Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 25: The Easiest Way for Therapists to Scale in 2026

Released: 04/24/2026

Show Notes:

In this episode, Amanda breaks down the confusion therapists feel around diversifying their income and why the real issue isn’t whether to diversify, but where to start. She explores the pressure to build multiple income streams, the overwhelm of trying to do everything at once, and why many therapists get stuck or burned out when they jump straight into courses, coaching, or memberships. Amanda also explains the hidden trade-offs of these models and why more effort doesn’t always lead to better results. She introduces therapy intensives as a simpler, more sustainable starting point, helping therapists increase income, reduce burnout, and create deeper client transformation using the skills they already have.

Join the Therapy Intensives Academy – sale ends 5/1!

3 Key Takeaways:

1. Diversifying your income isn’t the problem, starting in the wrong place (like jumping straight into courses or coaching) is what creates overwhelm, burnout, and inconsistent results.
2. Therapy intensives are often the most strategic first step because they leverage skills you already have, generate faster income, and create more schedule flexibility without building a new business from scratch.
3. Sustainable scaling means increasing income while maintaining or reducing time and stress, not adding more offers, complexity, or hours to your workload.

Connect with Amanda:

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

Make sure to hit follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode!

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 (00:00)
Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Happy Healthy and Wealthy Therapist podcast. I am super excited to have this conversation today because it’s something that I talk with therapists. I talk a lot about it with therapists. So a lot of people know me in the business coaching space as someone who talks about SEO, search engine optimization, someone who talks about therapy intensives, someone who talks about scaling outside of the therapy room.

So I get lots of different questions about where should I start? I kind of want to do everything, but I also don’t even know what’s working. I only have so much time. I only have so much money. So I want to name kind of a bigger pattern of something that therapists are getting really mixed messages about diversifying your income. It’s like full stop there period. Because on one hand you are hearing you need multiple income streams. You can’t rely on therapy forever.

you should scale beyond the therapy room. And then on the other hand, you’re hearing, but don’t do too much and make sure you stay focused and don’t burn out trying to build everything. So you’re kind of left wondering, so am I supposed to diversify or not? And just to make this very, very clear, I am obviously a proponent, a big proponent of diversifying and intensives and all the things, but.

A lot of therapists who do feel overwhelmed with all of the options, a lot of therapists who want to do all of the things, maybe you are high achieving, maybe you’re neurodivergent, whatever it is, I want to be very clear that diversifying your revenue is not the problem. And in 2026, it’s actually one of the smartest things you can do. We know the state of the economy always ebbs and flows, but we know especially it is ebbing and flowing.

given things that are happening globally and in politics and who knows exactly what’s to come. Things are changing with insurance. I know so many more therapists who are stressed about money these days. So diversifying how you earn money outside of therapy is a very, very smart thing to do. But starting in the wrong place is what burns people out. That’s where I really see therapists struggle with

What am I doing? Where should I start? I feel overwhelmed. I feel confused. So if we are starting in the wrong place, this might look like maybe you’ve tried to build something like a course or a coaching program and really felt like, ⁓ my gosh, why is this so hard? Is this even possible? Is anyone even buying things like this anymore? And this is not because you’re doing something wrong. This is not because you’re not capable of being successful with those things.

it’s probably just because you started in the wrong place. And this is exactly why inside of my Therapy Intensive Academy, I don’t teach therapists to just build something brand new right away. I teach therapists how to scale with what you’re already doing. And I’m gonna spend today’s episode talking about why starting in the right place is going to help you get to where you wanna go. Because this is not a situation where, yes, you have all the options in the world,

but that doesn’t necessarily mean all starting lines are equal, right? Like the end result, the finish line is the same in terms of your freedom, your flexibility, your money, all of that, but not all starting lines are created equally. So let’s zoom out for a second and talk about the real goal of scaling, because scaling is not just make more money, because if your income goes up and your hours go down,

down, ⁓ if your income goes up, your hours go up and your stress goes up, that is not scaling, that is just doing more. What we actually want is more income with equal or less time and we want more capacity and this is where most therapists get stuck. This is a place I know I’ve gotten stuck before and that’s why I continue to invest in my own one-to-one coaching because I always have

So many ideas I always want to grow, but sometimes my thought process is growing like horizontally, right? How do I do more? How do I show up more? And my coach reminds me that’s not actually what you’re trying to do, right? Like your point is you want to make more money and you want to work in a sustainable way. So I know I’m not alone in this. I know a lot of the therapists I talk with inside my mastermind also get stuck in this because again, everyone thinks the next step is I need a course.

I need a program, I need this mythical passive income that I keep hearing about. But these models often require more time upfront, right? You’re building something completely brand new, more marketing and probably learning marketing you haven’t touched at all for your therapy practice. I built my therapy practice completely on SEO, not networking, not social media. And now with my coaching business, I had to learn things like

funnels and video sales ledges and CRM systems and contracts and lots of different things. So there’s whole different marketing systems. And with that, that means there’s more complexity. So it requires more time, sometimes more money, depending on what systems you’re investing in. And again, more marketing, more complexity before they ever pay off, right? Like that’s a huge, not that it’s a risk if you’re doing it intentionally, but it does mean you are putting in a lot trying to make something work.

which is why I want to offer you a different starting point. You have so many options to scale. Yes, you can build a course, a coaching program, a membership, a retreat. None of those things are bad. I have so much fun doing those things in my coaching practice, but they all come with trade-offs as well, right? And I also didn’t start doing all those things at once. I started with one thing, but the trade-offs with…

is, well, you need an audience and you need a launch plan. You can’t just create something when no one knows who you are, you have no idea how to market a course, you don’t even know what it is to have a launch plan. Maybe you just put a sales page up and started sticking it up in email threads or these free Facebook groups for therapists. You don’t actually know what you’re doing. It’s going to feel hugely discouraging.

And I’ve seen so many therapists launch something once and launch it without a full launch plan and not sell anything or it didn’t go well and they get discouraged and they give up. And maybe you bought like a membership program for a thousand dollars. And I guess, well, now I’m not touching that anymore. Or you bought some kind of webinar course hosting platform and dropped $2,000 that again, now it’s just wasting all this time, wasting all this money because again, you didn’t know what you were doing.

Okay, so what about coaching? Well, you need sales skills and you need consistent visibility. This is very different from again, how I market and run and fill my therapy practice. My consistent visibility there is search engine optimization. I do not network. I kind of posted on social media every now and then because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. But none of my clients came from Instagram. I got

one client in my almost four full years of private practice now, one client like three years in, and they just happened to see something that I was posting. But it is actually very different for me in my coaching business where you all may have heard of this podcast from my Instagram. You all during different periods of time probably see my face everywhere in ads because that is what’s required.

to successfully run a coaching business. You need to be more actively online. You need to have more ways of essentially getting in people’s spaces because a lot of coaching is not everyone looks for it. A lot of coaching is kind of like educating on problem awareness of like why you need coaching and therefore why you need me as your coach. So it takes a lot of learning new skills, a lot of getting uncomfortable at first.

And if you do something with ads, also means needing the budget for ads. OK, well, what about memberships? What if I want to offer like a low ticket something? Well, again, you need retention and you need volume. I have my SEO for Therapists membership where I have either monthly options or an annual option. And I will say, like, it is exciting when people come in monthly because it’s twenty nine dollars a month. So to see that come in is like, OK, great, fantastic. And it brings in a reasonable amount.

amount of money each month, about $1,000, sometimes more, sometimes less, which is nothing to sneeze at. But some people sign up for a month and then they go away. Even though the content is helpful, they’re like, yeah, I got what I wanted, which is great for them. I’m so happy that people are learning quality SEO support in a month with a $29 membership. And it’s not sustainable for you if you’re thinking about I need to replace a $200 an hour client.

Right, you need a high volume of people coming into your membership and then you need to make sure that you are keeping them in that membership. You have to continue to deliver high quality support. And at the end of the day, some people are going to know it’s high quality support and resources and it has value, but they’re looking to cut their subscriptions, right? I’ve been doing that with different things in my personal life is like, I love getting a monthly massage. And so for a while, it made sense for me to have a

massage membership that I didn’t even know that was a thing. I first learned about that maybe like two years ago and that made sense maybe, but then what happens when I go out of town for a few weeks and now I have to squeeze in my massage and now it’s actually more stressful because I don’t want to lose the money that I already paid in my membership fee. So some people will still see value in something and still just not want a membership model. So there are all these trade-offs to all these different ways that you could diversify your revenue.

And what I see and I’ve experienced happen over and over again is therapists choose one of those options because it sounds scalable, but then in reality they get stuck in the creation mode of, you know, designing the course, designing the workbooks. They get stuck in the overwhelm of what tech setup do I use? How do I automate things? Why am I all of sudden working 80 hours a week or the inconsistent income?

This was a huge thing that I had to rework my business to get out of because I was trained to run a coaching program in a model where what you do is incentivize pay in full. Right. Obviously you want your money up front. Right. That’s very exciting. Money is secure. You don’t have to worry about chasing people down for payment plans. And at the same time what it meant was some months I literally just pulled up my sheet with one of my coaching clients the other day because we were talking about this. Some months I made

30,000, 40,000, and then the next month would be like $6,000. I’m like, that is not sustainable for me. That did not feel good to my nervous system. That doesn’t feel good for my financial trauma to feel that feast or famine when it comes to that. So if we get all of these different pieces around, I’m stuck in just creating and never launching or feeling overwhelmed with all the things or…

the income is not consistent and it’s not actually meeting my needs for why I’m diversifying. This is where I really want to slow everyone down, including myself, because I know I get passionate about this and I can talk fast and say a lot of things. So I really want to pause and ask, what if there was a way to scale without starting from scratch? And that’s where therapy intensives come in. And it’s why they’re the first thing

I recommend every therapist who is interested in scaling and diversifying their revenue. So that’s the first thing I recommend everyone start with. And that’s why I have my Therapy Intensives Academy program where I help therapists do that because it is easier, right? With intensives, they are the smartest entry point for you because you’re not building a whole new business. You’re not learning an entirely new skillset. You’re not waiting months to get paid after you’ve dumped

thousands of dollars down, you know, again, whatever tech you’re investing in. But instead, you’re using what you already know. You already know how to do therapy, right? You’re already doing it. You are working with clients you already understand. So your marketing and your messaging are basically the same. You’re just tweaking it a little bit to talk about why are we doing this in an extended session format? Why might we do this in a one-off weekend intensive?

And you’re in a format that creates deeper results for your clients. And all of that naturally allows you to charge more per hour. That’s something I help therapists work through what exactly they are charging inside of the Therapy Intensive Academy. It helps you to work less because instead of now relying on 15, 20, 25 clients a week in the hour long session format, now you get to charge a higher fee.

see clients for a shorter period of time and your calendar starts to free up and you’re like, oh my gosh, look at all this white space. And it allows you to create more transformation for your clients, which if you’re like me, when you are seeing way too many weekly clients, you start to actually feel like less of a good therapist. And that doesn’t feel good from a confidence perspective. That doesn’t help us feel good about the fees that we’re trying to bring in that just.

It just doesn’t feel good. That’s not why we got into this field to feel stuck and to feel like we suck as therapists, right? We all wanted to help clients experience that shift and that transformation. And I cannot tell you how many times it’s just been moving from 50 minutes to 90 minutes that that’s been huge for clients. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve booked a two or a three day intensive with clients and they’ve said, this has been so much more helpful than the decades of therapy I’ve gone to.

And so that’s why I always say, intensives really are the bridge. They are the thing that help you increase income now. They help you create space in your schedule and then you decide what you want to build next. Because now you have more revenue coming in. Now you have more time to work on that thing that comes next. But we got to start with, right? The right starting line.

So inside the Therapy Intensive Academy, I walk therapists through exactly how to structure the intensives, price them, and actually fill them. Because that’s the other piece, right? You need to sell them, right? You don’t wanna just offer something and be super excited about it and then not have it happen. But that’s the biggest thing I’ve seen for people, regardless of their…

like an area that they’re living in, I’ve worked with therapists in very rural towns who were terrified. Well, I’m gonna do this thing and no one’s gonna wanna book it because no one can afford it. But guess what? Because they learned SEO marketing and because they learned how to confidently talk about their intensives, they sure are booking consistent and repeating intensives. So what I’m seeing in real time right now.

therapists inside my world, therapists who work with me, people who are in the Therapy Intensive Academy, in the VIP community, coming to live group coaching calls with me, getting my feedback, getting my eyes on their SEO strategy, their marketing. We’re talking a lot about AI inside TIA as well. These therapists are replacing multiple weekly clients with one to two intensives a month. They are hitting income goals faster than they would have expected, and they’re actually having more time off.

One person recently was like, my gosh, I’m on a wait list. Like this is a new problem, but it feels fantastic. And what’s wild is most of them didn’t think intensives would be enough, right? They thought I needed something bigger. I needed something more scalable. But then once they actually started with intensives, they realized, this is already working, right? This is good. This is exactly what I was looking for. Like I love being a therapist.

I didn’t want to be a coach. I didn’t want to be a content creator. I just wanted to make more money and not be burnt out. But they didn’t realize therapy intensives were kind of right there as the answer all along. And then a lot of times, once that feels really good again, that’s where our creativity comes back in. And that’s where people take the next step of scaling beyond therapy. But it’s because, again, of what intensives offered them to begin with.

And this is exactly why I don’t want you jumping straight into something like a course if you don’t need to yet, because that’s how therapists end up over-complicating things, burning out, or quitting before it works. So why this really matters right now, because in this episode is gonna be airing in April, 2026, there’s some urgency here because timing actually matters more than people think.

We are heading into summer and I know a lot of therapists start stressing about that. I was just talking with therapists this morning about, you know, that’s when people are going to slow down and I want to take time off and they’re traveling for vacation. So like my income is going to dip, right? That’s our, it’s a trope that we know about the summer slowdown, the summer slump, whatever you call it. So people, therapists really start to freak out instead of embracing like, wow, a slow season. What could that mean?

Because again, right now, all of your income is probably tied to your weekly or your bi-weekly sessions. But we are heading into summer and summer, in my experience of three years of offering intensives, is that it’s actually one of the highest demand seasons for intensives because people who are looking for therapy do have a little bit more time off. They do have a little bit more flexibility and they might even have the mental space to do deeper work.

These are still people who know that they need therapeutic support, who want to travel, but also want to fit in therapy, but in an effective way. And they’re still committed to growing. And so when they see there’s this option that meets all needs, let me do therapy, but let me do it on my terms, well, then this is one of the easiest times to start booking them. And so if you have been thinking…

Well, I’ll just figure this out later, right? Like I don’t have time for it. Maybe I’ll do it in a few months. Maybe I’ll do it later this year. I want to gently challenge that because so often I’ll do it later turns into another six months, another year, another cycle of overworking your caseload. And this is why I’m talking about this right now in spring of 2026, because if you start now, you can actually really take advantage

of this window, right? You’ve got some time to work on what your therapy intensive offering is. You’ve got some time to work on your SEO and implement some AI knowledge so that you’re even more findable this summer for those people who are looking for exactly what you offer. And yes, this is exactly what I’m supporting with therapists inside of the Therapy Intensive Academy during this season. And in case you did not hear already,

The Therapy Intensives Academy is on a huge sale right now. So double the bonus of why this is the right time to join. So you do not have to do everything, right? Like you have options. We just don’t want to over complicate it. What you don’t need is five income streams, a huge audience or a perfectly polished brand. You just need the right.

starting point. And for most therapists, that starting point, like I’m saying, is therapy intensives, because they are giving you a faster return on investment. They are giving you more spaciousness, and they’re giving you more clarity on what your next step is. So you don’t have to just guess and start, you know, throwing spaghetti at the wall. You don’t have to be like, let me just try to make this thing work. I hope I make money ASAP on

this course or this coaching program or this digital product, you can actually get a lot clearer now that we’re actually fixing the income and burnout problem on what do you actually want to do next? Because if I could have done this all over again, ⁓ man, would I have started with intensives in my private practice, but I was so burnt out for my agency, I just wanted to leave and I just wanted to make money. Like that was…

That was my pure goal was let me replace my $6,000 a year. Oh my God, that’d be sad, but that’s probably some people’s cases. My $6,000 a month salary. So if you have been feeling like I want to scale, but I don’t want to burn out doing it. I know I want more income, but I don’t want more weekly clients. I’ve thought about diversifying, but I don’t know where to start. Well, then this episode is your sign to not overcomplicate it.

start with what’s already working. Just structure it differently. And if you want support with that, again, the Therapy Intensive Academy is open and on a huge sale right now. And inside is where I’m going to teach you not just with video lessons, but again, live coaching with me. This is huge, especially for the price point that this program is at right now. I’m gonna teach you how to create and structure your intensives. This is not about just replicating what I do because you might hate what I do. It may not work for you.

and therefore you’re not gonna sell it, you’re not gonna be successful with it. But what do you actually wanna do and how do we make it exciting for you and your clients? And then how to price them in a way that actually supports your needs. How do you price them competitively? How do you price them at rates that excite you that are actually higher than your hourly therapy fee? And how to then market them without needing to be online all the time. So many therapists inside of TIA have been surprised

at how fast SEO can work and how easy it can actually be to learn. So especially heading into summer, this is one of the best times to get all of this in place. So if this has been on your mind at all, I would not wait on it. You can check it out in the link in the show notes about all the sale details and the link to enroll now, because you are going to want to enroll now. And just remember, you do not need a completely new business to scale.

You just need a smarter way to use the one you already have. If you are all interested in joining TIA, my DMs and my emails are open. So please feel free to shoot me a message wherever you most prefer to connect. And I would love to welcome you inside and support you in having a nice, not like overly busy summer, but I want you to be busy in the way that’s comfortable for you with however that looks. If that’s weekly clients plus intensives, or maybe you just want to do intensives this summer. How excited would that be?

So I will hopefully see you inside, reach out with any questions, and otherwise I will chat with you more next time in the next episode.