Coordination Time Ratio

Coordination Time Ratio measures the share of an agency's social retainer hours that go to moving work between people (briefing, chasing approvals, reformatting, reconciling version conflicts) rather than producing it. It matters because social retainers are priced on output, not effort: a platform that trims coordination from 30% to 15% of a 40-hour monthly retainer frees roughly six hours per client, which across ten accounts is a full-time hire's worth of capacity. The ratio is measurable before purchase. Run one representative client set through the current stack for two weeks and log every handoff. White-label reporting depth, approval routing, and per-client workspaces are the levers that move the number; Sendible's dedicated client workspaces and Sked Social's plan-approve-publish workspace exist precisely to compress those handoffs. Cross-posting expectations raise the stakes: with 87% of brands now active across multiple platforms, per-channel reformatting is the fastest-growing line in the coordination budget.