Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 39: Why Is Making More Money Still Not Giving Me The Freedom I Wanted?

Released: 07/01/2026

Show Notes:

In this episode, Amanda Buduris discusses the various business models available to therapists looking to scale their practices. She emphasizes the importance of understanding what therapists are optimizing for in their careers, whether it be income, flexibility, or fulfillment. Amanda breaks down several models including the traditional weekly caseload, therapy intensives, digital products, and coaching programs, highlighting the pros and cons of each. The conversation encourages therapists to choose a model that aligns with their personal and professional goals rather than simply following trends.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. Before choosing a business model, the most important question isn’t what makes the most money but what you’re actually optimizing for, because the right model is the one that fits your life, energy, and non-negotiables, not someone else’s highlight reel.
2. Every scaling model (weekly caseload, intensives, courses, group programs) comes with real trade-offs, and understanding those trade-offs honestly is what separates a sustainable business from one that recreates the burnout you were trying to escape.
3. Therapy intensives remain one of the most powerful first moves for therapists who want more income and more breathing room, because they generate premium revenue without requiring the audience size, launch infrastructure, or visibility that courses and group programs demand.g any platform.

Connect with Amanda:

Follow on Instagram: @amandaamandakbcoaching-com
Check out the Amanda KB Coaching website

Register for the Therapist Scaling Intensive Workshop: half-day, hands-on virtual workshop for therapists who want to scale beyond private pay therapy sessions. Use code HHWPOD100 as a podcast listener to get $100 off at checkout.

Apply here: https://amandakbcoaching.com/mastermind – for the next round of the Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Mastermind – a 6-month hybrid, high-level mastermind with high-touch 1:1 coaching for therapists who are ready to stop relying on trading hours for dollars (even premium ones) and scale beyond the therapy room.

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Sponsors:

• This episode is sponsored by Alma – learn more here
• This episode is sponsored by Jane – use code: AMANDA2MO for a 2-month grace period

Resources & Links:

SEO for Therapists Membership

Therapy Intensives Academy

Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Mastermind

Free Training: 3 Steps to Booking Your First Therapy Intensive

Free Guide: 3 Steps to Double Your Income

SEO Freebie

Just a quick heads up, everything I share in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It’s not legal advice, financial advice, or tax advice. Every practice and every state has its own rules. So if you’re wondering how something applies to your situation, make sure to check in with an attorney, accountant, or another qualified professional who can give you guidance based on your specific circumstances.

Transcript:

Amanda Buduris (00:00)
Welcome back to another episode of the Happy, Healthy, and Wealthy Therapists. I am super excited to talk about this topic today because it’s something I continue to get a lot of questions about from therapists who are in my scaling mastermind as well as people who just have questions in the DMs as I post my income breakdowns for each funnel that I have. Funnily enough, actually, the day that I’m recording this podcast.

my team and I, we prep all of our materials in advance. And so it just kind of happened by happenstance that one of a a carousel that we put together that says, like, here’s all my funnels and here’s what I earn from each funnel, and here’s like the pros and cons of those that got posted today. And so I was like, yeah, that’s actually a good reminder. I need to record this podcast because I also prep this podcast in advance. So the thing that I really want to talk about is that is how to really think about if you want to scale.

How do you choose what you scale into? Most business content aimed at therapists jumps straight into the how without ever addressing the more important question, which is what are you actually optimizing for? Right? Why are you scaling? So in this episode, I’m gonna break down the most common private practice business models, especially for therapists, as they start to scale outside that. So I’m gonna be talking about what the online business world calls funnels, but essentially these are models.

the real trade-offs of each and how to figure out which one fits your actual life, not just your income goals, because those two don’t always align. So I have a question for you. How many of you have downloaded a freebie, joined a webinar, bought a course, followed some coach’s exact system, and still ended up feeling like, okay, I’m doing more stuff, but I don’t actually feel more free.

Right. Like a lot of people say my income’s going up, but so are my expenses. So, like, what’s the point here? Or I’m working a lot more developing my new thing and I’m not yet seeing the return on investment. Like, should I actually just do therapy? Should I just see more therapy clients? So yeah, we’re gonna talk about that today because I think there’s a massive gap between the business model someone sells you and the life you actually want to build.

One of my cats is currently kicking around a bunch of stuff on my desk. If you are hearing that noise, I’m trying to not apologize for my cats because I think they’re adorable and you know, they’re just cats. So when it comes to this gap of, you know, someone saying, This is the thing that works for my life, and here’s how it can help your life, there is a gap in that because everyone’s different, right? So no one’s really talking about the gap, and that’s what I want to talk about more in this episode.

I am someone who has tried way too many business models in my own practice and in my coaching business before really figuring out what actually works for me. And honestly, that is an ongoing process because my life continues to change, my capacit capacity continues to change. Sometimes it’s bigger, sometimes it’s smaller. I’m someone who loves international travel. And so I have to work a lot of my

business and life around that. And sometimes it does mean my capacity is much lower when I’m traveling or doing other like big life things. and I need to make sure that my business can still function. Right. So I’m going to break down the most common ways therapists try to make more money and build more freedom. So again, business model or funnel, whatever you want to call that, and these real trade-offs. Because the model that works for me or for your colleague.

Who’s a mom of three with a zero desire to be on camera is probably not the same model that works for you if you love teaching and want to build a seven-figure brand. And I think getting honest about that is one of the most important things you can do for your practice. So let’s immediately dive right into this. Before I get into the actual breakdown, I need to make one thing very, very clear. The reason a lot of therapists feel stuck.

even when they’re technically doing the right things, is because they picked a business model for the wrong reasons. Maybe you saw someone else crushing it with a group program and thought, I should do that. Or you took a course on funnels and kind of just copied it. And it sort of works, but something feels off. You’re making more money maybe, but again you really don’t feel that free.

And that is the gap again that I’m going to close today by going deeper into general pros and cons as well as sharing specifically what that looks like in my own business. Before I walk you through the models, I want you to hold one question in your brain. Don’t answer it yet. Just hold it. But again, that question is, what am I actually optimizing for? Not what do I want to make, but what do I want my life to feel like?

Because the answer to that question should be completely driving which model you build. And most people skip that step. They just go straight to the show me the money, right? Okay, so let’s break these down.

so model number one, the traditional weekly caseload. This is what most therapists start with in private practice. You see a certain number of clients per week at a set rate. You do weekly sessions, insurance, or private pay. Feels very familiar. It’s what we’ve all been taught to do. It’s predictable. And for a lot of therapists, it is enough, right? Like we’re like, I’m totally fulfilled by that. But honestly, the ceiling is very, very clear. You can

only see so many people, you have a finite number of hours in your schedule, you have a finite capacity. So if you want more money, you either raise your rates or you see more clients. That’s it, that’s the whole model. What you are optimizing for with this model might be stability and simplicity, right? It’s clean, it’s what you were trained for. You don’t have to necessarily learn new business models. You just improve your marketing,

Figure out, you know, when you actually do have time and when you don’t have time and who’s ready to graduate and all that stuff. But very, very simple. That’s what you’re optimizing for. You want stability, you want simplicity. The trade-off is there’s basically no leverage here. Your income is directly tied to your hours, which means taking a vacation costs you money. A sick day costs you money. There’s very little buffer. And for a lot of therapists, that’s the burnout cycle.

You can’t afford to take a break, so you don’t, so you burn out, so you can’t work anyway. This model, the weekly therapy, you know, 45 to 60 minutes session model, really works best for therapists who genuinely love the structure of weekly work. They aren’t trying to scale significantly, and they have their rates set at a place that covers their actual financial needs. If that’s you, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Don’t let anyone on the internet convince you otherwise.

You do not have to scale for the sake of scaling. If you are happy with where you’re at, you’re making your 10K, or I know tons of therapists who are actually making 15 to 20K months in a weekly therapy model. If that’s all you make, fantastic. If that’s what you want and that’s what you need. But if there’s something not meeting your needs, that’s where again people start to really get this, whether it’s the itch, whether it’s the FOMO, I don’t know what it is.

But this sense that there’s something more and there’s some kind of skill they’re not tapping into and that they want to, because again, they’re optimizing for something different. So model number two, right? So we’ve got model number one is that weekly therapy model. Model number two, therapy intensives. Obviously a favorite choice of mine. It is the first model I shifted into once I felt pretty established in my private practice where I was just seeing 45 to 60 minute weekly clients.

So this is where you can offer concentrated longer format sessions anywhere from a few hours to a few days rather than weekly 15-minute appointments. Your rate goes up because the value goes up, but this isn’t necessarily, you know, now everyone is charged at this same rate. It’s almost like a the premium offering. Like if you go to any department store, sometimes I’ve given the example of like,

A blender, right? You’re always gonna find the $20 blender and then there’s gonna be like a $500 blender. Not everyone buys the $500 blender. Some people are going to, and so there’s a reason to stock them. And there’s so in this case with therapy intensives, not everyone’s going to buy them, not everyone’s going to invest in them, but some people will. So having it is a nice way of even if you book one a month, that can bring in a significant amount of income.

replaces some other appointments. If for example you had a three-hour intensive at $1,000, this replaces 10 sessions at $100. So the math here really, you know, maths in your favor. If you choose the therapy intensives model, you’re probably optimizing for income without proportionally adding hours. You’re making significantly more per working hour.

And this is the key piece that a lot of people miss. It’s not that you’re just making more money, right? I mean, like the money is fantastic. It’s that you have breathing room between clients. You’re not back to back all day. You’re doing deep focused work with fewer people, and then you actually have time to recover. Now the trade-off is you have to actively market them in some way. They don’t necessarily fill themselves the way a weekly caseload can.

once you, you know, set up your psychology today and put up your website and work on your SEO and stuff like that. Like a lot of people already know weekly therapy exists, so they’re looking for that. A lot of people do not know what the heck a therapy intensive is. They either don’t know that framing, those like that wording of it, or they never even knew that they could go to a therapist for longer than 45 to 60 minutes at a time. And so you need

A really good website, you need really strong search engine optimization. You have to have clear positioning and a willingness to sell something that’s a little unconventional, but you have to do it in a very clear way, right? You can’t just be like, here’s the thing, it’s amazing, right? Buy it. You have to really show people what is in it for them and what potential transformations can happen.

The clients who are interested in intensives, they are out there. I promise you they are, but you have to go get them more intentionally at first. So therapy intensives are best for the therapists who want more income and more time back. Therapists who find weekly sessions creatively draining and thrive when they can go deep. Therapists who are okay with some on upfront marketing work in exchange for a lot more flexibility long term.

And honestly, this model works really well for people who have chronic health stuff or variable energy, like especially if you’re neurodiverse, because you’re building your schedule around fewer, higher impact working blocks. Now, like I mentioned, my little Instagram post breaking down my funnels posted today. So I’ve got that up on my phone to break down as I’m talking about these different models, what each has brought up for or brought in for me.

And so last year in 2025, my private practice made about 90K in revenue. This is a high demand level of work, right? Because it’s direct clinical work. It’s very session-based. I think I sh probably should have pulled this number up earlier, but a good like 30 to 40 percent of that came from therapy intensives last year. So I have a very, very small caseload, but I have a premium fee and I do intensives. So I don’t have to work so much so hard.

for that about $90,000 in a year. The good of this is obviously I love being a therapist. This is not just a revenue stream to me, like it is, but I at the end of the day, like it’s a core part of who I am professionally. I will never give up therapy, even if other coaches out there have literally encouraged me, like, you have to stop doing therapy if you want to scale your coaching business. I’m like, nope, that isn’t that it’s just not worth it for me. So it is time dependent income, but that’s exactly why I built

Everything else around that. So, model three. Let’s say now you’re doing the therapy thing, you’re maybe even doing the therapy-intensive thing, what else? So, digital products and courses is where a lot of people go to next. This is the one everyone thinks is passive income. And I will say this carefully but clearly: it can become semi-passive, but it is not passive on the front end. Building a course.

launching it, getting people into it. That is a real job. I have done it. It takes time, it takes some tech know-how, a marketing strategy, and usually some kind of audience already. You don’t need a ginormous audience, but you do need some people who know who you are, what you’re about, and you know, why would they want to work with you? Why would they want to buy something from you? If you’re interested in this model, you’re probably trying to optimize for

Income that isn’t tied to your time at all once it’s built. So if the funnel is working for your course or digital product, people are buying it whether you’re asleep on a plane or at a pottery class that you signed up for. The trade-off of that is that the build phase can be intense. If you don’t already have an audience, you need one before the course will sell. That means creating content, making an email list, having a

social media marketing plan. It means you have to do all of these things. The dream of passive income is real, but it usually, you know, it can take a lot of work depending on how much time and capacity you have. I know some people who have been working on a project for like six months and some people who have been working on a project for two years because their private practice is already so busy and thriving and they’re not trying to burn themselves out. They’re trying to do this sustainably.

But it does take real work because no one’s going to buy, you know, your seven-page PDF that was made entirely with AI, right? You have to build something that’s actually quality and something that is different than what people can learn with AI. Because people will buy when they know that it’s different. They’re not gonna buy if they feel like they can just learn it somewhere somewhere else. So it’s not fully passive income. It becomes more passive with time and with work.

And this is really best for the therapist who loves teaching, has something really specific and replicable to teach, and they are willing to treat the audience building piece like a second job for a while, right? Because again, you have to, you don’t have to have a ton of social media followers. I mean, ultimately, at the end of the day, what you need people on is your email list. Email marketing always has the biggest return on investment compared to organic social media marketing. Kind depends with.

Paid social media marketing, if you know what you’re doing with meta-ads, for example. But this is actually a great model if you eventually want to step away from one-to-one clinical work. If you have something you’re excited and passionate about and you want to scale it from there, depending on what your revenue kind of needs and goals are. But do not go here as your first move unless you have a list and a clear offer. So again, if I look at my post.

of what brought in what? So I have a couple different things when I think about courses and digital products. So I have my SEO for therapist membership. Last year in 2025, this brought me about $17,000. The demand level for this is fairly low. It’s me and my team. We come up with SEO strategies, some SEO tips, and some blog ideas and suggestions for how to optimize these blogs for AIO and SEO. So primarily this is a pretty

evergreen format of how we market something, which just means it’s always available. We’re always marketing it as like a call to action or I throw something up in stories on Instagram. It’s not something that we really launch for because it’s a low-ticket membership. It’s either $29 a month or $249 for the year. So the good is that this is recurring revenue that doesn’t require me to show up consistently. And the real part of this is that it is slower to grow and it does require upfront content investment.

To get there. Because a lot of people think, and you probably see the outliers of I know I just got an email the other day of like this person who made like a million or two million dollars last year off of a $9 a month subscription. You need a ton of volume to get that amount of money from a low cost subscription service. I’ve actually been surprised at times. I’m like, wow, my offer is so financially accessible compared to the other.

Related offers out there, I’m surprised I don’t have more people. So do not do a low-ticket digital product or membership or things like that. If your goal is, I want this to be where all of my money comes from. Like, do it if again you’re just trying to replace some one-to-one income. But then I have my this is like a digital product that also kind of falls into coaching and group programs, which I’m going to talk about next.

My Therapy Intensives Academy used to be a course only. I used to not offer coaching calls in addition to that support. So nowadays it does look like that. I think the first year when I launched it, I just did, you know, it’s a course, but you get like a bonus one coaching call with me. So in the very early years of doing that, the first time I launched it as a course standalone was in 2024. I probably maybe brought in.

$50-ish thousand dollars for the year because it is a higher ticket course. And then the other ones I’m gonna talk about that, okay, we’re gonna get to that next. This is me live doing this together and not, you know, pre-uh planning every single aspect of this podcast because it doesn’t need to be perfect. But model number four, again, is coaching and group programs.

So, this is where you move from therapy to maybe you do business or life coaching, often for therapists like I do, or for a specific niche population. Group programs give you leverage because you’re getting paid once for your time and serving multiple people in the same container. It’s kind of the same if you were to do like a group therapy, like a therapy group in your therapy practice, right? You are getting paid.

Buy more people for one slot of your time compared to one person for one slot of your time. And so if you go the coaching and group program route, you’re probably optimizing for, you know, you want your income to grow without you working proportionally more hours. If you have 10 people in a group program at $3,000 each, that’s $30,000 and you’re running a handful of group calls. That math is really different from seeing 10 individual clients.

Now, the trade-off is you need a bigger audience to launch and fill group programs. You also need to handle the business side, the tech, the sales calls, the marketing, probably a lot of visibility. And I’ll be honest, it can feel like you are always launching. There’s a cyclical pressure that burns a lot of coaches out in a way that’s not different from the clinical burnout we’re trying to escape. So this one requires real infrastructure and systems to be sustainable.

It’s really best for therapists who have a clear niche coaching audience, genuinely love group dynamics and get energized by them, are okay being visible and marketing consistently, and have the time and resources to build that infrastructure. This is not a shortcut, right? It is not easy to launch these things. It’s a different kind of full-time job for some time, right? If you’re

recording something your group gets access to, if you’re creating agreements or contracts or things like that, it takes time and then you can streamline things eventually. But please do not throw together something that you’re not confident in and then try to charge high ticket for it. Like you’re gonna lose a lot of trust with your audience. So again, if I go back to my post with my breakdown, my Therapy Intensus Academy now that it is

A group program where people get consistent calls. Last year in 2025, that brought in about $1,000 in $100,000 in revenue. The demand level for this is kind of medium. I do two live calls a month and then I am monitoring people get access to a community board off of Facebook because I hate Facebook, where they can ask questions, celebrate their wins, things like that.

The good of this is that it is really high transformation and it’s strongly aligned with my mission of helping therapists make more money and have really, really good lives. The trade-off for that is, you know, revenue tends to be higher during what’s called a launch period. So a time when I say, hey, it’s on sale and you get some extra bonuses. And then it’s quieter in between those launch periods. So it does require really good strategy of, you know, if I do want to make a couple more sales this month, what should I do then?

Now I also have my scaling mastermind, the happy, healthy, and wealthy therapist mastermind. And this is a newer offer for me. I launched it in, I mean, like I announced it in June 2025, but the first call started happening in October 2025. So it brings in about 100,000 per year at this point. pretty medium to high demand. It kind of just depends.

Who’s in the group and what they’re working on. Sometimes I’m looking at a lot of emails or landing pages or answering questions, looking at webinar slides, stuff like that. But this is an intimate group. It’s a max of eight therapists per cohort. and it does require me to do active facilitation. I’ve played around with either weekly one-hour group coaching calls or bi-weekly 90-minute coaching calls. The good of this is that there are deep relationships. There’s

Generally high retention, some people have renewed into another round of a cohort, and it’s incredibly rewarding to run them. And the real of this is again, it requires consistent presence and energy from me to deliver well. I would not feel good if I tried to charge someone high ticket for this mastermind and then never answered their questions or told them like, the answers are in the course or something like that. Like I really have to show up and and be present. From a different capacity, I know a lot of people.

push more of the group model. They say, you know, don’t even do one-to-one coaching. Like you just just do group. In my mastermind, I offer both because I know what it’s like to be in a group space and feel like, I just wish I had like more individual time, or I’m too embarrassed to ask this question, or I don’t want others to judge me when I say this thing. So I do offer one-to-one coaching in my mastermind, as well as I have like one or two spots available for just pure one-to-one coaching retainers.

So from that I make approximately 59 or 49 or 50,000 a year from that. And again, demand for that is very high because I meet with these people multiple times per month. It is very high touch and premium pricing for that reason because it’s a lot of my time and a lot of my energy. And again, I love doing it, but it’s the same or similar to therapy where my what I’m earning is.

It’s not directly just tied to, you know, the live sessions, because I’m also in Slack answering things and looking through things. So that’s why I charge a premium price for it.

So again, the real question is what are you optimizing for? So you have this breakdown of what are some of the things to be thinking about, what are pros and cons of all of these different options. And I want to come back to that question I gave you earlier: of what are you actually optimizing for? Because the answer to that question changes everything about which model makes sense for you. So let me give you some real examples.

If you’re a new mom or a caregiver and you’re non-negotiable, is that you are not on calls more than 10 hours a week, then a group coaching model with multiple weekly calls and launch pressure is probably going to crush you. Intensives or a simple simple private pay weekly caseload at really good rates might be a way better fit. There’s lower complexity and there’s way less visibility demand. If you are maxed out on clinical work and you’re already burning out,

But you have a big personality and you love talking and teaching, maybe the course or coaching route is where you eventually land. But you need that runway to build it. You can’t sprint to passive income. So in the meantime, intensives or a well-priced weekly caseload can buy you that runway without completely wiping you out. If you want maximum income and minimum hours, and you’re good at marketing or willing to get willing to get good at it.

Intensives plus of course is honestly one of the most powerful combinations I’ve seen. You’re earning premium rates from clinical work while simultaneously building something that earns when you’re not working. And if you just want simplicity and a solid income without all the business stuff, weekly therapy at the right rate, that was hard to say. Private pay, good SEO, so clients can find you. Like that is all you need. Have a good rate, be private pay, and good SEO.

That’s a completely legit and fulfilling practice model, and I will shout that from the rooftops because not everyone needs to become, quote, an entrepreneur. The point is there is no universally best model. There’s only the best model for what you actually need your life to look like. I want to name the most common mistake I see therapists make because I’ve made it myself.

The mistake is choosing your business model based on what looks most successful on the internet and not what actually fits your life. Someone posts about making six six figures from their course and you think, I should do that, but you haven’t asked yourself whether you have an audience, whether you love teaching, whether you can stomach the launch cycle. You just see the result and you try to reverse engineer the model without knowing if the model is right for you.

So here is my challenge for you. Before you choose your next move, answer three questions. One, what does my ideal week look like? Not my ideal income, but my ideal week. How many hours am I working? What kind of work am I doing? What does my energy feel like at the end of the day? Number two, what am I willing to build? Some models require a big upfront investment of time and energy.

Am I in a place where I can make that investment? Or do I need something that generates income now while I build? Number three, what are my non-negotiables? Maybe it’s school pickup every day at three, maybe it’s no weekend work, maybe it’s needing to take a full month off every summer. Build your model around those non-negotiables, not the other way around. Okay, so here is your takeaway from today. Funnels and business models are tools. They are not

prescriptions. The one that builds you the most freedom is the one that actually fits your life, your personality, your energy, and your season. And the most important work you can do right now is get really honest about what you’re optimizing for. If this episode made you realize you might want to explore therapy intensives as a first or next step, I’d love to have you check out the Therapy Intensives Academy. It’s designed exactly for the therapist who is looking for something a little bit beyond

you know, just the weekly caseload, not quite ready for scaling. But if you are ready to look at scaling, that’s where I have a couple things coming up. Either my live workshop that’s happening on July 17th, it’s called the Therapist Scaling Intensive. It’s something I’m super excited about because I’ve not seen anything else out there like this. Like truly and genuinely, I’m not just saying that. so there’s either that for people who are looking to get started.

Or I have my six-month mastermind, which has enrollments in August and October are the next couple of dates that are coming up. And then it’ll be April 2026. Or nope, it’s already 2026, April 2027 when the next round opens up. So a few different ways to work with me if you want to think about what do I want to do for scaling and how do I actually get that support scaling it out. And if you’re not there yet, again, if you don’t want to think about any of these things, you’re just kind of almost like,

future pacing yourself, that is completely okay too. I will keep showing up in your ears every week to help you figure out the thing that is right for you. Thank you so much for being here. Share this episode with a therapist friend you know is running on fumes and maybe copying someone else’s business model. And I will see you next week.