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Welcome to Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists, where you’ll find conversations about marketing, scaling, and building a private practice that supports your clients, your nervous system, and your biggest dreams.

Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 59: I’m Choosing More Call Time Over More Admin Time

October 2, 2026

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Released: 10/2/2026

Show Notes:

Amanda shares what the last few months actually looked like behind the scenes: pausing the second cohort of her mastermind, spending close to $9,000 on ads to scale her Therapy Intensives Academy, and then deciding to bring the mastermind back. She gets into how she knew something wasn’t working, what she uses as data beyond just the numbers, and why the business model that made sense six months ago stopped making sense when her personal life changed.

3 Key Takeaways:

  1. Pivoting away from a strategy that looked good on paper is not failure; when ads started feeling like a drain instead of a tool, that shift in energy was just as valid a data point as the numbers on a spreadsheet.
  2. The goal of scaling is not to be on as few calls as possible, it is to spend your time on the work that actually energizes you, and for some therapists that means more live coaching, not less.
  3. Your business has to fit the life you actually want right now, not the life you had when you built the original strategy, and changing course when your personal circumstances change is not inconsistency, it is good business ownership.

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Transcript:

Amanda Buduris (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Happy Healthy and Wealthy Therapist Podcast. I am going to share a little bit more today about some of my behind-the-scenes thinking and some recent decisions that I made because a lot of you are really liking the behind-the-scenes content. I know I personally am kind of like nosy as hell when it comes to why are people doing this and why’d they do that? And I thought that, you know, things were going so great for them. And I think as we

see and share all of the positives and the highs and everything from other therapists and coaches that we might admire. I think it’s also just as helpful to see some of the lows, some of the challenges, and some of the things that they have strategized through. And so that’s what this is episode is about today, where ultimately what I’m going talk about is something that

wasn’t working for me and what I decided to pivot to and why I decided to pivot that way. So earlier this year, I have been running a mastermind, the Happy, Healthy, and Wealthy Therapist Mastermind, which is all about helping therapists to scale outside of the therapy room. It’s something that I’m super passionate about. It’s something that I have so much fun with, you know, helping other therapists do, whether they’re

you know, marketing in themselves as business coaches or relationship coaches or building digital products or whatever that might be. So for me, I love, love, love this group. It is a high-touch group. I’m looking at a lot of people’s copy, looking at their landing pages, their email sequences, their offers. We have live group calls and we have live one-to-one calls. So I love it and it’s a lot of work.

You all, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, if you follow me on social media, you know that I also still keep a very active, part-time private practice myself, right? So I’m not one of those business coaches that just said, like, I’m not a therapist anymore and I don’t see clients anymore. I will always be a therapist. I love being a therapist. On average, I’ll say I probably see like three to five clients a week in the 60-ish session format, 60-ish minute session format.

And therapy intensives really just depend. I’ve talked with a lot of my coaching clients and even some people inside my therapy intensives academy about how, you know, these days, actually what works better for my schedule is weekly hour-long calls. That does not mean I don’t do my therapy intensive still. It just means I’m not emphasizing and focusing on them so much. That said, there are still people who reach out for therapy intensives.

I do discernment counseling, which are by nature two hour sessions. I have been in contact with someone earlier this week about doing a one of my three-day intensives, which is three hours each day for three days. I just did an intensive a couple of weeks ago for three hours. So I definitely still do them, right? So I am busy. I am always busy. It’s always my goal. It’s always something that I’m saying of like, I should create more white space. I want to be a little bit less busy. And so when it was coming time for me to, I had one

Cohort, because I’ve been running two cohorts of my mastermind. I had one cohort that was getting ready to wrap up, which meant it was getting ready for me and my team to start promoting the next cohort of it. And I was talking with my coach about how busy I’d been feeling, how not burnt out. I don’t think I’ve felt that feeling in a very long time, but just stretched thinner than I would like to be, especially because my life, my personal life, is so much better, so much fuller, so much happier these days.

post divorce and meeting a new partner. So there’s a lot of ways in which I’m like, I don’t want to work on my business all the time. Whereas when I was in a relationship that I wasn’t happy with and didn’t want to spend quality time with my ex, then you know I was okay working more hours at night on the business. Right. So that was my even there is a trade-off point around like, well, I could continue doing, you know, something else in my personal life or I could invest more time, energy, effort.

all of those things into business. And, you know, I’m in a very different personal place now. So I don’t want to work as much after hours to work on my social media content plan for the week or the month, or to write more email sequences, or to think about a sale to do. Like I actually want to think about business less these days. And so my coach is very aware that that is a part of my goal. And so as we were talking through

Getting ready to prep for the next cohort of the mastermind, which in theory would have been starting October 1st, 2026. So I would have needed to start marketing this a long time ago. She reflected back to me, like, do you actually want or need to do the second cohort? And for me, it was feeling like I have to fill it. Number one, because I had carnival,

verbally and mentally committed to it. I had been telling some people like, yeah, I’ve got another cohort starting in October. You can get on the wait list for it. And because I was feeling more stretched than because I was feeling like, okay, this is this is a lot of work and I love it. And it’s a lot of work, ultimately we came to the decision of, you know, let’s look at what are the revenue drivers in your specifically your coaching business. She doesn’t work with me.

my business coach doesn’t coach me on my therapy practice because my therapy practice is going so well, I do not need help with that. Everything is running exactly how it should be. So all we talk about is my coaching business. And we kind of just decided I valued more in terms of how do I want to say that? When I was looking at what revenue is coming from which revenue stream, because I have multiple revenue streams in my coaching business.

We looked at, you know, my Therapy Intensives Academy program is the most quote unquote scalable offer that I have, which means yes, I’ve died dedicated a certain amount of live time to be there. I monitor the community for when people are asking questions or sharing wins. And so, yes, the more people that come into the community, the more questions I’ll have to respond to like that. But it’s not necessarily more of my live time. It’s not calendar call time, right? Because I could even respond to questions.

evenings or weekends in the community if I wanted to. But as of right now, it is two live calls per month. And that felt like a really, really good balance for me. So we said, okay, let’s go ahead and pause the second cohort of the mastermind. And we’re just going to focus on this next month. And actually maybe at that point, we had made the decision and I probably had like two, three months to really think about how do I scale up the Therapy Intensives Academy program.

And so we looked into my last launch that I did for that was in August 2026. And we said, we’re gonna try to make this the biggest launch we have ever had. We are going to spend a ton more money in ads. I think I spent somewhere close to like $9,000 in ads, which I’ve definitely never done in a single month. so we really decided to go all in to see if we could make more revenue coming in. And I say we because my coach works on a revenue share model. So I send her 10%.

Of new revenue that comes in each month. And it really does feel like we are a partnership. So I say we a lot, even though obviously it isn’t me running the business. And we had really, really big goals for that August launch. And not that it didn’t go well. I had 34 therapists enroll, which is pretty much on track for how my launches usually go. Literally, the last two I had were 37 enrollees, 37 enrollees, and now 34 enrollees. So perfectly on track, but

That was a huge expense for me. And I am good with investing in myself and investing in my business when it’s strategic. And it’s harder to invest in yourself when you don’t see that ROI, right? Like I wanted the financial ROI of we set a goal of like, let’s see if we get a hundred people to join because of all of these extra ads that we’re gonna be running, all of the huge budget that we set with those ads.

So was really, really optimistic about those and it didn’t turn out the way that I wanted, even if it was still a really, really good win. So then what that meant was we went into September 2026, and it was a matter of, okay, how do we scale this in a non-live way, right? I have what’s called an evergreen funnel, which is someone signs up for my PDF, they can sign up for a free training, and then they get a special five-day sale option for the Therapy Intensives Academy. So we said, okay, let’s take September to see.

Can we continue scaling this in ads where you’re not having to do a live webinar to promote the sale? And it’s gone okay for September. I think two sales have come in that way, which again, not nothing. I definitely did not spend as much on ads as I did for the live launch. But what I started to notice in September was I’m stressing a lot about these ads. There is a lot that is kind of dependent on ads.

Going well. And if you have ever run ads for your business, whether that’s meta ads, Google ads, whatever it is, you know that something can be working really well one day, one week, one month. And then all of a sudden it just kind of goes away. And you’re not always exactly sure why, which is not fun to be that much out of control. There’s a lot you can control with ads.

And there are some pieces you can’t control. You can’t decide, you can’t control when the meta algorithm decides to change who it is sending your ads to or not. we had a tech issue of like we weren’t tracking properly how many people landed on the page versus opted into the page. So that created more problems where meta was essentially overspending. And I went back to my coach and I said, I really do love.

The tech component. I love a lot of things that I do in my business. It makes it really hard to focus on one. I’m like, I really do love the tweaking and tinkering with ads, and I love the aspect of what they could do for me. But at this point in time, I don’t think it’s worth it to throw all my eggs in this basket. To say, yep, the Therapy Intensives Academy is definitely the most scalable thing. It’s gonna be the thing I rely on most of my income coming in.

per month, because that’s what giving up the second mastermind cohort would mean is now the mastermind cohort is not my primary income per month. Now it’s my my program. And I was like, I just don’t think it’s worth it right now. And I don’t like how much I’m putting into ads. Obviously that messes with my profit margins when I’m looking at my profit and loss statements. And I want to take home more money for how much I am working. And so ultimately I’ve talked about this before on the podcast of like

everything you do in business, there is a trade-off, right? There are pros and cons to each thing. And while the pro of how do we scale the Therapy Intensives Academy as much and as big as we can was okay, in theory I have more free time. The con was I was spending a lot more of that free time with messing around with ads, and pissed off at ads and feeling like every time my team assigned me to look at ads or create a new reel for ads, I was just like,

hate this and I don’t want to do it. And so when my coach had asked me some questions around like ideally, how do you want to be spending your time? And especially right now, what I really said was like, I would rather spend time live coaching someone one-to-one or on a group call than deal with this, you know, headache around ads right now. And so, very long story short, we decided that we’re actually going to bring back the second mastermind cohort.

For a while, I was telling people because this was genuinely true, I was like, you know, now the cohort, the one cohort I’m running now, they end in January, which means the next cohort is in February. And I’m only running one cohort for the year. I do have an alumni cohort as well, but that’s a little bit different. it’s structured differently. I have different amounts of time that I give to that program too. But in terms of like people who are getting something off the ground, people who are learning some of the tech funnels.

We are now bringing that second cohort mastermind, second mastermind cohort back. And again, this is what I really want you to hear, regardless of what you are doing in your business, if you are primarily slash only in your therapy private practice, or if you are also trying to diversify your income streams, like you do have options in how you choose to spend your time and make your money, right? If you want.

And you choose something as a strategy. For me, again, right? Ads started out as a strategy, but then they turned into a stressor because more and more of my week went to marketing with managing the ads and tweaking and watching the numbers. But that wasn’t what lit me up. Right. I know so many therapists who are like, Well, I gotta go viral on Instagram in order to get clients and I gotta do the marketing and I gotta do all these things. But if you don’t like the things that you’re doing, if you would rather spend your time doing something else.

You have the choice to change that. That is the beauty of working for yourself. So as soon as I started to really notice that for me, the fun was out of ads when I was not enjoying ads anymore. That was really my cue in that again, like my body and my energy, I treat that a lot as data, just as much as I treat numbers as data. So I had to really t pay attention to that, right? I didn’t want to just push through and say,

Well, this is how it’s supposed to work, and this is what I committed to because, like, you’re allowed to pivot, right? You are allowed to change your mind based on how things are going data-wise, as well as based us based on how you are feeling about something. And so, again, for me, if I would rather be on calls doing coaching and connecting and watching people have breakthroughs in real time, that sounds a lot more exciting than, you know, fucking around with ads. And I think that that’s.

The difference when people really talk about scaling, a lot of people put this in the context of your goal is to be working as little as possible, to be on as little calls as possible. But that’s not the goal for everyone, whether that’s because actually they really love being on calls or whether that’s because being on more calls is easier than doing all of this tweaking and messing things around and focusing on content creation and things like that.

That’s the more important thing is, yes, of course, we all want to avoid burnout. And there’s an extent to which, like, if you love the work that you are doing live and you want to do more of it, and that doesn’t burn you out, well, then it’s not a problem. Right. Like for me, any time where I’ve gotten close to tipping over the edge between, like, okay, I’m pretty spread thin and I’m burnt out with my coaching practice.

It’s been because I’ve been doing too much live call time and admin work across both businesses. Right. So when I was managing all my social media myself and doing a lot of one-on-one calls with coaching and therapy, and I was doing a lot of, you know, setting up funnels and setting up ads, like that’s when I feel most stretched thin. On the weeks where I’m just like, hmm.

I don’t know the last time this has happened where my team hasn’t been waiting on me for something related to social media or emails or things like that. But in the times where what I really get to focus on is just call time, those weeks feel so easy to me, right? I look forward to them. I like doing them. So really think about what is it that you would rather be doing. And for me, that mastermind format really fits because it’s all about depth.

of how much work we can do, how deep we can dive into things. It’s about community building and it’s about relationship building. And so generally you can do both when it comes to business. You can do the live call time and you can do the admin marketing time. You can do both, but you’re probably not going to do it well because you only have so much time, you only have so much capacity and we can’t do all the things, right? We know that. We tell our therapy clients all the time.

How do you look for help? How do you change something? What do you let go of? What do you add in terms of self-care? I don’t know anyone who’s ever told a therapy client that they need to add more in terms of like something to do. And again, like coaching as a lot of people see it put on this pedestal, depending on what it is you’re doing, if you’re doing one-to-one or group or you know, more of like digital product memberships or something like that, every business model has trade-offs.

and trying to run all of them at full speed, that’s its own 50-minute hamster wheel, right? Like it’s not just, you know, do I do 50-minute sessions or therapy intensives, or it’s not just, do I do 50-minute sessions or a group coaching program? Every business model has trade-offs and there are pros to each and there are cons to each. Choosing one path, right? It’s it’s a strategy of what works best for you.

And ultimately the thing that I’m really trying to ground myself in is that my business has to fit the life and the work I actually want. And when I really, again, had a life that I wasn’t living and that I was pretty miserable in, I was perfectly happy to work. Sometimes it would be 10, 12 hour days. Not on therapy. Some of it is obviously therapy, but on

Doing therapy calls and coaching calls and working on admin and social media and this, that, and the millionth other thing, I was pretty happy to do that because it served as a distraction to I didn’t like my life. Right. Now that I have a life where I want to be more present with my partner, I really do want to turn off work at a more reasonable hour.

I don’t want to be checking my email or my messages after five. I don’t want to be working on email sequences on the weekend. I really am having to adjust so much, which means I’m also rethinking how do I want to spend my time based on past goals versus current and future goals. And so some questions for you to sit with and think about is, you know, really where are you trying to do everything at once?

Right? Like, are you having a weekly caseload plus intensives plus a course plus social media? Are you trying to do it all or are you outsourcing anything? And is there something you can let go of? Right. What part of your business drains you the most? Again, for me, it started to become like, I don’t want to do ads like this anymore. I don’t want to, you know, honestly, like the part that drained me most was the like risk component of it, right? Like, okay, I can throw.

$2,000 a month into ads, but if I don’t see that return on my ad spend, that’s draining. That starts to make me anxious. That starts to make me not trust what I’m doing. That starts to make me feel like I need to be doing more, offer something different, or have a downsell or all these different things. So what part of your business drains you the most? And what would you do more of if you had the time? Because honestly, if I had more time, I would not fill it with more admin work.

Right. Outside of, you know, okay, there’s some life goals that I have. Outside of that, I would love to see more people one-to-one. I would love to have more group calls. I would love to be with people because that’s why I do what I do. Right. That’s why we are therapists because we do love being with people. It’s just generally, I think, again, this is the introversion, extroversion, or maybe it’s autistic versus neurotypical kind of thing. But I have a battery, right, that I have to pay attention to. I don’t want to just

do more calls for the sake of doing more calls to make more money, but I want to and I would rather be on live calls than mess with something that is more frustrating than it is rewarding. And what are you doing because you think you should, right? Like I, me seeing all the messages out there around like, have more white space and only do your admin work from the beach, like I agree with a lot of that. And I

admire and I yeah, I idolize some of that too because I’ve been taught to idolize it. But I think that there’s something to be said for doing something you enjoy doing that has a good return on your time investment from it and that you are good at and that you know you’re good at. As opposed to right now, my team and I are teaching ourselves a lot about ads and we’re getting good at it. In some ways we’re great at it, but it’s not the thing that I’m like, if only I had more time, I would get better with ads. It’s like, no, I just wish that I could

be working with someone, right? That’s ultimately what I’m looking for is the connections and the relationships and to be able to coach people in the way that I’ve been coached and really know that I can coach them to yeah, have a business and a life that they love. So this exact question of, you know, how do I build wealth, right? And for some people that’s financial health and some people it’s social health or health wealth, whatever that is.

How do I build wealth in a way that fits me instead of burning me out? That is what my live webinar is going to cover. I have done this one before. I’m tweaking a little bit to give it some updates, some new numbers, to share with you all where I’m at these days. But it’s called the wealthy therapist method. And if you sign up for it, the link is in the show notes. You’re gonna walk away with knowing how to determine your right offer, how to create a magnetic brand.

How to solve the right problem so you stop wasting time and money like I was, how capacity support and systems are the biggest things to get you to where you want to be, and actually learning how to sell different offers. Those are all the things that I’m going to be covering. So if you are a therapist who’s tired of trading just hours for more income, whether that is, you know, more marketing hours, more admin hours, or more face-to-face hours.

This is a it’s a webinar I’ve done a couple of times before again. People really love it and they love the energy from it. And I love to see you all in the questions that you’re asking. So again, information for that is in the show notes. Either live or recorded options are available. And again, like I announced, I’m going to be opening that second mastermind cohort for it’s going to be a November start date. So if you are interested, we’re also going to put those the link to learn more information in the show notes for that too.

So I hope that this was helpful to hear, which is again, not all of us have all of our shit together as much as we might seem like we do. And it is okay to pivot. It’s okay to make one decision in service of one feeling and then to change that decision in service for something else that you are needing. That is ultimately what matters at the end of the day. This whole goal of happy, healthy, and wealthy, it’s all subjective.

Right. I’m not gonna say I have the exact key or blueprint to how you find that because your life is different, your needs are different, your wants and your values are probably different. Right. But I know how to help people identify what are those things that they need to get to where they want to be, as well as overcome the blocks that they need to overcome as well. So again, everything’s in the show notes. Thanks much for listening today, and I will talk with you all next week.

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