Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 19: Why You Still Need to Diversify in 2026

Released: 03/20/2026

Show Notes:

In this episode, Amanda discusses the importance of diversifying revenue streams for therapists, especially in the face of economic uncertainty. She emphasizes that diversification should be strategic and intentional, rather than reactive or chaotic. The conversation covers the significance of optimizing existing offerings, building continuity in business practices, and the need for therapists to create stability in their income. Amanda encourages therapists to focus on depth and long-term strategies rather than constantly launching new products or services.

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3 Key Takeaways:

1. Diversification is about stability—not panic—the goal isn’t launching multiple offers quickly, but intentionally building income streams that reduce risk, burnout, and reliance on weekly sessions.
2. The real profit is in optimization, not constant launching—refining, improving, and scaling one offer over time creates more sustainable income than repeatedly starting from scratch.
3. Continuity creates growth—whether in offers, strategies, or coaching support, long-term refinement leads to deeper results, while constantly switching resets momentum and keeps you stuck.

Connect with Amanda:

• Follow on Instagram: @amandakbcoaching
• Check out the Amanda KB Coaching website

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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

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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 (00:01)
Hello, hello, happy Friday. I am excited to welcome you back to this episode of the Happy Healthy and Wealthy Therapist podcast. Let’s dive right in to talking about 2026. The economy feels super weird right now. A lot of people are feeling cautious with their money and about the state of the world, quite honestly, and especially about the US. AI is changing a lot of things.

A lot of therapists are asking, should I even be diversifying my revenue right now? Because if you are a therapist in private practice and maybe you’re new or maybe you’ve been in it for a while, you probably see all the same kind of, I don’t know if it’s rhetoric or just talk, the fear talk in Facebook groups and maybe even on some Instagram posts and things out there about how hard it is to fill a private practice right now.

And so a lot of therapists are asking if it’s already hard enough to fill my practice, is anyone going to buy a coaching program or a course or sign up for my retreat? And what I’m seeing in the conversations I’m having with the therapists I coach in my mastermind and one-on-one is that there are two extremes. One group is freezing. They feel ultimately stuck in, don’t know what to do. I don’t think I have anything to offer. And I guess I’m just not gonna do anything.

And the other group is working on launching five new things out of pure panic. How do I get something out here as soon as possible because I need to make money as soon as possible? And neither of these extremes are strategic. Diversification, when we talk about diversifying your revenue as a private practice therapist, it is not about reacting to the state of the economy and reacting to the ebbs and flows of

you know, what it’s just like to be a business owner, diversification is supposed to be about creating stability. And yes, you should absolutely still be diversifying in 2026. But what you should not do is diversify in this chaotic, shiny object, new program every quarter type of way. So I want to talk today in this episode about what diversification actually means and looks like. So.

Why should you still diversify? Let’s start with that question there. Diversification is about reducing risk, right? That’s why we all hear about it because if 100 % of your income depends on your weekly sessions and clients not getting sick or you not getting sick, insurance panels and whether they decide to pay out on time, whether they’re super backed up, whether there’s the awful clawback situation that I hear about.

If your income depends on one referral source who just stops referring to you, if it depends on one platform like Instagram and the algorithm changes again and now you’re getting no views and no followers. If your income depends on one offer, which is therapy, weekly therapy, then you are kind of exposed to the economic uncertainty that happens year by year, decade by decade. However, many times we see these kind of bigger or larger recessions.

But economic uncertainty is not the time to narrow your income streams. It’s actually the time to stabilize it. I follow a lot of other, I don’t know if you would call them like financial advisors or financial coaches or money mindset coaches, but a lot of people actually talk about how more people actually, especially small business owners tend to get rich in times of recessions because they’re taking advantage of strategic.

investments and diversifications. so diversification actually protects you from any client volume dips, right? When people decide, I can’t afford therapy at this frequency anymore, or let’s just take a pause from sessions. Diversification protects you from platform algorithm shifts, search engine changes, now that AI is becoming a part of the picture.

Diversification protects you from burnout because maybe you can’t imagine taking on more and more clients, but maybe you’re able to do something that’s a little bit more hands off in different ways. Maybe something that’s a little bit more creative. Diversification protects you from burnout. It protects you from market contraction. And no, obviously this is not about greed and just go get that bag. Although like why not go get that bag? This really is about stewardship.

We talk a lot about trauma stewardship as a trauma therapist, because if we cannot find any kind of stability, and a lot of that starts with financial stability, then we really cannot show up as grounded, best versions of our therapist selves for our clients. So this is about making sure we are taken care of. like the just honest truth is that it is hard to have stable income as a private practice therapist. And so that’s where the diversification

alternative streams of income comes in. But this is the part that most people miss. Diversification does not mean that you are launching something new every six months, right? This six months is about launching my course. The next six months is about launching my coaching program. The next six months is about launching something else that is not actually diversification. Diversification should not be about how many streams of income can you build. I think there is this

false sense of security or this perceived security of the more I have, the more revenue I’ll be able to bring in. But remember, the more things you have, the more things you have to market, the more potential expenses you have. If you need one platform to hold and promote and market this thing and an entirely other platform to market another thing, like it could potentially be more expensive to have as many streams of income as you might imagine. And ultimately,

really what that is, again, going back to what I said earlier, is it’s just instability. It’s that kind of desperation. I’ve heard that a lot from therapists and I won’t lie. Like I felt that at times in my business too. It’s this desperation that is disguised as ambition. Right? I’m like, well, if I just do this real quick, if I just put that out there real quick, then, then something will work. But that’s where the burnout happens. That’s where people stop believing in themselves and their ability to diversify their revenue.

because they tried one thing quickly, they did not do it with intention, they didn’t know what they were doing, they didn’t know how to properly market or track how things are performing, and then they feel like it was a flop and it was a failure, and now why should I ever bother to do that again? So it is not that launching, launching a new product, a new offering, that is not a bad thing in and of itself, it’s just important to do it intentionally, to really pick.

what is something that I do have energy for? What’s something that I have passion for? And those two things may not always occur in the same timeline in your life. There was in 2025, I did my first retreat because I was so excited about the idea. I really wanted to do a retreat. I had been a retreat participant, but I hadn’t hosted my own yet. And so I wanted to do it. And I essentially was like team and I had a team of

I think two, three virtual assistants at that time. was like, we’re doing this no matter what. And like, we’re just going to figure it out along the way. And I’m happy I did it. I had a great time. The people who came had a great time, but it wasn’t, I didn’t actually have the capacity to do it in the way that I wanted to. There were other things that I was trying to market. And so I didn’t get to market the retreat as well as I could have. And I had three people sign up, which was fantastic. And I would have liked more people to sign up. I

truly believe I could have gotten more people to sign up if I wasn’t so busy marketing all my other things I was trying to market. So again, just having more things out there, this is not the answer. The answer is to do something you have capacity for, you have time for, you have energy and passion for. So that’s just step one, right? Like to launch the new thing, to do the weeks or months of planning to

put the product or service or offering together, but launching is also not the final step. And that’s, think, where a lot of people miss something because of this kind of common occurrence in the therapy coaching field right now where there are programs with limited, it’s like a time-limited program, three to six months to do X, Y, Z, which yes, a lot of those programs, I have one, the Therapy Intensive Academy.

It’s a three month program where ultimately the goal is to launch your intensives. But the reason that I have a VIP community that continues after the program, so it’s something people can stay on month to month. And the reason I have a mastermind where people can re-enroll every six months is because launching is not the final step. The industry makes it seem too much like you just launch, you celebrate, you hit a revenue number and you’re done. No.

Launching is just the beginning of something. After a launch, you should be asking, well, how do we optimize conversions? How do we improve retention? How do we increase lifetime value? How do we refine messaging? How do we streamline delivery? How do we reduce operational load? The real money isn’t actually in launching something, right? It can look exciting to be like, I launched this course and made $5,000 this month. I launched this program and made

$50,000 this month. That can feel really exciting. But if you don’t actually know what worked for your audience, why did the people who buy or sign up join at that time? What was it about your messaging? What was it about your marketing? What about the way that you marketed? Like what actually worked and how do we double down on that? Then you’re just gonna be back to ground zero come the next round of either.

that same offering that you want to promote or the next offer that you want to promote. And so the real money, yes, on paper, it looks like it’s in the launch period when you’re getting a lot of people to sign up or buy something in a short period of time. The real money is in optimizing. The real scaling happens after the first iteration. I have learned this after relaunching so many group programs, relaunching my therapy intensives Academy program over and over again, which

has shifted between course only option to having more program ⁓ support between me as a coach and having some guest coaches inside the program too. So you learn a lot the more that you do something and you learn how to optimize and scale and therefore have something be more profitable the more you do it. If you launch one thing and then immediately move on to the next idea, you are leaving profit, clarity,

and stability on the table. And so this is something, I’m gonna say something that might be just a little bit spicy. I want you to stop switching programs and coaches every three to six months. Right, again, it’s very easy to do these days with all the programs that are out there, right? Okay, let me do this program about therapy intensives and now let me do this program about learning to be a CEU provider and now let me do this program about expanding into a group practice.

It is so easy to do that, but let me give you a parallel situation that I was talking about with my own coach, which is you as a therapist, hopefully you are in your own therapy taking care of yourself because, you know, self care is a part of our ethics. You as a therapist in therapy would never say, ugh, therapy is just too hard. I’m just gonna start over with a brand new therapist.

If you didn’t like the therapist, if you didn’t feel they were helping you, if it wasn’t a good personality fit, absolutely yes, go ahead and change your therapist. But if it’s overall a good fit and it’s helpful and it’s productive, you wouldn’t want to start over just because you finished with processing one area or just because the process got hard. Because you as a therapist know exactly what that would mean. I hear this from my therapy clients all the time. You’d have to…

retell your entire story, you’d have to rebuild trust, reestablish context, re-explain your patterns, you could waste weeks or months just catching them up. And business coaching is exactly the same thing. When I started receiving business coaching, I was about a year into my practice and I was like, I have bigger dreams for myself and I want to expand. I don’t know how to do that. I found a business coach off of Instagram and

During our discovery call, she had asked me, like, do you have a good sense of what business coaching is? And I was like, honestly, no, but I see what you’re able to do. And that sounds really like admirable and like inspirational. Like I want to do the same. And she said, it was explained to her by her own business coach. Business coaching is really like therapy for your business. And the more I’ve been in business coaching and long-term business coaching, I truly do feel that because when you are jumping from

program to program, coach to coach, strategy to strategy, you are consistently resetting the clock, right? And it’s the same in therapy if I understand our whole concept of like niching and hyper niching, right? Like this is a therapist you go to if you’re struggling with psychosis symptoms. This is the therapist you go to if you’re struggling with your relationship. Like it makes sense that we feel that way about.

Business coaching too, right? This is the coach I learned this skill from. This is the coach I learned that skill from. But again, if we keep pivoting from coach to coach, you’re always resetting that clock because the first three months are always onboarding, context building, untangling your old strategies and depth doesn’t happen in…

the chaos, right, of really trying to relearn everything of, what’s your dish and what’s your marketing and what’s your offers and what have you tried and what have you not tried? That’s chaotic, right? It takes a lot to catch someone up with that. More depth, more clarity, more of that ability to optimize and scale something, it happens in that continuity. And that’s why I’ve worked long-term with business coaches. I worked with my first coach for about 18 months and then she went out on maternity leave.

And now I’ve been working with my current coach for, I think like eight, moving on to nine months at this point. And I have no plans to end with her because she is amazing and super, super helpful. But again, here is what a lot of therapists underestimate in terms of the coaching relationship and why should I stick with one coach compared to try out a coach who maybe has more like a specialization in a different area of coaching? Like my coach right now, I had told her.

some of the things I was working on with my past coach. And I was like, we were working on some brand partnerships and really working on scaling this program and getting a ⁓ combination of like group coaching clients and one-on-one coaching clients. And she was like, well, first of all, let me just say like if getting brand partnerships is your one specific goal, like that is not what you should hire me for. I do not have context for that. I don’t have training in it. I don’t do it myself. And so number one, valued that honesty so much instead of someone pretending they could help me with something.

But number two, I trust even with the knowledge she does have and the ways that she’s helped me, she probably could help me get brand partnership. She just doesn’t know like what platforms you would use and what might be the specific strategy and stuff like that. But just because therapists have niches, right? I hear this all the time from therapists. I experienced this myself as a therapist in private practice. We keep hearing this message that you need a niche. You have to be so good at one thing.

how many of us can work with almost anything that walks in the door, right? Like I don’t, I love working with complex trauma symptoms as those show up in terms of self-criticism, hard times being self-compassionate, being hyper independent. Like that’s the kind of stuff I love. A lot of times that shows up as anxiety and I can work with someone who’s coming in with social anxiety. I don’t love working with depression, but I can work with depression, right? I can be effective.

with all these things because we were all trained to be generalists to begin with. So it’s the same thing with coaching of like, yes, there’s going to be coaches that have specialized knowledge on XYZ because they’ve been doing it for years or decades, but most coaches know a little bit about everything, right? And if they don’t, then they might recommend you seek some other support elsewhere. coming back to the sense of continuity is again, where you build more depth.

And therefore it’s where your actual profit lives. So we underestimate the fact that money, where we make money, where we make revenue and actually those profit markets start to get bigger. That is in the refinement process. It is not in the reinvention process. It’s not in the, me launch something completely new. Let me try something new and do a totally different marketing strategy. That is not where it is. Scaling sustainably looks like

Improving one offer until it converts consistently. Increasing your profit margins. Building retention. Strengthening your positioning. Expanding from a solid foundation. Right? That can take time to build all those things. As much as we might love to think, I launched a course, all the like tech systems are out there, so now it just sells itself, right? No. You have been lied to, I have been lied to about passive marketing.

There are ways it gets easier and so to feel more passive, but everything still takes work to do, right? Especially when it comes to the what’s next, the how do I make this offer stand the test of time as marketing angles change? How do I make sure I’ve built a quality product, not just a product? So when we’re focusing on more of that sustainable level, that sustainable type of scaling,

It feels a ton less dramatic and it feels like a lot less of acting out of desperation. And it becomes far more profitable. If you are always starting over, you never get to compounding your efforts for your profit. You never get to have like brand equity. You never have operational efficiency. You don’t have that predictability and…

The whole reason we’re talking about diversification is because our income as therapists does not feel predictable, right? Whether we are sick, the client is sick, something just comes up, we want time off, you think a client’s gonna be with you for years and then they just ghost you all of a sudden. So this whole point is that we’re looking for predictability because we want to be able to relax. We’re looking for predictability in our income because we are tired of the instability.

And so we can’t just say, I’m gonna diversify my revenue in all these different ways, but make it feel super chaotic. And again, create more avenues of less predictability. We need that safety in order to actually relax. And this is something honestly, that’s been coming up so much in my own coaching sessions, which sometimes just feel like therapy sessions. Because my business, the more that I’ve honed in on processes that work,

I’m still victim of shiny object syndrome. I still think there’s something I should, something else I should do, some other thing I should offer, some other way to incentivize people to work with me. But what my coach reminds me is that a lot of that type of thinking is my own complex trauma, is my own history of financial trauma. And so my work right now is actually letting the systems that I’ve built work, right? Not.

messing with the process, not interfering with the process. My work right now is trusting in what I’ve built to date so that I can actually relax. I’m getting ready to go to, ⁓ when this episode airs, it’ll be after I’ve left, but I’m currently filming this before leaving for a two week trip to New Zealand, which I’m super excited about. But of course, my anxiety brain says, my gosh, my business is going to just completely flop in those two weeks that I’m gone.

No sales are going to come in. No one’s going to reach out about working together. Like everything’s going to break, which is just simply not true with all of the things that I’ve built in across this podcast and email marketing and social media marketing and paid marketing with ads. Like it’s just simply not true that everything’s going to break. But again, that’s my anxiety and my trauma brain. And so when we create that predictability, when we remind ourselves we have something that is working. Now the next step is.

creating safety in being able to slow down and pull back and relax. So yes, diversify in 2026. You absolutely should. There’s absolutely still a market for your expertise. I don’t know if you’ve seen the data that I’ve seen, but I always see things that are saying the coaching industry is booming. And coaching doesn’t necessarily mean like one-to-one coaching or group coaching. It’s just how do you bring your

expertise to the masses. So that could be with a course that could be with digital products to the coaching industry is booming. And it’s like hundreds of billions of dollars like projected to keep growing even in a year like 2026 when everything is chaos. So yes, do it. Reduce your exposure to risk by only relying on your weekly therapy sessions. I even talk about

therapy intensives being the first way to diversify your revenue because no, not everyone is going to want them. No, not everyone is going to be able to afford what you might price them as. No, even the people who can easily afford them, they’re not always going to say yes for whatever reason. But it’s a nice way to add on one little way to diversify your income with ultimately still having all of the foundational knowledge you know about what to do as a therapist. It’s just a different way to offer.

And it reduces that exposure because I might have my weekly clients, I just had one take a break for like eight weeks from therapy, but that was fine because I had booked at least two therapy intensives in the time that I wasn’t seeing this client. And that has more than replaced the income that I would have seen with this client in the eight sessions that we would have seen together. So I’m reducing my exposure with even that diversification of my services. And then obviously I have many more things.

beyond that. So building multiple streams, yes, do it, but do it intentionally and start with one. You don’t have to launch all five new things at once. We have to do all of these things strategically. Do not launch all these new things in panic or in desperation. Do not hire a new coach every quarter. Do not burn down something that’s half built unless truly you’ve decided you’ve paid it and it’s not like.

alignment with your values and your morals, that’s very different. Do not chase every new tactic. It is so easy. I am inundated with marketing on social media about here’s the next big thing that I should invest in or here’s what I actually need or here’s the one thing I’ve been missing. You don’t actually need to pay attention to those ads. They’re ads for a reason. We don’t have to change everything we’re doing. We just have to refine.

what it is that we’re doing. Again, imagine if every six months, every three months, you are restarting therapy with someone new, with a new therapist for yourself. It would feel exhausting, fragmented, unproductive. In your business, just like your personal life, and again, how much does your business impact your personal life? Your business really does deserve some continuity and some safety, and honestly, so do you. And if you are ready for

long-term refinement, not just more of this like launch adrenaline of like, me create something and get it out there and launch it ASAP. That’s exactly why I built my Happy, Healthy and Wealthy Therapist Mastermind. It’s not about constant reinvention. It’s about depth, strategy and long game thinking. I’m going to put some of the details in the show notes because the next round of the Mastermind is opening very, very soon. And if this resonated, if this episode resonated with you,

send it to a therapist who you think would benefit from hearing from this message. think number one, I rely so much on you all sharing something that you find helpful. And I think it’s just a message that we all need to hear is just because something may not be working right now, if you are stuck in that freeze response, what we don’t need to do is not make any momentum, not take any steps. And what we don’t need to do is just keep starting over.

What we really want to do is build sustainable empires over here, right? And we are all capable of doing it. We just need the right support doing it. So thank you for being here today. I hope this was helpful to think about and reach out to me if you have any questions about the mastermind or working together.