Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 44: 4 Lessons from Scaling My Coaching Business

Released: 07/10/2026

Show Notes:

Amanda pulls back the curtain on what scaling her coaching business actually looked like, including the four lessons she wishes someone had told her way earlier. She gets into why spending big before you’ve proven your concept is a trap, why complexity feels like progress but usually isn’t, why hustle culture is just burnout with better branding, and why following someone else’s blueprint to the letter can leave you building something you end up resenting. If you’ve ever looked at someone further along and wondered how they make it look easy, this episode is the honest answer to that question.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. You do not need a massive upfront investment or a complicated tech stack to start scaling, and the therapists who build most successfully start with one lean offer, prove it works, and build from there.
2. Hustling harder is not the variable that determines whether a launch succeeds, and posting every single day during Amanda’s April launch produced the exact same number of sales as a launch where she barely showed up on social media.
3. Sticking to the plan is not always the most important thing, and giving yourself permission to pivot, pause, or shut something down when it stops feeling aligned is not a failure of commitment, it is how you build a business you actually want to run.

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:

Therapy Intensives Academy – use code HHWPOD250 as a podcast listener to get $250 off at checkout.

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Transcript:

Amanda Buduris (00:00)
Hello, hello. Welcome back to Happy, Healthy, and Wealthy Therapists, the podcast for therapists who are done choosing between doing meaningful clinical work and actually making the money they need, want, and honestly deserve. In today’s episode, I’m going talk directly about my journey scaling a coaching business and the three lessons, actually, four lessons that took me way too long to learn, because that is what a

A lot of the therapists inside my mastermind, the therapists I coach one-to-one ask questions about of like not just the strategy, but you know, what did you take away from this? Like what got you through this? And so I wanna just take a moment to ground us in this thought of, you know, if we’ve ever looked at someone that’s further along than ourselves and thought, how do they make this look so easy? You might even, you know, think that about me. Well then this episode is for you because I’m gonna share

My takeaways and the biggest things I’m encouraging therapists who are scaling to really think about. So we’re gonna dive right in. Number one is the money myth. You do not need a gazillion dollars to start scaling. When I first started building out anything beyond my one-to-one client work, I was doing, you know, like 45, 60 minute sessions as well as my therapy intensives, but that’s still one-to-one work.

So when I thought about scaling, because I heard of a lot of other people doing that, well, I thought that if I wanted to scale a business really big that I wanted that I needed to invest really big, like scary big, because I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen a lot of this messaging of like, well, if it’s not scary, then how do if you’re not doing the scary things, like how do you know you’re serious about it? If you’re not investing big amounts of money, how do you expect to make big amounts of money?

So I spent money I didn’t need to spend on things I didn’t need yet because I thought that’s what going all in looked like. So here’s what I actually learned instead, which is, you know, the therapists that I’ve watched scale the most successfully, they didn’t start with the biggest investment. They started lean. They tested small, they put a little bit of money and a little bit of time into something, saw what worked, and then invested more into the thing.

That was already showing them any kind of signs of life. There is one therapist in my mastermind right now who she sold out a beta offer for her course. She pitched a few people that she would be, she knew would be ideal clients for her course. And she got five people to buy, like literally just from an easy amount of, hey, are you interested in this? Just a little bit of like networking, so to speak. And and it worked, right? So, like, that’s it. That’s the secret. Just like start.

lean. You do not have to invest in, you all have probably heard of all these systems like Kajabi and Flowdesk and all of these things. And you you don’t actually need to start that way. For a lot of people, depending on what you’re starting to scale, if that is a course, a membership, a coaching program, there’s some basics that you need, like if you’re gonna offer a course, well then you need to record those videos. So how are you recording them? Where are you storing them?

If you’re doing coaching, then obviously you might need like a Zoom account, but even you can use Google Meet, right? That one’s free if you have a Google account. There’s some things that you can build with time, but you can also start as simple as a Google Drive folder where you share documents and videos. So start lean and invest strategically and incrementally. But now on the flip side, I want to talk about the other side of the money myth because I hear this one just as much.

Now some of you have convinced yourself that, okay, well then it can cost nothing. If you can figure out how to scale for free, then you know, maybe that’s the smart thing. So a number of people I’ve heard talked to who I love how creative people get with naming things. I am not creative with naming things, but a lot of people ask AI and specifically ChatGBT, and people are like, I call him chat, or I call him chat, or even I heard Chat Gibbity, which is like my favorite one that I’ve heard. you know

AI exists for a reason, but AI is not your coach. AI is not your teacher. You are not going to get nearly anywhere as far as you could if, you know, you invested in someone who can teach you how to do that. So both extremes of like, I’m gonna spend all the money and get all the fancy tools and tech and systems, or I’m gonna do this completely for free. I’m not gonna ask anyone for any support at all when it comes to.

what it looks like to launch something versus what it looks like to scale something because again it’s two-step process. Again, you don’t need a gazillion dollars and this doesn’t have to be some complicated multi-year build-out before you see a single dollar back. So this is actually one of the reasons why I built my upcoming live workshop, the Therapist Scaling Intensive, that’s coming up on July 17th, is I have a mastermind and it is higher ticket.

For those who are wanting, like, I need more weekly support, I want one-to-one support, I really need accountability to just like get some shit done. And, you know, cost is a barrier for a lot of people who have expressed interest in that. And so I built this workshop that’s like, well, I can at least help you with looking at the big picture and what we want to think about so that you can be successful, so that you know the roadmap that you’re going to be following. So

The workshop is a little bit more like lower lift, lower cost way to actually get started with a actual like, I don’t want to say deep dive, like I’m gonna talk about a lot of details. It’s a four-hour workshop, so we’re gonna cover a lot. And it is about what are the real first steps, what are the things you don’t need to overspend on, what are the things that might be too big too soon, or you know, you also don’t have to convince yourself that you just figure it all out for free before you’re allowed to invest in support.

So I’m giving a workbook that my team and I have worked really hard on to go with the to go with the workshop, which includes all the resources of like if you’re starting lean, if you want to know about like the cheapest systems to use that you’re probably not gonna replace. Here are all my recommendations, which I think is important too, right? What we don’t want to do is spend a ton of money on something and then replace it with a cheaper option down the road because that costs more money. We also don’t want to

start with things we know we’re going to replace, just to replace it with something because obviously that cost team time and money. Like I once worked with someone on my team who we had our email marketing system and she’s like, I think we need to go to this email marketing system because it’s so much better and so much high performing. But like I didn’t have a problem with my email marketing system. That just would have been spending more money and spending more team time, aka more money for me, to make a change I didn’t need. So it’s also helpful to remember

probably don’t need to change as much as you might think that you do, right? So there’s so many tools and tech out there. It’s kind of the equivalent of when you started a private practice and you were looking at what EHR to use and you got overwhelmed with all the decisions and at some point you just picked one. It’s the same thing when it comes to scaling. There’s a lot of options out there, but I can talk you through and recommend. Here are the ones that are either cheap or you start for free that you know could be all you need, or here are things that are

one of my favorite tools is a one-time investment. It’s like $500 for lifetime access. Like, why would you not use that? You can scale so easily with that and not pay like $50 a month for the life of your business, which is obviously gonna be more than 10 months, right? In that $500 lifetime example. So if you’re kind of sitting on the sidelines and really waiting and thinking about like, I need more money, I need more time, or I need more certainty before I start to scale, then my therapist scaling intensive workshop.

Could be a really good fit for you. So you can head to the link in the show notes to grab your spot with a special coupon just for podcast listeners. Piece number two that I’ve learned is this complexity myth. So this does not have to be complicated. There are a lot of marketing content creators, whatever we want to call them out there, who want you to believe that scaling is hard. And that’s not to say that it’s

easy and it’s the easiest thing in the world. It is hard. It does take work. It does take some setup. But, you know, I remember also being in front of my computer with 70 different tabs open. And in those tabs having a funnel builder, an email platform, a course host, a scheduling tool, all of these different things when I hadn’t even sold anything yet, right? Because people also kind of give this messaging of like, build it and they’ll come and

There’s an extent of that, but it is definitely not the whole truth. And that’s why I think it’s helpful to be strategic about where you’re starting and not spend a ton of money up front before you’ve even, you know, really gotten clear on this is my offer, this is my audience, this is my launch timeline. It is so easy to be in that place of like again, I remember being so deep in building this machine, building my systems that

Well, I forgot that the machine was supposed to be in service of something, right? To help me with getting this co coaching program is what I started with. So getting that out there and eventually getting a course out there, and now I have a membership as well. So the thing that I’ve noticed in a lot of the therapists who I’m coaching who are scaling these days is, you know, the ones who are doing really well, they do not have the fanciest tech stack.

They are the ones who got clear on one simple offer, one simple way to talk about it, and one simple way to get it in front of people. And then they built it from there. Did you notice the theme there? It’s all starting with just one thing. When we see a lot of the messaging around diversify your streams of income, it’s so easy to try to launch those five streams at once. And you know what that does? It takes forever to launch five things at once. And it also creates.

Not just confusion for you, but also confusion for your buyers of what they should do. I did not start with the amount of revenue streams I have today. I started with one coaching program and I exclusively sold that coaching program for about a year until I decided, okay, I’m gonna take the course out of this coaching program and sell it just as a course with no live coaching support or anything like that. And then

months later, maybe like half a year later is when I had the idea for a membership. Like the whole point was that I was giving myself time to build out one thing instead of do seven things at once because, you know, whether you’re a neurodivergent like me or not, it is going to be hard to try to sell multiple things at the same time when if you have an entirely new audience, you know, they’re number one, maybe newer to hearing you even sell to them.

But number two, you start to pitch too many things, and there is buyer confusion. I still have people who are confused about my offers, even though I think it’s pretty clear. Like, well, I’ve got this therapy intensive academy program, I’ve got this scaling mastermind. Like to me, it’s very clear because I am in my business, but some people still don’t know the difference, which is again helpful to think about. Like just start from one place. I think.

Where a lot of us get trapped in that is complexity feels productive, right? It feels like progress. If it’s, okay, well, I’m gonna work on this workbook and this course and this program and this, this, that, and the other thing. It feels like we are moving in the right direction. And pieces of that can be true. But most of the time, adding complexity, adding too much too fast is just a really elaborate way of avoiding one simple.

slightly uncomfortable step that would actually move you forward, which is putting your offer out there and seeing what happens. The number of times I have seen someone be really excited about their idea, and then, you know, this is different than life gets in the way or something comes up, but to say like, no, actually I don’t think anyone’s gonna buy it anyway, or maybe, you know, ChatGPT said that I should come up with a low-ticket offer first, which like, there’s strategy to that, sure. And

Again, like it’s it’s really hard for your audience to go all in on anything when they don’t know what exists. Right. So if you’re noticing yourself getting into patterns of just delaying what it is you want to put out there, then I think that’s worth paying attention to. It’s worth bringing up with, you know, a supportive person, whether that’s in your personal life or if you do have a business coach, you can even bring it up with your therapist. But it’s helpful to remember like

We don’t need to start again with complexity. You can start with one revenue stream outside of therapy. You don’t have to start with seven. And if you are someone who is how I ideally see myself in my mind, which is I wanna believe that I have beautiful spreadsheets and an official organized content calendar and only maybe like two tabs open, you know, that

That ideal version of ourselves. It may not line up with our actual version of ourselves. And that’s okay because you don’t need a ton of organization to make an offer. Right. You don’t have to have an official launch calendar or anything that looks like what pe those of us who have been doing this for a while have. Like, my gosh, you should see my, I use Asana, it’s my project management system. You should see the hot mess that that thing looks like because.

I do have a big business and there is a lot going on. But again, I started from one place. I started with one offer. And so remember that even if you are really good at organizing things, it is best on your nervous system. It’s best on your brain. It’s best for your time to just start with one thing. So that also then leads me into lesson number three, which is the hustle myth.

Honestly, this might be the one I feel most fired up about, which is you do not have to hustle to scale. Don’t get me wrong, you have to work to scale. You might have like a hustle-ish season, but I spent a long stretch of my own business believing that if I just wasn’t exhausted, then I wasn’t working hard enough, right? Like as much as I left my

Agency, I was working at a college counseling center. As much as I left that because I was working 43, 50 hour weeks and that was a lot, and I was like, I don’t want to do that much. There is also something to be said for feeling productive, right? And you’ve put in a hard day’s work. And so when I started to have slow days in my business, both across therapy and coaching, I would reach out to my coach and be like, this doesn’t feel right. I feel

there’s too much white space. I feel like I’m supposed to be working on something. I’m supposed to be doing something because clearly making money can’t be easy, right? This constant grind of we have to keep working, we have to keep hustling, we have to do everything ourselves. This is the the toll that we all have to eventually pay to, you know, get to the version of business that feels easier, right? That’s what we tell ourselves is work hard now and everything will be easy.

In the future. Put a lot of hard work in now, and then you’ll have a totally passive income stream, which I disagree with. I think things become more passive. But if you ever have a passive course, if you never sell your course, right? Selling even once a week or once a month to your social following or email list is still marketing. So it’s not fully passive. But again, you can work hard, but not hustle. So

Again, I get why so many of us believe it. And so many programs out there are literally built on that promise. Hustle now, r rest later, post every single day, launch constantly, never stop optimizing. And this is again something I have to talk about in my own coaching, my own one-to-one coaching is how do we optimize this more? How do we get the open rates?

Higher? How do we get higher click rates? And like at some point, my coach has to remind me like if we keep optimizing, we will break something. And right now, things are working. Of course, you’re always gonna want it to work better and work faster, but things are working every day. And does posting every single day actually help me on Instagram? It’s it, you know, debatable in terms of like what am I posting for?

certainly the algorithm loves the more that you post. certainly my sales are higher when I do a full launch instead of something called an evergreen model of launching. But I would burn myself out and that’s not worth it. And so even though I am on social media every day, I’m not actively posting every day all the time. Posting more during a launch period has never resulted in significantly more sales. Literally, I sold.

I launched my Therapy Intensives Academy program in August 2025 and then April 2026. Literally the same amount of sales came in, 37. I thought that’s actually really funny. in August 2025, we were posting a carousel and a reel every day. So my team prepped that out in advance. And then I was showing up on stories, but it was so a story set, a reel, a carousel every day for seven or eight days. And then in this April one.

I I think we maybe put out like three to five reels and carousels. actually no, we sold for 10 days. So we put maybe like five to seven posts out. There were days I forgot to show up on stories. And again, exact same amount of sales came in, right? By not like I didn’t overwork and that was kind of the the purpose to trust that I built out other systems and other things that were gonna bring people in outside of posting every day.

So what actually moves the needle for me instead of just hustling is support and getting real specific strategic support to help me get clear on what works for me in my life and my nervous system. And just as important, all the thing that I all the things I don’t need to be doing at all, right? I didn’t need to show up more on social media. I didn’t need to post in Facebook groups.

I didn’t need to, you know, X, Y, and Z. So it’s really important to remember you do not have to do it all. And the therapists I’ve watched scale the most sustainably all share this one quality. They stopped trying to do it all themselves and stopped trying to copy someone else’s exact path. They got support. So maybe they hired a virtual assistant or an online business manager. They helped me as their, they hired me as their coach. So that they can, you know, not.

work 80 hour weeks so that they can cut through all the noise of the shiny object syndrome and you know what’s supposed to happen when and really focus on the few things that actually matter for them. We all deserve spaces, right? We’ve heard this your net worth is in your network thing and why being in the room where it happens is important. But a lot of those programs are like, my gosh, just sold it some like really ridiculous prices. I’ve seen like

$10,000 deposits just for some masterminds, or three-month programs that are like $10,000, $15,000. And as much as those things might be helpful, right? The content may be very good in it. If something’s trying to rush you to success, then it’s telling you that burnout is the price of success. And all of us, especially those of us who need our own amount of healing, those of us who are

High achieving and believed at some point that our worth was based on how hard we worked. We all need a container that gives actual simple strategy that works and helps us get right on, you know, it helps us get clear on what is the right path for us. So that way we can finally let go of everything that isn’t working for us. And I know this because I joined a coaching program when I was first getting started. That was three months, and I

hustled during that time. I got it done. I launched my thing. I started collecting revenue in that time. But when I took a look back after like eight to twelve months of the program I built and how I built it because this is how that person said I should do it. Then like I honestly I I kind of hated what I built. Like I loved the people inside. I believed in the message.

But I did it in this way that someone told me to. They’re like, you have to hire a setter, you have to hire closers, you have to do this, that, and the third thing. Like that wasn’t helpful for me. It was me building a business that does work, but doesn’t work for me. So I think that’s really important to think about that difference is actually getting personalized support, not just follow and do exactly what I did and it’ll work for you because on paper it might work, but does it work in alignment with your

soul and with your being, not always. And that’s exactly why I created my happy, healthy, and wealthy mastermind, which it’s all about, you know, we’re not gonna hustle and grind. We are going to get real support, real clarity, and figure out your sustainable path to scale. And again, information in the show notes if you’re interested in looking at that mastermind. But lesson number four, and this might be

I don’t know if it’s like the biggest thing, but I think it’s like a clear reminder, not a lot of us get, which is that you do not have to stick to the plan, right? Sticking to the plan is not the most important thing. A lot of us think, okay, like I know who my audience is, I’ve got my niche, I’ve got my offer, I know when I want to launch it. So now I just gotta do the thing. I just gotta see it through. And there is an extent of that that is true around, you know.

I don’t think it’s a matter of like commitment or lack of commitment, but everything I say to all the therapists scaling in my mastermind is like, your first launch is just about getting data and information about how did this go? What’s working well? What do we improve for next time? But there are some times where someone gets to their launch and actually they decide, I hate this thing. I don’t like my offer anymore. I think I have a bad offer. I’m embarrassed to put this out. And someone could argue.

that’s just like mindset stuff. You just have to push through. Just like go forward as planned. But that would be, I think, more for the sake of like if I were the coach in the example that said, just do it anyway. Like you’ll be fine. Just believe in yourself. Like I would probably be doing that because I just wanted data and a number around like look at my clients who are launching X, Y, and Z, as opposed to, okay, let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about extending this timeline. Let’s talk about why this felt

unsustainable. Let’s talk about why you’re not excited about it anymore. Because that’s very, very different to have someone hold you and support your decisions, right? There’s always going to be like some gentle challenging of like, is it just a mindset thing? But often it’s not. I find for myself when I feel most pressurized, which is times when I feel like I’m really acting out of alignment with what I actually need and what I actually want. And so there’s been times where

You know, my very first coaching program that I launched, I shut it down in I think the last cohort I took was like spring twenty twenty five. I shut it down because I was like, I do not like this anymore. I really want a strong pivot. And I’ve gotten advice from past coaches that was all about just stick with it, just keep scaling it. And I was like, I I don’t want to though. And so when I worked with the coach who finally gave me permission to like, great, let’s shut it down, I honestly felt so relieved. And even though I love my

Happy, healthy, and wealthy therapist mastermind. I was at a point where how we were launching that just based on like timelines, it was a lot of launching, it was a lot of pressure to fill the group that like the launching process felt less exciting. I love running the group. I hate launching the group, to be honest. because there is, there’s a lot of things that go into launching a mastermind compared to like a course or something like that. Cause you do, you’re looking at applications, you’re scheduling discovery calls, sometimes those discovery calls.

cancel last minute. And now, just like we feel in our therapy practice, it sucks to have a late cancellation or no show. If for no other reason then, well, now what do I do with my time? Do I have any time to get work done in this period or what else should I do? It’s hard to go through the ups and downs of like, yay, my God, I scheduled all these discovery calls. Filling the mastermind is going to so easy. And then like more than half of the people are like, no, no, it’s not the right time or something came up. Like keep me informed about the next round. So we actually decided like,

I have this August cohort coming up for the mastermind. And it’s almost about halfway full at this point. But I was going to open the next round in October, because that’s when another cohort will be wrapping up. So in theory, that’s when I would have started a new one. But me and my coach were like, actually, that’s it just doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel exciting to do that launch right now. I’ve got a lot of other things that are going on. So let’s just drop it, right? Let’s not do a second cohort of the mastermind. Let’s wait.

Until you know, do August through its end of January. So the next one will be February 2027. We’re like, let’s just wait. And like again, immediately, huge weight off of my shoulders. So it’s so important to listen to your intuition of what is working for you and what is not working for you. Doing something just for the sake of doing it is not going to get you further. It’s just going to burn you out more and you’re going to resent your business and

If you are investing any amount of money and any amount of time into something, you should love it, right? So let’s recap. You do not need a gazillion dollars to diversify your revenue. This doesn’t have to be complicated. You can start super lean, super simple. You definitely do not have to hustle your way to get there. And figuring out your way of what you want to do and when you want to do it is way more important than following someone’s blueprint roadmap.

whatever you want to call it. And if any part of this episode landed for you, I want you to do one thing today, which is just to pick one of these four lessons and ask yourself where it’s showing up in your business right now. And again, if you want to look at either my therapist scaling intensive workshop or my mastermind. Links for the all the information is in the show notes. If you want to read more about those and see if one might be a good offer for you. But otherwise I just want to thank you for spending this time with me.

Thanks for listening to yeah, just some of my stories because again, this is this is hard work to put yourself out there to push so much work into something that you are excited about. And I think again, it’s just helpful to remember this does not have to look one way. And ultimately what matters is that it works for you. I always say there’s no wrong way unless it doesn’t work for you, right? The only right way is all the things that do work and you have.

So many options there that’s been so helpful for me to remind myself over the years in my own coaching is you have options here, right? Like you’re not stuck into anything. That’s why we’re business owners because we want to work for ourselves. One of my favorite things, and I’ll close with this: when I was getting ready to leave my college counseling center, I saw someone post, I think it was in a therapist Facebook group, that was like, I decided if I’m gonna work for an asshole, I’m gonna be that asshole. And I was like,

A million percent because yeah, I would rather be my own boss and have some frustrations and annoyances with myself, but I’d rather be in charge of my ability to check in with myself, to make sure things still matter, to make sure I still take care of myself, and to ultimately be way, way happier doing what I’m doing now than, you know, even my best day in the worst parts of when I worked for someone else. So

Rem remind yourself why you are doing this, which is you’re doing this because you deserve better and you want better. So thanks for listening today. I will talk with you next week.