Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 4: How I Made $1M in 3.5 Years as a Therapist

Released: 12/12/2025

Show Notes:

In this episode, Amanda Buduris shares her journey of earning over $1 million in gross revenue through her therapy practice and coaching business within three and a half years. She discusses the discomfort many therapists feel around money, the importance of sustainable business practices, and the strategies that helped her achieve this financial milestone. Amanda emphasizes the significance of therapy intensives, SEO marketing, and maintaining alignment with personal values while building a business. She also addresses common pitfalls therapists face and provides practical steps for achieving financial success without sacrificing well-being.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. You don’t need hustle culture to build wealth as a therapist—intentional specialization, therapy intensives, SEO, and aligned strategy can create sustainable multi-six-figure growth.
2. Protecting your nervous system isn’t optional—it’s a core business asset that determines whether your income is sustainable or burnout-driven.
3. Money earned ethically and in alignment with your values creates freedom and impact—while money chased from fear, comparison, or external pressure will eventually cost you.

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 Jane – use code: AMANDA2MO for a 2-month grace period

Resources & Links:

SEO for Therapists Membership

Therapy Intensives Academy

Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Mastermind

Free Training: 3 Steps to Booking Your First Therapy Intensive

Free Guide: 3 Steps to Double Your Income

SEO Freebie

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

Transcript:

Amanda Buduris (00:10)
Hey everyone, welcome back to happy, healthy and wealthy therapists. Today’s episode is a big one and honestly, it’s going to be a little bit of a vulnerable one because we’re talking about how I earned $1 million in gross revenue in three and a half years across my therapy practice and my coaching business. If your first thought is, ugh, why are we talking about money? Please know I get it.

Therapists are conditioned to feel uncomfortable with numbers, especially big ones. But that discomfort is exactly why I’m doing this episode. I want to show you what’s possible when you build your business intentionally, ethically, and sustainably without grinding yourself into dust, without becoming a full-time influencer, and without abandoning your values. Before we dive in, here is the breakdown so you have some context because I know so many people

believe all of the money comes from coaching, right? Coaching clearly is where the money is, so why am I doing therapy? Well, let me give you this exact breakdown. My therapy practice total gross, and I am filming this episode on November 30th of 2025, so as of today, therapy practice total gross revenue is $452,051. So about $452,000.

of that $452,000 from my therapy practice, $137,608 are from therapy intensives specifically. So about $138,000 when I’ve done somewhere in the ballpark of, I’ve definitely done less than a hundred, but I’ve done a few dozen a year. So that’s like.

at least a quarter, a little bit more than a quarter of my revenue just from therapy intensives. So as people ask, are people still paying for intensives? Are people still paying premium rates? Yes, I’ve booked about 40,000 in 2025 alone, which as we all know, 2025 has been a really hard financial year for a lot of people. It’s been a time of a lot of financial uncertainty, but I’ve made at least 40,000. Whereas in 2023 and 2020,

for both of those years I brought in about 50,000 from Therapy Intensive. So I’m not that far off, about a $10,000 difference. So again, therapy practice total gross revenue is about $452,000. My coaching business revenue to date is about $569,207. So really there’s only a difference of about, it’s like $117,000.

So in total combined, it’s about a million dollars, a little bit more than that, in three and a half years. I officially crossed the million dollar gross revenue mark on November 5th, 2025. I track all of my numbers because I find them so exciting. I find them so motivating. So no, I did not do this overnight. I did not do this by scaling to a group practice. I didn’t do it with hustle culture. And no, I haven’t even had this like…

sexy, I made a million dollars in one year that you might also see a lot of people posting about. And that’s okay for me because a million dollars in three and a half years is still a really fricking cool win. So I’m excited by that. And it took a lot of strategy. It took a lot of alignment. It took a lot of business coaching and learning from people who know what they’re doing really well. And it also took learning how to honor my nervous system along the way. So.

Let’s get into it. I’m going to break some things down a little bit more. So I’m going to rewind the clock for a second. For those of you who don’t remember my story, may not have heard my story before, I left my agency job. I was pretty freshly licensed, relatively freshly graduated. I left my agency job in July of 2022.

Before I did that, went part-time while I was still working there. I went part-time in my private practice in April 2022. That’s when I started collecting revenue, April 2022. And then I went full-time in my practice in July 2022. So I had a couple of months of building up a caseload. I think by the time I got to July, I might’ve had a caseload of like five clients. And at that time, truly my only goal was to replace my salary of $60,000 per year.

I was not thinking about multi six figure years. I certainly wasn’t thinking about hitting a million dollars in under four years. I was just trying to breathe again after years of burnout and feeling unappreciated and feeling like, I just can’t imagine my life continuing to go this way. And what happened next was honestly pretty wild. So as my practice grew, two things became very, clear to me. Number one,

I could not sustainably see 22 to 26 clients a week. I know that’s a ton of the guidance that I’ve seen out there when people think about setting your fee structure for private practice. A lot of it kind of depends on, well, basically, can you see four to five clients a day? Or if you want a three-day weekend, can you essentially see six clients a day? And no, I could not. Outside of getting out of a job that caused me burnout, I also had ADHD and I just cannot sustain.

my attention for that long. I didn’t want to work that long because as we know, seeing clients is only a part of the job. There’s also all of the admin and things like that. So it just wasn’t going to be sustainable for me to see that number of clients every week and to depend on that for income purposes when it comes to needing a sick day, wanting to go on vacation. So that wasn’t going to work. Number two, I wanted to serve my clients more deeply than weekly therapy allowed.

My therapy niches are complex trauma and I do a lot of couples work as well. I know when I say that that’s not specifically a quote unquote niche, but that’s what I specialize in. And with both of those client types, you need more time to build safety. I literally, again, I am recording this episode after I just wrapped up a two day couples intensive. And what they said in that space was this was so much better.

than all of the therapies we’ve tried before because it does not make sense to come week by week, hour by hour and literally not get anywhere as opposed to the way I run my couples intensives is it’s nine hours across two days. Like as opposed to this, we just had so much more spaciousness and we can be so much more intentional and we can actually learn things and apply them and wow, who’d have thought we’d feel better after two days when we’ve been struggling all year.

That’s what I want to continue to do in my therapy practice. I want to serve my clients more deeply. So that is when, when I had that realization, probably four to six months into running my private practice full time, I realized I couldn’t see that many people and I wanted to serve people more deeply. That’s when I started adding therapy intensives as more of like a niche offering. And seriously, that is where everything changed. So again, I started part-time private practice in April, 2022.

By January, 2023, I had launched my therapy intensives page and services on my website. In like late February, early March, I got my first booking for a consultation for an intensive. And then I did my very first intensive in April, 2023. So literally within a year, I started booking these and like everything just unraveled very, very quickly. People got really excited.

by the idea of, I can sit down with a therapist who is specialized in the areas I need her to be specialized in and get a ton of work done. And there were not a lot of people doing this back in 2023. These days, more people are doing it or at least trying to do it. back in literally just two years ago, a lot of people hadn’t heard of it. A lot of therapists were still stuck in this, like there’s a way therapy has to go and it’s the weekly 50 minute model. But my gosh, that is just so not true. And so,

As I started to talk with some of my old colleagues who had left the agency, I had also left. As I started to just chat with other people from grad school, so many therapists started asking me, how did you do that? How do you market it? How do you price therapy intensives ethically? And that’s how my coaching business was born. It was not specifically like intentionally. I was never like, I’m going to start a coaching business. I love mentorship. It’s something that I…

really enjoyed as a therapist providing supervision to other therapists in training. So I saw coaching as kind of a sidestep to mentorship and supervision of here’s what worked for me. Let’s make this as simple as possible. Let me tell you how I think about these things and then talk to you about the strategy behind it. So when it comes to my coaching business, like, yes, it’s it is such a passion of mine. It’s something I’m so excited about.

But again, I wanna bring you back to these numbers for comparison sake, because I know a lot of people are thinking about the numbers of it all, right? Coaching has to be all this, there’s all this money in coaching, especially in business coaching. Let me just say first and foremost, like business coaching is one of the most saturated markets. it’s not that it’s hard, but it’s not as easy as people think to make money. So I’m just gonna say that. But let me drop in these revenue pieces again, so you can see the journey and the difference. So my therapy practice.

Total gross revenue, $452,051. Therapy Intensive’s revenue to date, so from April, 2023, about $137,608. Ton of money. Coaching business revenue, $569,207. So again, combined about a million dollars in three and a half years. Behind those numbers were a lot of fears, a lot of

boundaries and a lot of learning how to not burn myself out again. Because let me tell you, as someone who is high achieving and perfectionistic and who loves to be good at things, oh my gosh, was it easy to essentially set myself up for burnout. So here’s what actually helped me reach a million dollars in three and a half years and to do it as about sustainably as possible. I’m looking forward to

the next million that I earn and feeling like, wow, that was even easier. But the first time around, there were a handful of strategic decisions that changed everything for me. And here are the big ones. I specialized early and I did not apologize for it. I stopped trying to serve everyone in all of my graduate training. I was trained to be a generalist, right? And so I thought that’s what I had to do in my private practice, but I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t love working with everyone. A couple of my…

very first therapy clients, they had areas and difficulties that I wasn’t an expert in. They weren’t areas I loved working in, but I needed the money and I needed to show myself private practice can work. And I eventually worked on transitioning those clients out because it didn’t feel like the best fit for me, which ultimately is also not the best fit for them. So instead of trying to work with everyone and anyone under the sun, I became known for complex trauma work, for brain spotting, a little bit for EMDR.

as well as for couples therapy work and the intensives I offer for my couples and my trauma work. It made my website incredibly effective as a marketing strategy. It also made me highly referable, but not in the way that you would think. I don’t network. I am way too introverted for that, but I’m very findable by other therapists.

So therapists I don’t know often refer to me because I’m easy to find because of search engine optimization, which again is everything that I infuse in my website marketing. so many clients will come to me and be like, XYZ referred me. I’m like, I have no idea who that person is. So that person either went to psychology today or they Googled, for example, EMDR intensive. They found my website and they sent me to the client. So truly, truly specializing early, not apologizing for it. It’s huge.

Number two, I embraced therapy intensives. Like I talked about, offering intensives is truly the single biggest reason I could scale not just my therapy practice, but also start and build my coaching business without sacrificing my wellbeing. Because if I was trying to see 20 to 30 clients a week and then build another business on top of it, again, let’s talk about recipe for burnout. So with therapy intensives, they really allowed me to work

fewer hours, so I was able to scale back how many hours I was working in my therapy practice so that I could make more hours available for my coaching business. I also made a bigger impact with my clients. Like I’ve talked about, I’ve worked with so many clients who have done years or decades of therapy and not gotten what they’ve needed simply because of something like I don’t have enough time to drop into my body and feel comfortable crying or accessing this emotion or doing this processing work or whatever it is.

And so I was able to give clients faster and deeper healing. And that honestly felt just so honoring and humbling and so cool to witness. And it made me go to my therapist and be like, do you offer longer sessions? Because I want this to. Therapy intensives ultimately really allow me to structure my weeks around my life and not my sessions. And so if I do a weekend intensive, like I just did this weekend,

I make sure I take a couple of days off in the middle of the week. I make sure that I’m getting in exercise at times that I want to exercise as opposed to I used to do 7 a.m. or 7 p.m. when I worked at a job where I did not control my schedule. And I hated that because I’m not a super early morning person and I am not an evening exercise person. So I can confidently say intensives are a therapist’s Disney fast pass to sustainability.

You all might’ve heard me say that intensives are the Disney fast pass to healing, but for therapists, it’s the fast pass to sustainability. I really want you to let that sink in. Number three, I used SEO, search engine optimization, as my main marketing strategy. To date, over 90 % of my therapy clients come to me directly from Google. They do not come to me from Reels. They do not come to me from TikTok, not networking, not Google Ads.

just strategic SEO and a website that clearly communicates my value. Because yes, even in the age of AI, SEO is still a wildly effective marketing strategy. This couple’s intensive that I just did, they came to me from the Midwest and I’m located in Seattle. There’s literally no way they would have found me if SEO, like so many people think, is just location specific.

No, it means they were looking for something specific and they found me because I used the words that I know my ideal clients are looking for on my website. So you can have successes like this too. You can market your practice without it feeling like you’re marketing your practice. I literally don’t feel like I do anything to market my therapy business this past month. I don’t do anything. My virtual assistants helped me with my blog posts and my Google business updates, but like truly that’s

it in terms of marketing my therapy practice. And this past month, even though winter is supposed to be a part of like slow down season, I know it’s still fall, but technically we’re kind of in winter season. I’ve had like eight consultations, right? Without touching anything. So this can be you too. Number four, I built a coaching business that aligned with my ethics. And this part really matters. I did not create a coaching business to squeeze therapists for money.

I created it because I saw therapist after therapist burning out and undercharging and drowning in guilt. And I knew intensives and SEO and money mindset work could change that because just like me, so I am in adult with complex PTSD. I’m working through that in my therapy and honestly working through that in my business coaching in some ways, the coaching that I receive. And I know I’m not alone in that. I know that so many therapists

have complex PTSD where they struggle with messaging around worth. They struggle with feeling like they’re not important. They can’t be prioritized. And so I really, when I talk about coaching being a passion project, it’s because not only do I get to help people with their businesses, it’s because usually by offering them help with their businesses, I’m often kind of opening up some doors for them to have.

also like therapeutic breakthroughs, which feels really cool to just be a part of someone’s healing, right? They never would have thought by doing some website SEO tweaks or working on money mindset that they could actually have like better and more fulfilling lives. So I just feel really humbled to be a part of that journey for people. And when I was starting my coaching business, you all have probably seen there’s a ton of learn coaching programs out there for therapists. So I tried following the exact blueprint.

of another therapist turned coach, which isn’t how I identify actually because I’m still a therapist. So I’m like a therapist and coach, but anyway, I tried following someone’s exact blueprint and honestly it worked great for a while, but I also realized I was following what worked for someone else. And honestly, that didn’t really work for me in terms of how I wanted to show up as a coach. Pretty central to my value as a coach for a therapist is that I am still a therapist myself.

That’s so important to me because I don’t want to feel irrelevant when I talk about how to book premium fee clients. I want to tell you the patterns and trends I’m seeing in my own practice too. Whereas other therapists turned coaches who let go of their therapy practices, yeah, they can tell you what worked. They can tell you what they see working. They can kind of be in the know about what’s working and what they hear as like struggling pain points. But I think it’s so different.

between, you know, let me teach you as this guru and this guide and learning from someone who’s still in the trenches with you. So when I really learned not just to follow someone else’s rules around what running a coaching business looked like, which I was encouraged to let go of my therapy practice, I didn’t want to do that. When I stepped into what do I actually think therapists want and need and the amount of validation I’ve gotten from the therapist that I’ve worked with that

Yeah, having someone in the trenches with you is super important. That just validated me running a business in the way I want to, as opposed to running a coaching business in the way someone else says you’re supposed to. Number five, I protected my nervous system like it was a business asset because it is, right? Like your time, your energy is the biggest asset in your business because you can’t do this work if you cannot show up. And so I built in rest.

I traveled, I stopped overbooking myself, I stopped trying to prove my worth to the field, and I made decisions based on sustainability instead of fear. Even to raise my therapy hourly rate from, it was 275 and then I raised it to 350, that was kind of terrifying for me to do, but it was how the math worked out between, I have a very busy therapy practice, I have a very busy coaching business, I can’t.

quote unquote, as low as 275 anymore. So let me just throw 350 out there and see what happens. And honestly, within the week, two clients reach out for consultations at that fee. So it’s so easy to make decisions or to test something based on fear and scarcity, but you can do so much better for yourself. And when you take strategic risks and you have strategy, things actually can be easier than you might think.

So what I refuse to do, I wanna talk about the things that don’t work, the things that therapists get pulled into that actually sabotage their success. Number one, don’t burn out to make more money. Burnout is hella expensive. It will cost you years of income, joy, clarity and vision. I chased the big exciting numbers and it was fun for a while.

But honestly now what I care more about is a life that is fun and safe and fulfilling and just making sure the money I take home is enough to pay my bills, pay down some debt, save a retirement. I don’t need to make more just to make more. But if you’re like me, you see so much marketing out there about how to make 10K months, 20K months, 50K months, how I made 100K month by posting three stories on my Instagram.

That’s fantastic for the people who like actually make that work, but like the point shouldn’t just be the number, right? The point shouldn’t just be the more money, especially because a lot of those people who say, I made a hundred K with three stories, they’re also spending like 50 K on running ads or something like that. So it’s not all authentic and true marketing. I want to say that, but it stopped being.

this like badge of honor of like, I made a 50K month when it actually wasn’t worth it. And again, it wasn’t in alignment with my values. So that’s helpful to think about and just reflect on for you. You know, is the number that you see on your, have spreadsheets. So is it your spreadsheets, your bank statements, whatever? Is it worth the amount of energy that you’re putting in? Is it also worth the amount of money that you’re putting in? Because obviously, yes, spending money to make money is definitely a thing.

But there’s also an aspect of overspending. And even if the money that you are making is still a good number, if you’re not taking home what you need, that’s a big problem. So number two, don’t do things just because the online business world says you should. You do not have to become an influencer or post reels daily or work with funnels and ads or build a giant audience or follow a proven system that isn’t designed for therapists. That’s why it’s so important if you’re considering working with a coach,

to work with one who is truly in partnership with you, who doesn’t have an agenda of making you a clone of them, who understands what you really want and need because we’re all unique and we have different interests and passions and abilities, responsibilities and more. And you shouldn’t feel less than because you can’t perform in the way someone expects you to. I legitimately mean it when I say my current business coach has helped me create such

and aligned business, which honestly helped me create a more honest and aligned life. More on that in a future episode.

Number three, don’t work against your values. Money made out of alignment feels awful. Money made ethically, life changing. Big money wins are exciting. Yes, I’ve said that already, but it’s never gonna be sustainable or worth it if you’re doing things that don’t feel right for you. So really and truly think about are you doing things just because they work or are you doing them because they work for you and they work for you, right? Like that’s important.

Number four, as therapists, should know this, but we honestly, we struggle with it. Do not ignore your nervous system. Your body knows when something is unsustainable and listen to it. Right? Even though I was taking a ton of time off of work, I was still feeling tired and unexcited and like I was ready to burn everything to the ground. That was a whole conversation I had with a previous business coach around like, I think I’m ready to be done because

I was tired and obviously that’s not a good sign, but I felt so stuck and like I needed to keep pushing forward even though I didn’t really want to. Right? I was having a hard time listening to my body, but over time I learned to, which leads to number five, don’t build a business you’ll resent. If you’re grinding your life away now, scaling it will only magnify the resentment later. When I started to feel

frustrated by various parts of my work, it showed up in my body. I was irritated by the work I was doing. I felt annoyed by the advice I was given. I honestly just didn’t want to do it anymore. And I was waiting for someone else to notice and say something, but they didn’t. I had to. And when I finally listened to my needs, life and business literally felt easier. And so practical takeaways for therapists listening right now. If you’re sitting here thinking,

Okay, Amanda, but how do I get there? How do I get to a place where I’m making the money that feels exciting? I’m leading a business or businesses that feel profitable and passionate and, you know, fulfills my creative needs. Let me give you some of the exact steps I give to my students and coaching clients. Number one, pick one thing to be known for. Your niche is not a prison, it’s a compass, and it doesn’t have to be

You know, your niche being complex trauma or OCD recovery. Your niche does not have to be a diagnosis or a presenting concern. Your niche can be about you and the type of space you provide. It can be a common thread amongst all the different types of clients that you work with, regardless of their identities, their diagnoses or their demographics. It doesn’t have to be as hyper-specific as all the free downloadable PDFs tell you, right? This whole formula of how to build your perfect niche statement.

It does not have to be that you do not have to feel stuck in that box. Number two, clean up your website and fix your SEO. Your website is your 24 seven unpaid employee. Yes, you are paying to host the website, maybe around 20 bucks a month. Please don’t pay much more than that. You can find a really good website host for less than that. But truly this is your marketing agent, right? So you need to have a website. You need more than a one pager on your website.

and you need to make sure that it works for you. If you need help getting started, that’s exactly what my SEO for therapist membership is for. Therapists inside have literally doubled their consultation within a couple of months of using the tips and guidance I provide. So if you are struggling with what the heck do I even put on my website? How do I infuse SEO into it? That’s a great low cost way to get started. Number three, add a high value offer. This can be

therapy intensives, some kind of VIP day, a mini retreat, a three session transformation package, a specialized couple weekend, like whatever it is, whatever you offer. More value equals more impact equals higher income without more hours. If you want to get started with therapy intensives, my therapy intensives Academy course is the exact support system that can get you there. It’s literally hundreds of therapists and anyone who enrolls also gets access to live and asynchronous coaching support.

directly from me. So this is not just a course. This is a program that comes with tons and tons of support. If you’re looking for support outside of the therapy realm, that’s where my happy, healthy and wealthy mastermind comes into play. It’s more of an intimate coaching container that supports therapists in diversifying their income, their way, not my way. Yes, I’ll teach you all the tools, the technology and strategy and stuff like that, but I’m not going to tell you this is how you have to run your coaching business because

That didn’t work for me and I do not expect it to work for anyone else. Number four, raise your rates ethically. Charging sustainably is a trauma informed practice. It helps you stay in the field longer. It’s actually helped other therapists become more accessible because by actually taking care of their financial needs, they can truly offer pro or low bono out of abundance, not out of guilt or perceived duty.

Number five, do the mindset work. If you don’t address your visibility fears, like what happens if more people can actually find me? What happens if actually more clients reach out for support? If you don’t address any money stories you have around not being worth X amount, not being safe to have money in the bank. If you don’t address these internal blocks, no strategy will help. I have seen this

time and time again inside my coaching programs is they have all the knowledge, but it’s the mindset stuff that is holding them back. So if you struggle with this, bring it up in your own therapy, better yet, hire a business coach who can help you learn practical business strategies to help deconstruct these money stories and visibility fears and internal blocks. I’ve actually done, ⁓ you can do brain spotting as a coach and I’ve actually done some brain spotting with my coaching clients to help them get out of.

this funk because yeah, it’s no amount of strategy is going to help. I’ll just say it again. And then number six, build systems. You do not need to be everywhere. You just need to be consistent where it matters. Whether it’s SEO marketing, strategic partnerships, the EHR you use, or the administrative help you hire, know that you don’t actually have to wear 17 hats to run a successful and profitable business. And lastly, I want to talk about the human side.

of hitting a million dollars. Because here’s the part that people don’t talk about enough. Money does not automatically fix your life. Success doesn’t erase self-doubt. Hitting a million dollars does not make you immune to fear, comparison, or burnout. But here’s what it did do for me. It gave me freedom in ways my younger self never imagined. It gave me spaciousness without sacrificing impact.

It helped me build a career I actually love. It helped me help more therapists. It gave me the ability to rest without panic. And the biggest thing, it showed me that therapists deserve this kind of abundance too. So let me know what are your financial goals for your practice. Leave them in the podcast reviews or DM me on Instagram at AmandaKBcoaching because I would love to root for you.

I chat with so many therapists, especially women and people of color, about how we just deserve so much better and we are so capable of such amazing things. And so whether we work together in one of my programs, whether we work together one-on-one, whether I am just on the sidelines rooting for you, I would love to root for you. So reach out, let me know your fun and scary money goals, and thanks so much for listening to today’s episode.