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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.
Released: 07/02/2026
Show Notes:
Amanda gets into one of the most common questions she hears from therapists: should you add coaching to your practice? This isn’t a vague “it depends” answer. She walks through the real pros and cons, what therapists consistently get wrong when making this decision, and the four questions you need to answer before you build anything. The pros are genuine: more creative freedom, higher income ceiling, and the ability to use more of what you already know. But the cons are just as real. Protecting your license, unpredictable ROI, client expectations, and the reality of building a second business from scratch all deserve serious thought. If you’ve been on the fence about adding coaching, this is the honest conversation you actually needed.
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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 Buduris (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Happy, Healthy, and Wealthy Therapist Podcast. Today I want to talk about something that comes up constantly in my DMs, discovery calls, and honestly just in the back of my own brain over the years, which is should you add coaching to what you do as a therapist? Now, if you’re listening to this podcast, obviously you know I did go ahead and add coaching, but it wasn’t lightly.
And I know a lot of therapists go back and forth on it for a number of different reasons. So I’m not going to spend this episode today giving you this kind of fluffy it depends answer and just kind of send you on your way. I’m gonna give you the actual pros, the actual cons, and with my experience in coaching other therapists, what I’ve seen therapists get wrong when they’re weighing this decision. Because you can absolutely still make coaching work. There’s some things you want to pay attention to.
You can also really mess it up if you go in without your eyes open. And I care too much about your license and all the years and money you spent getting that license and your business to just let you mess it up because you went in eyes closed. So let’s do this, let’s dive into it. But before we go right into pros and cons, I want to acknowledge why this question of should I add coaching comes up so much.
Most therapists who are exploring adding coaching aren’t just doing it because a thought popped into their head and it’s kind of random. They’re doing it because somewhere along the way, they hit a wall with the traditional therapy model. Maybe it’s the limitations of what you can actually address in a 50-minute session. Maybe it’s the fact that your clients hit a certain point in therapy and they’re ready for a different kind of support, but you don’t have an obvious next step to offer them.
Maybe it’s purely income-driven and you want to reach people who aren’t looking for therapy but who could absolutely benefit from working with someone like you. Or maybe you have knowledge and experience that goes beyond what you can ethically offer as a therapist, and coaching feels like a way to finally use all of that. All of those reasons are valid, and coaching can be a beautiful complement to a therapy practice when done right.
But I’ve also watched therapists dive into it without thinking it all the way through, and it gets messy fast. So let’s talk about the good stuff first. Pro number one: flexibility outside the limits of your license. This is obviously one of the biggest ones, I think, for a therapist, and it is genuinely exciting. We know after, you know, during COVID, there was a ton of flexibility in terms of
where we could see our clients as things were super uncertain. And then they, you know, shut that shit down. So things got more strict and back to going regulated. And even though I as a psychologist, I’m able to opt into something called CyPact. So I can see clients in like 44 or something states like that. And I know the counseling compact is, you know, hopefully soon coming is what I hear from a lot of my friends in the spaces. So it’s exciting to think about can I practice wherever I want. But as we know,
There still come all these stipulations and things to consider because each state that you’re practicing into might have different reporting laws and things like that. So when we’re practicing therapy, we’re working within the scope of our license, right? We still have to diagnose, we have to have a treatment plan, we have documentation requirements and insurance considerations, and like 47 other things sitting on top of what could be a beautiful client relationship.
Coaching operates in a completely different space, on the other hand. So you’re working with people who want support, they want accountability, and they want some strategy. You’re not treating mental health conditions necessarily. You’re just working with what’s possible and not what’s wrong. And honestly, that’s been something I’ve really liked about being in therapy. I still go see my therapist every other week for 90 minutes, and having a one-to-one business coach is.
There are times in my therapy sessions where I’m like, my God, just tell me what I need to do. I don’t want to process this anymore. And I get that need met with my coach. And I obviously still value and I understand why working on my attachment trauma is more than just so do this differently, right? So like that work needs to be done in the way it’s being done in my therapy space. But it is very different to get my needs met in different ways.
with both therapy and coaching. So when you add coaching, you can serve people who don’t need a diagnosis, don’t want a diagnosis. You can work with very high functioning professionals or entrepreneurs, other therapists even, people who want to level up rather than heal, right? The goal is not healing for everyone. So you can go places in the conversation that would require
very specific clinical justification in a therapy context, right? Like you can explore other things. You can have deeper types of conversations than it might feel like if we’re trying to justify medical necessity, so to speak. So the scope with coaching is just wider. And for a lot of therapists who feel boxed in by the clinical framework, that is genuinely liberating. Pro number two.
potential for more income. I’m gonna emphasize that word potential because yes, it can be. So plain and simple, coaching can pay really well. You set your own rates, there is no insurance involved, you can work with people internationally, you can create group programs, courses, masterminds, retreats, all the things, literally whatever you want to do. The business model operates inside coaching.
Yeah, you’re significantly more expansive than in traditional therapy. Like even within therapy, you can do individuals, you can do couples, you can do family, you can do assessment, you can do group therapy, you can do psychoeducation. Like there are a lot of options, but you have even more options when it comes to adding on a coaching arm of your business. And here’s what I then see happen for a lot of therapists. They start coaching and they realize they’ve been chronically undercharging for years.
The coaching world kind of recalibrates your sense of what people will actually pay for expertise. And that realization offers often ripples back into how they price their therapy services too. Like I didn’t ever think I would get to a place in my therapy practice where I’d be charging $350 to $500 an hour. And again, granted, I live in a higher cost of living area. so I know I kind of have already that.
like makes sense, back up to my line of thinking, right? Like everything’s kind of more expensive here, so why wouldn’t therapy be? I know other people who charge closer to my rates. So it’s not wildly outside of the realm of possibility. But one thing that really helped me bump up from even breaking that $300 threshold, I went from $275 to $350, not $275 to $300 or $275 to $295 or something like that. Because I was doing coaching on the side and I realized
People will pay a lot for support and I want to continue perceiving co pursuing coaching, but I know that I can’t do both businesses full time because I will never give up my therapy practice. I still very, very much love it, but I knew I couldn’t do both. And so I knew I needed a bigger filter of okay, if someone really wants to work with me in this therapy capacity, I have to set a higher fee so that I can keep doing both. So.
Yeah, that that was wild to me. And people pay me $350. And I’m like, my gosh, how how are people paying $350? Because I personally currently am not in a financial position where I would pay $350 for each therapy session. I pay my therapist. I’d have to look at my bank statements. I think I pay like $220 for our 90-minute sessions, but her and I have had money conversations and she feels good with the rate that she set. So like fantastic, right? So yes, when it comes to coaching, the income potential is there.
But it’s not instantaneous. We’re gonna talk about that in the cons, but the ceiling is higher. That is just true because people will always look at a therapist and think, wow, how who is charging $350? Who’s charging $500? Who’s charging? I feel like I recently saw a therapist who charges $600 an hour and like, damn, go, go you. Like, that’s awesome. but people don’t do that for coaches, really. You might think like,
Wow, the price of a coaching intensive with Amanda is $2,500. That’s a ton of money. But it’s not, it’s not seen as crazy of a as an expense as it would be if I was saying $2,500 for a 90-minute therapy intensive. Like people see it differently. So yeah, it’s it’s just true that people will pay more for coaching than they will for therapy when they trust that you can get them the results.
Number three, pro number three, is creativity. my gosh, this one, this one is so underrated. Therapy has structure generally, right? That’s great. Structure serves your clients, but it can also feel over time like you’re running the same play over and over again, even when you love the work. Coaching gives you a lot more room to experiment.
To create things, to design your own frameworks and your own offers, to build something that actually has your fingerprints all over it. Right. Even if you are using AI to help you build something, it is still your brain and that source material is original. And yeah, AI didn’t write what I just said. Like that is truly what I believe is if something’s coming from your brain, like it is original and it is unique and it deserves to be out there in the world.
So you can do, for example, a three-day virtual retreat. You can build a group program around a specific outcome, create a membership, write a course, host workshops. The creativity ceiling inside coaching is much, much higher than inside of traditional therapy. And for therapists who have a neurodivergent or an entrepreneurial brain that is genuinely energizing, like my ADHD and my need for, I want to do something new, I want to do something else. Like
is very happy and overwhelmed with everything that happens in my coaching business because I always have new ideas. I always have ideas we have to put on the back burner and then revisit and be like, my God, that’s a terrible idea. but I don’t have that in my therapy practice. With my therapy practice it feels kind of clear cut what my options are moving forward. And again, I love that to an extent. Like that part appeases more of my like autistic brain that needs that needs the structure, that needs
Predictability and stability, but within coaching, I get to scratch the other side of my brain, the other needs that I have. Pro number four, you get to use more of what you know. I genuinely believe therapists are walking around with so much knowledge about human behavior, change, communication, what actually gets in the way of people making the progress that they want. And a lot of that knowledge can’t be fully applied.
inside a clinical hour, not even within a therapy intensive. Coaching, however, lets you bring all of it to the table. Your understanding of mindset, patterns, nervous system responses, relational dynamics, you don’t have to compartmentalize as much. You get to show up as the full person who knows their shit and knows what they’re talking about and is an expert at what they do. And that is a really competitive advantage in the coaching world, by the way.
Not everyone coaching people has the depth of training that a licensed therapist has. Like that part, I just really want to underscore that because anyone can call themselves a coach. If you have heard anything about it, you know that the coaching field is unregulated. And so literally anyone can slap that name onto what they do and the services they offer without knowing anything. They could have maybe gone to one therapy session themselves and are like, I’m gonna coach other people to do the same.
That’s not actually really good coaching and people will pay for really good coaching and they will not pay even for cheap coaching, right? That’s why we know a lot of people leave some of those platforms. Like, I don’t I I don’t know if I can actually say their names or if I get in trouble. So you all know the platforms that I’m talking about. Okay, so now we’re gonna slow down a little bit and talk about the cons because these are not throwaway concerns.
Number one, the biggest con, hopefully everyone knows this one, is you have to do this carefully to protect your license. I am going to say this so, so clearly. Your license is not worth any amount of coaching income. Period, full stop. Unless you have fully decided to actively abandon your license, if you are so against the field and you’re just like, it’s not worth it anymore, by all means, do you.
But if you are someone who wants to protect your license, you want to keep it, you want to stay active in therapy and add coaching, it’s not worth doing it wrong. The line between therapy and coaching can be blurry. And when that line gets blurry, it can create real legal and ethical risk for you as a therapist. What does that mean in practice? It means you cannot coach your therapy clients. We all
kind of do that anyway, right? Like literally every therapist coaches to some capacity, but coaching coaches shouldn’t be doing therapy. but we can’t do both, right? You can’t have a therapy client and then have a coaching business and then be like, but we can work together in both businesses, right? Dual relationship, not good. No bueno, y’all know that. You cannot call something coaching when you’re actually doing therapy, right? So you shouldn’t be, okay, my client moved across
state lines and I’m not licensed in that state. So I’m just gonna call it coaching, but we’re still doing like EMDR therapy. I totally get this is where the blurriness around ethics are, which is like, is it actually more ethical for continuation of care that you keep seeing the person and working with them? Or is it actually ethical that they, you know, see someone quote unquote local, even if they’re seeing someone virtually on the complete opposite side of the state? I know, I have my issues, I have my concerns with that.
But from the legal perspective, I know that you can’t coach and you can’t call a coaching and do therapy, right? That’s very tricky, that’s very messy. You are technically operating now outside of the scope of your practice as a coach if you’re actually found to be doing therapy. So you really need clear informed consent with your coaching clients that explicitly delineates this is not therapy.
They are not your therapy client or patient. And if they need clinical support, they need to seek that elsewhere. Right. Which is hard if you are transitioning people. If you have someone who randomly approaches you, let’s say you do Instagram marketing, then they’re like, I’m not in that state, but can we still work together? And you’re like, yeah, I can coach you. You want to have that conversation around the difference between coaching and therapy. And you need to follow up on and enforce those boundaries and restrictions.
You need to be thoughtful about how you market, because if your coaching is designed for people with a specific mental health condition, like maybe that is coaching for ADHD entrepreneurs, maybe that’s coaching for people with OCD, maybe that’s coaching for people with CPTSD, well then that can start to look a lot like therapy, and that can put you in a really precarious position. And this is where, you know, marketing is so important because if you’re
marketing language even looks like you’re talking about doing therapy, it’s only going to matter so much what you’re doing behind the scenes. Number one, document what you’re doing behind the scenes. But you want to make sure if someone comes to your coaching website or social media platform that it is very clear you’re not providing therapy, right? So like how are you marketing the services and what people can expect.
Some therapists create a completely separate brand for their coaching business specifically to maintain that clarity. That’s personally what I did. I have totally different LLCs, totally different websites, different email addresses, different bank accounts. Everything is separate so that if I’m working with someone under one business, it’s very clear what we are working together under. Some therapists choose to keep it under the same umbrella, but are very explicit about the distinctions.
Either approach can work, but you can’t skip this step, right? Like definitely talk to your either therapist ethics consultant or talk with your malpractice insurance to see what they cover. Talk to a lawyer who understands both healthcare licensing and business. Like do your homework. It is so worth it and it will save you so much stress later. Con number two, the ROI, return on your investment, can really be unpredictable.
Up front. Here is this fantasy that we’ve all created based on all these ads we are ever served. I literally just gave myself a project a few minutes before signing on to record this. Of I’m gonna take, I’m gonna start taking screenshots of all these unrealistic or at least they’re like lying by omission ads that I get. Of this one was just like how I made, I don’t know, it was like 100k or 10k days for 444 days in a row. Like
Click here for my $47 offer. Like clearly there’s a lot else going on behind the scenes there. but it’s this fantasy, right? Like, okay, I add coaching, I put together an offer, people sign up, money comes in, woo, sign me up. no, here is the reality for more most therapists, which is that it takes longer than you think to figure out who your coaching client is, what your coaching niche is, what your clients actually want to pay for, and how to reach them.
Therapy clients come to you because they’re in pain and they need clinical support. Coaching clients come to you because they want something, but they have more options for where to go to get it. And there are a lot of coaches out there. So unless you already have an audience, an email list, a platform, or a very established referral network, building a coaching practice from scratch requires real investment of time, money, and energy.
Before it starts paying off. Now, I’m not saying don’t do it. I’m saying go in with a realistic timeline. Six months to a year before you have consistent income from coaching is not unusual. A lot of I refer to my emotional support spreadsheets that I share with my coaching clients. People will ask me, like, how long did it take you? And how long did it take to earn revenue in my coaching business from the point of
Making my business official, launching my first product, it maybe took like four to six weeks, but all the money I invested in a coaching program, in a coach, in the platforms, in the tech, like I didn’t really consider my coaching business viable until it was profitable, right? Because none of you all are considering adding coaching because you just want to like net zero something. You want money from it. So
If you need income now, you might need to stabilize your therapy practice first and then add coaching more strategically down the line.
I was considering pausing this podcast episode for a while because one of my cats just came screaming and purring in my lap. But I’ve also gotten feedback that, you know, people are appreciating more realness and something that’s not fully put together. So I’m leaning into that. So you might hear some purring in the background. But con number three is the client expectation problem. And this one doesn’t get talked about enough, and it is very, very real.
So in therapy, there is a shared clinical framework. You are treating something, there is a treatment plan, progress is measured in ways that both of you and your client understand. In coaching, the agreement is a little bit different. You are working toward an outcome, and clients can come in with wildly different expectations about what that means and what the timeline looks like. They also often underestimate their own responsibility in the process.
There’s been a lot of times as a coach where it feels like people want me to do the work for them when literally that’s not what I’m saying I offer at all. Outside of in my Therapy Intensives Academy right now, we have a to you pay in full, you have a bonus of we will do some done for you keyword research for your website. But I’ve literally never told people, I will put together your sales pages or your funnels or things like that. But there are people who have those unrealistic expectations of, you know.
Just because I work with the coach, I’m going to get the results and I don’t have to put in the work. What I see happen sometimes is therapists get coaching clients who are treating the coaching relationship like therapy. They want to process and explore and be held, which is beautiful, but it can blur that boundary we just talked about. Or they want to resolve fast and they’re not doing the work between sessions. And somehow that becomes your problem as the coach.
You have to be really clear in your coaching agreements about what you do and what you don’t do, what your coaching includes and what it doesn’t, what a client needs to bring to the relationship in order for it to work. and you have to be willing to have direct conversations when someone is treating the relationship like therapy or outsourcing their results to you. I’ve had to write many emails that.
made me angry to write about and that I needed to process a lot with my business coach when someone essentially almost threatened to sue me because they didn’t get the results they were looking for, because they didn’t do the work that they signed up for. They accused me of scammy false marketing when again, literally in our contracted agreement was here’s the work you are signing up for, here’s what you are expected to do. So so important that you have
all of your documentation and legal stuff in place, as well as clients or students, whatever you want to call them, who are willing to kind of like come to your rescue. I had a s had so many people reach out and spam me with these like positive testimonials that are now up on my Google profile, which I just so so so appreciate because people are gonna do their homework. People are gonna look and see if if shit is talked about someone like, well, is that actually true? So now I’ve got a nice I mean it’s not a balance because that person
Thankfully, never wrote any public that I’ve seen negative reviews on me. They hopefully just kept that stuff to themselves. But yes, therapists are trained to hold space and meet clients where they are, whereas coaches are supposed to move people forward. Those are different orientations, and you may have to consciously shift how you show up, right, in each business. Con number four is you are building a second business. And I wanna be honest about this because again.
People just talk about like ad coaching, like it is just you just add it. But coaching isn’t just adding a service. You’re essentially building a second business. And again, legally, you really should have it as a separate business with different marketing, different positioning, different offer structure, different sales processes, and potentially a different audience. My audiences are totally different. I do have some therapists that are therapy clients, but my coaching business doesn’t talk.
two therapists who are seeking mental health support. I connect with and I do happen to market with a lot of therapists who do have CPTSD, which is my therapy nation specialty. But I’m not saying in my coaching business that’s what we’re gonna work on. It’s all about, you know, building a business and a life that you love and making more money and feeling like a badass and all that good stuff. If your therapy practice isn’t solid yet, spreading yourself across two business models
Can be a recipe for both of them underperforming. And I think it’s not because inherently that model doesn’t work. I think it’s a matter of I’m always horrible at quoting things, but something around like energy goes where energy flows or something like that. Where like if you’re really excited about one of them, you’re gonna put all your time, energy, and attention and money and resources into that thing. And then you’re like, why is this other thing not working? Because you only have so much time, so much energy, so much money, so much resources.
And so if you’re not giving your all to something, it can like your business will probably suffer. And I believe in building things sustainably. That means if your therapy practice has gaps, fix those first. If your therapy practice is running well and you have capacity, then layer in coaching. And I know that that looks different for every single therapist. Some therapists are like, I just want my caseload to be five people, and then I want to add coaching. That’s perfectly fine.
But if your goal is I want 20 therapy clients and you’ve got seven, well then maybe we have to revisit like order of operations. Trying to build both at the same time from scratch is a lot. I’ve seen it lead to burnout, which is exactly what most therapists are trying to avoid in the first place by adding a second business. So how do you actually decide? You’ve heard the pros, you’ve heard the cons. So how do you actually figure out if this is right for you?
Here are the questions I’d want you to sit with. First, do you have a clear sense of who you would coach and what you would help them with? Not a vague, I want to help people, a specific person with a specific problem who has a specific reason to hire you over someone else. If you can’t answer that, start there before you build anything. Second, is your therapy practice stable enough to add something? Are you fully booked or close to it?
Are you making enough that you can invest time into building something new without it creating financial panic? If the answer is no, stabilize first. Third, are you actually excited about this? Not just the income potential, not just the idea of it, the actual work. Because coaching is different from therapy, it requires you to show up differently. If you’re excited about that difference, great. If you’re kind of hoping that it’ll just feel like therapy, but with more money and fewer constraints,
It won’t, I am sad to inform you. And fourth, are you willing to do the legal and ethical homework before you launch? Not after, before. That includes having real documentation, real boundaries, and a real conversation with your licensing board, if they will respond, if you need clarity on what’s allowed in your state. And again, if it’s not your licensing board, because yeah, we all know how that goes, talk with your malpractice insurance, document their response.
As we all know, document, document, document. If you answered yes to those four things, coaching might be a really smart next step for you. If you’re not sure, that’s okay too. You don’t have to do everything. Therapy intensives alone can completely change the financial picture of your practice without the complexity of building a second business model from scratch. Just something to keep in mind if you’re not doing that already. So I’ve watched a lot of therapists add coaching over the years.
And the ones who do it well tend to have a few things in common. They start narrow. They don’t try to just coach everyone on everything. They pick a lane, build an offer, test it, and refine it from there. That part I want to talk a little bit more about because the therapists I see inside my mastermind, like all of us, this is not a bad thing, but I just want to highlight it. A lot of them are kind of looking at what’s going to get me the most.
ROI and like make this mastermind worth it. And I totally get that. No one wants to waste money, but we can’t guarantee something is going to work. We can do our market research, we can put our all into it, and we might test something and realize our audience was off, our pricing was off, our timing was off. Testing is such a huge component of adding a second business. Like we don’t, I think we don’t realize how much we tested.
In marketing or therapy business, we kind of just took it for granted of like, well, I know what I have my certifications in, I know what I trained in, I know what I wrote my thesis or dissertation on. Like, that’s my niche. Now I just have to figure out how to market my therapy services. Whereas with something else, it is totally different. We are testing different types of organic marketing and maybe paid marketing and different offers because you’re not just offering one thing potentially anymore. So there is a lot of retesting, testing, retesting, and refining.
That goes into a coaching business. I know I’ve done so many different iterations of things over the years. So that’s important from again that realistic expectation setting. The therapists who are successful also keep those boundaries clear. They do have separate web pages, separate brands, explicit languaging in all their marketing about the distinction between therapy and coaching, very clean, thorough, informed consent. They also treat everything like a business, which means learning about sales and marketing.
not just content creation, understanding what actually makes someone buy, getting comfortable having conversations where money is on the table. And they give it enough time. They don’t quit at month three when it hasn’t taken off yet. And I so, so get it, right? There have been times when I’ve launched a new offer and I didn’t sell something in like a week and I felt frustrated even though I’ve sold other things. Why is this not successful?
Because anytime you do something new, you have to build more trust, more credibility, more authority around it. So we have to give things time. We have to have more distress tolerance, right? You might be annoyed by that term, but that is definitely something we have to have. And that’s the pattern. We keep it simple, we keep it legal, and we give it time. So
That’s what I’ve got for you today. I hope this felt like the honest conversation you actually needed, not just cheerleading or scaremongering. Coaching can genuinely be a powerful addition to what you do. It can open up income streams, creative outlets, and ways of serving people that therapy alone can’t reach. And it requires real intentionality to do it well. So take your time, do the homework, build it right.
If you want to dig into more about how to build out your own business, that’s where you’ll want to attend my live workshop on July 17th about how do I pick this niche, how do I figure out what the heck a funnel is, and how do I decide how to launch something. You can check out the information in the show notes to see if it would be a good fit for you. And if this episode was helpful, make sure that you leave a testimonial, leave a review.
read the show notes about how you can get an entry into a raffle for a coaching intensive with me because I would love to help you with this process. Otherwise, I will be back for the next episode in this series. And until then, take care of yourselves.