. Session plan, materials and deck, every week.
- Coverage on your other campuses. The same tool, set up on each campus’s own master schedule.
- Delay days, half days and field trips. Rebuilding the bell schedule and the coverage plan when the day isn’t the normal day.
- Coaching themes across a campus. It reads the walkthrough notes and names the two or three teaching patterns that come up most, so the next PD can target them. It names no teacher and stays out of evaluation.
- One morning brief for every campus. Who’s out and whether they’re covered, which buses are late, and each campus’s attendance total.
- Onboarding new hires. A setup checklist for each new hire’s role, plus what’s still missing on day 10 and day 30.
- Bus coverage when a driver is out. Which routes to combine or who covers, and a person approves it before anything changes. It works from routes, rider counts and the driver roster.
- A reading plan to-do list. The required actions, owners, deadlines and evidence in one place. It tracks the tasks and never reads a score.
- Your AI policy. If you have one, it tells me what anything I build has to meet. If it’s still in progress, I can help you adapt a model policy.
Use one of these, or point me at a new one.
100% of my clients were referrals. Year over year, 91% came back.
Where I did it
The Record
The work with Chris deeply accelerated the trajectory of my school, and ultimately the network at large. It was nothing short of transformational, and I do not use that word lightly.
Jerel Bryant · CEO, Collegiate Academies · Louisiana State Principal of the Year
Our school leaders name his coaching and support as having very high impact, and they push hard to get as many ‘Chris days’ at their schools as possible. I would highly recommend Chris to any school, CMO, or district looking to make dramatic improvements.
Doug McCurry · Co-Founder, Achievement First
Chris’s monthly visits were a catalyst for dramatic growth. On our network’s evaluation system, we went from the lowest-performing middle school to the highest-performing in the history of our network. Truly, Chris was no small part of that.
Tom Kaiser · Founder, Authentic Leaders · former Principal, Achievement First Endeavor MS
Tell me what you’re up against. If I can help, I’ll say how I’d start. If I can’t, I’ll say that too.
Book a 30 minute call (opens in a new tab) Or write me: chris@habetlerconsulting.com · 617-913-8366
How We Start · done for you, done with you, done without me.
Take the three-minute scorecard and I’ll show you what the busywork is costing you, in school days a year. Or name the problem here and I’ll tell you what I’d do first.