Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 42: What Starting a Second Business Actually Costs

Released: 07/04/2026

Show Notes:

Amanda Buduris tackles one of the most common fears therapists have about building a second income stream: how much is this actually going to cost? She breaks down what you genuinely need to spend money on at the starting phase, what you can skip until your business earns the right to grow, and how your investment profile should change as your revenue does. She also gets into the cost nobody talks about enough, which is the cost of not investing at the right time. Whether you want to add therapy intensives, build a coaching offer, or create a digital product, this episode gives you a realistic picture of what lean startup actually looks like and what the path forward looks like from there.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. Starting a second income stream does not require a massive upfront investment: realistic monthly tech overhead for a coaching or digital product business can be as low as $50 to $150, and you should stay lean until you have proof that people will actually
2. The investment profile of your business has to match the phase you are in, because what works at $60K is not what gets you to $150K, and trying to solve a consistency problem alone through trial and error is expensive in time and opportunity cost.
3. The real cost is not the money you spend on systems or support, it is the cost of another year seeing 20+ clients a week while the gap between where you are and where you want to be stays exactly the same size.

Connect with Amanda:

Follow on Instagram: @amandaamandakbcoaching-com
Check out the Amanda KB Coaching website

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Sponsors:

• This episode is sponsored by Alma – learn more here
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Resources & Links:

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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 Buduris (00:01)
Hello, hello. Welcome back to episode four in my Summer Spark series where I’m breaking down a little bit more about what it looks like for the therapist who’s actually looking to scale beyond therapy for whatever reason. And I was just having this conversation with one of my coaching clients the other day who’s been getting more clarity around.

What is it that she actually wants to do? Why is it she wants to make more money? And does it have to be what I think we’ve all seen a lot of? and this is even, you know, including myself as an example of the therapists who outgrew their therapy income with their second business. And should that be the goal for everyone? Or is it a goal just to have it as secondary income or income from when the therapy season is slower?

So whatever your reason is for wanting to expand, I think it’s helpful that we have this specific conversation today. And this is a lot of a lot of the questions that I get around, it seems like it’s so expensive to start a second business if I want to add coaching, if I want to create a digital product. We all know there are so many systems out there, and I think the worry somehow feels like I have to spend an arm and a leg.

on getting my own coaching on the systems on all of these things and that’s just simply not true. So I want to break it down and equate it to your therapy practice too. So you can kind of see the similarities and the differences. So you built your therapy practice from scratch, right? For whatever reason you graduated, you left your agency, however long it took you to start your therapy practice, you did it from scratch. You figured out how to get licensed, how to find clients

How to set up your systems, how to do your notes at night without crying, you did all of that, and somewhere along the way, you probably spent some money to make it work. And now you’re thinking about adding something else. Again, is that a coaching offer, digital course, maybe a done-for-you service, therapy intensives, just something that isn’t trading your time for 50 minutes at a time. And the first question that might might pop up as you’re seeing other coaches who

have systems and have teams and do all these things is how much is this gonna cost me? So I’m gonna answer that question honestly today because there is a myth floating around that starting a second income stream is either free and easy or that it requires you to go all in and spend thousands before you make a single dollar. And none of those is inherently true. By the end of this episode, you’re gonna know exactly what’s reasonable to expect, what’s worth spending on

What you can absolutely skip, and how to think about investment at two completely different stages of your business growth. So let’s get into it. The actual truth is that starting a second revenue stream will cost you something. Not a fortune, but something. And the reason I want to name this up front is because if you go in expecting it to be free, you’re gonna get surprised and discouraged. And if you go in expecting it to cost.

$10,000, $15,000 before you’ve made anything, you’re gonna talk yourself out of it before you even start. So again, think back to when you started your therapy practice. You probably paid for your LLC or PLLC setup, you paid for your liability insurance, you got your EHR, hopefully a website, a scheduling tool, a Google Workspace account. You paid for some version of marketing, whether that was getting your website up or paying for a directory listing. None of that was free.

But you did it because you understood those were foundational costs for a business that would generate income for you four years. Starting a coaching offer, a digital product, or any kind of scalable service works the same way. There are legitimate setup costs. The goal is to keep them small until the business earns the right to grow. And that is the thing I want you to take from this first segment of this episode is.

You invest lean. You do not build Lamborghini infrastructure for a business that hasn’t made its first dollar yet. That is one of the biggest mistakes I see people do is, you know, I see this other coach who has this system and that system’s like $200 a year or $1,000 for a month, not a month, my gosh, $200 a month or $1,000 a year. Like I should just get that one. It’s like, but why? There are other ways.

For you to do this, and if spending $200 a month or $1,000 for a year of like a community or something like that, before you’ve even built or launch a thing, like if that doesn’t work for your budget, don’t do it. There are other ways to do this. So, what are the actual costs to start a coaching or digital offer? I’m gonna get really practical here. When I talk to therapists who are just getting started with something, like a coaching container or a course.

The thing they fear most is the tech. How do I choose a course platform? How do I set up email marketing? Where do I collect payment? All of it feels like it starts to stack up fast. Again, because there are so many tools out there. I myself am always having my team be like, hey, maybe we should look into this. Maybe we should look into that. Let’s compare these two different things. We’re at a point now with our tech where ultimately we’re not gonna change where we collect the emails, we’re not gonna change where we host our course, because it would just

Return on investment would not be worth it. I had an OBM, that was last year, an online business manager who wanted to change our entire email marketing platform. And like the features of the system seemed great and like they would be helpful, but it would have cost my team dozens of hours and therefore me thousands of dollars to do that switch. And it just didn’t make sense because we didn’t have a system.

problem, right? It just would have been like making things better for the sake of like saying we made it better. So you don’t have to start with all of this fancy tech buildup, like literally just using the thing that works for you is the best thing that you do. You can do because it can stack up really fast if you overcomplicate it before you have to. This is what I actually recommend getting started with. And this is what it can realistically cost.

So obviously there’s probably stuff you already have. You probably already have a website. You may already have an email list, even if it’s small. You have a phone, you might have a Zoom account, maybe a Canva-free account, and like that’s it, that’s your baseline that most people need for whatever they’re doing. There’s some minimal additions, like you might need a payment processor processor, which costs you nothing until you start to make money, and then they’re gonna take a small fee out of each transaction.

You need a basic email marketing platform like Kit or Flowdesk, which can run anywhere between zero and $40 a month at the entry level. And you need a scheduling tool like acuity or Calendy, which starts free or around 15 bucks a month. For a coaching offer specifically, that might be genuinely all you need to start. And you do not need a fancy course platform. You don’t need a membership site or a custom app. You just need a way to collect payment, a way to communicate with your client, and a way to show up on a call.

For a digital product like a course, you may eventually want a platform like Kajabi, Teachable, ThinkIphic. All of these can run anywhere between $30 to $200 a month, depending on the plan. But the thing is, you can sell access to a Google Drive folder with video recordings in it. And I know that that sounds unglamorous, it is, but it does work. And it works while you’re validating whether people actually buy the thing before you invest in a platform.

That looks beautiful, but costs you $150 a month, whether or not anyone buys it. Right? Like this is where we start to waste money we don’t have while we’re trying to build a thing. And you do not need to do that. A realistic startup budget, if you start lean and stay lean until you have proof of concept, aka you’re collecting revenue, your monthly tech overhead for a second income stream could be somewhere between $50 and $150 a month.

Depending on what tools you add. It does not have to cost hundreds. It definitely should not be costing thousands. The thing that trips most therapists up is, you know, again, spending that money where you don’t actually have to spend it yet. Like hiring a brand designer before you’ve sold anything, paying for a podcast production team before your show even has an audience, buying an expensive email marketing platform with bells and whistles you don’t know how to use.

Hiring a virtual assistant before you even know what tasks you want to hand off, or when you don’t want to hand tasks off yet, which by the way, you should. A virtual assistant is one of the best investments you can make when you’re starting to manage multiple businesses. All of those things are eventually worth it, but they are not the starting point. So if you’re sitting there with a list of things you think you need to buy before you can start, I want you to cut that list in half. And

Then start. Start imperfectly, right? You do not have to start at the finish line. I certainly did not. Now, this is all with the caveat that this does change when you’re ready to scale. So this is where this conversation is going to shift a little bit because there is a difference between starting a coaching or digital product business and growing past $100,000 a year, let’s say.

And there’s another difference between 100,000 and 250,000 and beyond. I talk about revenue thresholds a lot on this show because I genuinely believe the way you run your business has to match the phase you’re in. What works at 60k is not what you need at 150k. What you need at 150K is not what gets you to 300K. There are a lot of differences. There are so many ways I’ve had to

Grow as a business owner, systems I’ve had to buy into, more things I’ve hired out to protect my time and capacity. And it’s just different, right? It’s different depending on the stage that you are in. So even if you’re looking at me, for example, if you’ve seen some of my expense reports and you’re like, I don’t have that much money to invest each month, you do not have to. You don’t have to pay your team $6,000 a month when you don’t have a business that is as big as my business.

And I know tons of people who pay their team 10 grand a month because their business is even bigger than mine. So this is all about where you are. And at the starting phase, your job is to get proof of concept, right? You are asking, does anyone want this? Will people pay for it? Can I deliver it? This is lean operations, low overhead, and your primary investment is probably your time, not your money.

Obviously, if you have a little bit of a budget for a virtual assistant, I always think that’s a fantastic idea because you probably also still have your therapy practice. So there’s only so much you can do. You don’t need to be in Canva. You don’t need to be posting all the things in social media all the time. At the growth phase, right? You’ve proved the concept. You’ve proven you’ve proven the concept. You know that people want the offer, so you want to grow it.

This is somewhere in that first six figure range. And your job here is building repeatability. And this is where it starts to make sense and invest in a real course platform to think about more intentional email marketing strategy, definitely to bring on some help from a virtual assistant or an online business business manager. And you’re also at the point where you should be investing in support for yourself, whether that’s a program, a coach, or a mastermind, because you are now trying to go from

I made money once to I make money consistently. Those are very different problems. And trying to solve the consistency problem alone with only trial and error is slow and expensive in a different way, the way of time and opportunity cost. Now at the scaling phase, once you are pushing past $250,000, your investment profile looks totally different.

Now you definitely should have multiple team members. You should be investing in automations and systems. You might have a real content strategy with a team supporting it. You’re not doing everything yourself anymore. And that means paying for people and infrastructure that makes your business work without you being in every piece of it. I love at this point that I hardly know how my business works behind the scenes.

My OBM will tell me, like, okay, yep, I got this automation set up and here’s a Loom video if you want to watch it to know how it is. I’m like, nope, I do not care to know how it works. I just want to know that it works. And at the beginning stages, I needed to know how it worked because if it was me and one team member, it was her at the time, she was my very first virtual assistant. hi Holly, I know you edit these shows. So yeah, that makes sense that I used to need to know those things, but at some point you don’t need to do that anymore.

So the thing most therapists don’t realize when they’re thinking about the cost of a second business is the cost of not investing at the right time is higher than the cost of investing generally. Spending another year figuring out something on your own while also seeing a full case load of clients that has a real dollar value and it has a burnout cost and it has an opportunity cost. It has a what would my revenue have been if I’d had the right guidance six months ago cost?

We’re not talking about enough, right? Now I’m not saying throw money at every problem. I’m saying at some point, the thing that’s keeping you stuck is not money. It’s access to the right strategy and the right support. So here’s the part I think is most important and not talked about as frequently as I would like. The question is never really can I afford this.

The question is always, what is the cost of not doing this and how long am I willing to pay it? If you are still seeing 15, 20, 25 clients a week and you want to see 10, the gap between those two realities has a price tag. Every week you spend not solving that problem is a week of emotional drain, of income that’s capped at your calendar, of zero flexibility.

That is not a free alternative. It’s actually an extremely expensive one. When I started adding intensives to my practice, I invested in figuring out how to make that change in my practice. Right, right. I wanted to do it strategically. Now I didn’t invest thousands of dollars, but I didn’t try to reinvent the wheel from scratch either. And any investment I made around talking with other therapists who had done intensives, hiring my first one-to-one business coach.

learning how to market myself with more confidence because I’m an introvert and I think I suck at marketing myself still sometimes. All of those investments paid for themselves back within the first months, right? Not years, months. That’s how business investments should work. They should have a return. Now the other thing that nobody’s telling you is that the biggest investment is not always money. It is often the decision

To take your business seriously. The decision to stop treating your coaching offer or your course or your second income stream like a side project and start treating it like a real business that deserves real attention. That’s a mental investment. It doesn’t show up on a credit card statement, but it is the thing that determines whether any other investment you make actually works. So when therapists ask me, Amanda, what do I need to spend money on?

My honest answer is less than you think to start, more than you currently invest in yourself when you’re ready to ready to scale. And the only way to know which phase you’re in is to know where your revenue is, what your offer is, and what’s actually keeping you from growing. Okay, so everything I just talked about in this episode, the different phases you might be at, the investment decisions, the question of what to buy and what to skip.

All of that exists in a vacuum if you don’t have the right support for where you are right now. And where you are right now is probably one of two places. Place one, you are a therapist in private practice who wants to add a scalable offer, potentially something like therapy intensives or VIP days, and you want a concentrated high-impact experience that helps you move fast without dragging it out over months of solo trial and error.

You might need a clear path, a real system, and the confidence that this is doable. Now that is exactly what my Therapy Intensives Academy program is built for. It is for the therapist who is looking to, you know, have a different stream of income, but just not, you know, maybe become a coach yet. I hear that from so many therapists. I don’t actually want to be a coach. I don’t want to make a course. I don’t want to do all these things.

I just want to be a therapist and I just want to make more money doing it and I don’t want to work so much. If that is you, you are a perfect fit for the Therapy Intensives Academy if you’re not already in it. Now, place number two. so actually this is gonna be you’re maybe in one of three places, not two places. Place number two is that, you know, you’re a private practice therapist. Maybe you’re already doing therapy intensives, or maybe you’ve decided therapy intensive.

intensives aren’t for you. Maybe you’ve tried them and you’re like, no, actually I don’t want to do more therapy. I just want to make money in a different way. But you are maybe still like a DIY or maybe you still want to just get a little bit of guidance, figure out exactly what do I need to be focused on. So many people tell me that Amanda just tells me what to do. And you just need a little bit of help. Now if that’s the case, that’s where my therapist my therapist scaling intensive

might be the better fit for you because this is a focused, intensive experience where we’re going to sit down and talk about what are the things you need to know in terms of how to target your audience and build out your offer, figuring out how do you build a freaking funnel, whatever that is, and what are the next steps when it comes to launching. So we’re gonna do a lot of this in my live workshop on July 17th. And so if you’re kind of in this, I want to start lean and prove the concept phase.

But you know you need more than just like a course or a free webinar, then the therapist scaling intensive is where you should start. Phase three, kind of like that third option, is you’re more past that point. Maybe you’ve already started a scalable offer, maybe you’ve had some wins, but you’re trying to get a real level of income growth. We’re talking pushing toward and past that six-figure mark and maybe into the multiple six-figure marks.

and you’re ready for a higher level of strategy and support, right? You don’t need a course, you’re not gonna watch it. You need more of a container that’s gonna help you actually think about your specific business, your offers, your pricing, your model with someone who’s done it and can see what you can’t see about your own situation. And that is where my happy, healthy, and wealthy therapist mastermind comes into play. It is my highest level level offer. It’s a six month hybrid experience combining one-to-one support.

group coaching and curriculum. And it’s built exactly and specifically for therapists who are ready to scale beyond private sessions and actually build real financial freedom. The kind that doesn’t depend entirely on how many hours you work. All of that information is in the show notes. I’m gonna link all of that as well as any of the resources I tech about talked about today. So go ahead and check those out and see what could be a good fit for you. Either way, one of my favorite things is

Helping therapists really just live the lives that they want and make the money they want. And so I want you to walk away from this episode knowing that starting a second business does cost money, but it does not have to cost a lot up front. Start lean, prove the concept, and then invest in really, really growing it. The investment that’s actually keeping you stuck is not usually a technology platform. It’s not having the fancy brand. It’s

Honestly, like the absence of a clear path and the absence of someone in your corner who can help you stop spinning your wheels. Whatever phase you’re in, there is a right next step, and it probably costs a lot less than you’ve been telling yourself it does. So thanks for being here today. We’ve got one more episode in this series tomorrow, and I’m excited to talk to you more then. Thanks for listening. Bye.