Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 47: The #1 Thing That Helped Me Scale to $1.25M in 4 Years

Released: 07/31/2026

Show Notes:

Amanda makes the case for the one thing that has done more for her business growth than any offer, marketing strategy, or sales technique: capacity. If you’re a therapist who knows your offer works and clients keep coming back, but you still feel like you’re drowning, your problem probably isn’t your strategy. It’s that you are the entire delivery mechanism for everything in your business. Amanda gets into how she recognized that in her own practice, what finally pushed her to hire her first virtual assistant, how to know when you’re actually ready, and which tasks to hand off first.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. Capacity is not about how many hours you work, it is about how much of your week is spent on things that actually require your clinical judgment and specific expertise versus things a competent person with clear instructions could do for a fraction of your hourly rate.
2. More marketing will not fix a capacity problem, it will actually make it worse, because the more you promote something that is working, the more demand you create with no room left to meet it.
3. You do not have to wait until you are big enough to justify hiring support, because buying back your time is the thing that makes bigger possible in the first place, and most of the fears around hiring are strategy problems, not mindset problems.

Connect with Amanda:

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

Apply here for the next round of the Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Mastermind – a 6-month hybrid, high-level mastermind with high-touch 1:1 coaching for therapists who are ready to stop relying on trading hours for dollars (even premium ones) and scale beyond the therapy room.

Resources & Links:

• This episode is sponsored by:
  • Alma – learn more here
  • Jane – use code: AMANDA2MO for a 2-month grace period
• SEO for Therapists Email Membership
• Therapy Intensives Academy – use code HHWPOD250 as a podcast listener to get $250 off at checkout.
• Free Training: 3 Steps to Booking Your First Therapy Intensive
• Free Guide: 3 Steps to Double Your Income
• SEO Freebie

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Transcript:

Amanda Buduris (00:01)
Hey, welcome back to the Happy Healthy and Wealthy Therapist Podcast, which is all four therapists who want to build a business that actually gives you your life back instead of taking it over. Today I want to talk about the one thing that has done way more for my growth than any offer, any marketing strategy, or any sales technique combined. And it’s not really that sexy. I’m not going to convey any, you know.

Deep secrets here. I’m not gonna sell you something here. It’s not something you’re gonna see in like a course launch email. It is straight up just capacity. It is buying back your time. It’s building a team, even a tiny one, before you think you’re ready. If you’re a therapist, whether you have a very, very busy solo practice, or maybe you’re starting up a small little group practice, or

Have a solo practice and you’re wanting to expand and diversify your streams of income. If you are feeling like you are drowning right now, trying to do everything right and everything yourself, this episode is specifically for you. So here’s the story we get told as therapists entrepreneurs. If business isn’t growing, it’s just a strategy problem. You have to fix the offer, you have to fix the messaging, you have to post more, sell better, find a bigger audience, maybe put some money behind ads.

And look, sometimes that is true. But for a lot of you listening, and for myself as well, three, three years and maybe like a month or two ago, like that’s where we start to hit an actual ceiling, right? It’s we know that our offer works, we have testimonials, we’ve got really good experiences with our clients, and they’re coming back, and more people keep finding us.

Maybe as a therapist, you’ve got a wait list or you have a coaching program where people keep asking when the next round is. Your problem isn’t that people don’t want what you have. Your problem is that you are the entire delivery mechanism for everything. And there are only so many hours in your day and in your week. I started, I started my prior practice in April 2022. That’s when I officially opened doors, got my first client.

And I started my coaching business in, I think the like month I registered the business was May or June of 2023. So a little over a year later, and I was still running a therapy business and now starting a second business. And I realized, wow, I can do a lot by myself, but I cannot do everything. And I see this constantly with the therapists I work with in my mastermind who

Build a really solid private practice and a great first coaching offer, course offer, whatever it might be, they come to me convinced, like, well, I just need a better funnel or I just need a better sales strategy or whatever it is. When what they actually need, what I actually needed as I started to diversify my income strings was just like three or five thousand fewer things on our plates so that we could actually think straight.

Most marketing and like more marketing, it’s not gonna fix capacity problems. In fact, it actually just makes it worse because the more you are marketing this thing that you love and that you’re passionate about and you’re clearly very good at, the more you market that, it’s actually gonna make your problem worse because more people want in and you still have no room. I had to have my coach s sit down and talk with me at some point about like, why are you even still doing consultations for your therapy practice?

if you don’t actually have openings for your therapy practice. And that’s a little challenging for me when my weekly caseload generally, yes, is full, but I still like to book one to two, maybe even three intensives in a month. So it’s hard to kind of close off one without the other. I help a lot of therapists do that inside my therapy intensives academy. but it is challenging, right? Like it is challenging to think if I just stop marketing or if I don’t just focus on marketing, how is that actually going to fix my problem?

But again, we have to talk about capacity. We have to think about what is the right problem that needs solving here. And so I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when finally I knew I could not do it alone. Right. Like I was seeing at that point, maybe between 15 to 20 weekly clients. I was doing one to three intensives a month and starting now this coaching business where I’m attending.

I was in a coaching program at the time, so I was attending multiple calls per week. I was working on my funnel, building up my free PDF, and like AI had just kind of started around those times. And like it’s very early days of ChatGPT. So like it was kind of started out there, but I did not rely on that to build everything myself. I was building everything myself, like writing all this copy from scratch. And my therapy clients were doing really well.

my coaching business did I don’t wanna say take off quickly, but I was getting success pretty quickly. I was working hard. I was working a lot. And, you know, it felt good to see that things were working, but it didn’t feel the way that I thought that it was gonna feel. I didn’t feel as much excitement as I thought I would feel, didn’t feel so proud. I like felt all those things in my head, but not in my body and not in my heart. And that was because I was kind of

Dreading doing more. Right now I’ve got more emails coming in, more DMs coming in. I still have emails and texts and voicemails to respond to from my therapy clients. And so the more and the more and the more that became expected of me, the more and more and more tiny decisions that only I could make, and tiny tasks that only I could do.

it genuinely started to pull away from my enjoyment of everything because like was I burnt out in the same way that, you know, was the whole reason I left the university counseling center I was at. No, it was a very different burnout. It was more like instead of the physical fatigue and burnout, I think it was more the like emotional burnout of not like that I was quite numb, but again, I wasn’t enjoying things. I wasn’t as proud as I wish I would have been.

At that point, I wasn’t as excited as I wish I could have been. All I was focusing on was, I have all this stuff to do. I am doing all the work, and every piece of everything is running through meet me alone. And so as I was meeting with, I was meeting one-to-one with a business coach at that point, different from the coach I’m working with now, and we were really talking about capacity, right? The fact that I had hired out like

on Fiverr, you know, someone to help me with social media posts or someone to help with blog posts. I had done some of those pieces of hiring out, but I was kind of, I didn’t think I needed my own team. I didn’t think I needed my own virtual assistant. But my coach was like, you need your own virtual assistant because what I needed ultimately was someone else touching the parts of my business that didn’t require me specifically. And yes, hiring someone off Fiverr or whatever platform you might use for

To find like a freelance, you know, support person, whatever that is. Like it’s helpful in getting a task done, but it’s not the same as feeling supported. It’s not the same as someone holding your vision and your, you know, baby, your business is your baby. It’s not someone holding that with you. And so when I finally reached out, there was this kind of like directory application thing that I used.

and I refer to everyone that I work with when they ask for recommendations for a virtual assistant because you submit this application and you say, Here are the skills I’m looking for, here’s the type of support I’m looking for, here’s the budget that I’m working with. Basically, like, please help, right? Like SOS. And they send you four to five recommendations of here are people who meet your skill sets, who have availability, who we think could be a good match. Please feel free to like move forward with scheduling like a Zoom interview. And the very first person

Who responded to me is now, if you all are in my world, if you’re in the Therapy Intensives Academy program, if you’re one of my mastermind or one-to-one coaching clients, you know Holly. Holly is my online business manager. even if you’re not in one of my programs, she’s probably responded to one of your emails if you’ve got a question about something. she was the very first person that reached out and she expressed so much excitement about how she thought we’d be a good fit to work together. And now we’ve been working together for about three years at this point. So I never

knew that that was fully what I wanted or needed. But just to have someone helping me with the stuff that was eating my hours without moving my business forward, that really did change more about my capacity to grow than anything I could have done marketing wise. Right. Again, because the more blogs I write, the more I market my therapy practice, the more that I market that coaching program I had at that time. Like again,

great in terms of more money, but not so great in terms of more work that’s required of me. And what I noticed was tasks kept falling off my to-do list of like, I guess I don’t have to write a blog this week or I guess I don’t have to do that thing. Like I kept letting things go because I didn’t have time or capacity to do it all. So literally just hiring someone to

do the things I did not have to do, right? Obviously they can’t do therapy for me. They can’t do the coaching for me, but they can write my blogs for me. They can create a funnel for me. They can set up some automations for me. So that was huge for me, honestly. So when it comes to capacity, I want to define this because I think capacity gets confused with just being busy, right? Like we think about this white space, the white space that we’re all looking for. We all want to work less and I

I think a lot of how it’s being defined in social media, at least what I’m seeing is working less means less button seat time, right? Less live therapy, live coaching time. But capacity is not about how many hours you’re working. It’s not about, okay, now I’ve cut my caseload in half. Now I am doing a group program with all these calls instead of one-to-one calls. It’s not just about how many hours you work, it is about how much of your week.

Is spent on the things that actually require you, your brain, your clinical judgment, your voice, your decision making versus how much is spent on things that require a competent human with clear instructions. Right? Like for me, when I think about capacity, I’m not just looking at my calendar and my white space. I’m thinking about what is that white space look and feel like? Because I can have

Today, for example, I have three meetings. I have a coaching call. I met with Holly so we talked about business and business plans. And then I led a master class for an hour. And that’s only three meetings. Great. And I know that there are four to five hours in the day where I have to do things like record this podcast and draft some emails and check on some things with ads. Like there’s still things I’m doing. There’s things I’m thinking about. My brain is not off during that time.

Right. So even if you have more white space, if you are spending your limited working hours formatting a Canva graphic, manually sending the same onboarding email for the tenth time or tracking down a link you sent someone three days ago, like that’s not you being thorough. That’s not you just like, let me make sure all this stuff is getting done. That is again using your own expensive time to do

$25, $30, $35 an hour work, right? That is not the stuff you have to do. A lot of you have probably already been working on this. Maybe you have worked through this when it comes to your therapy fee. For some people, it feels huge to go from $100 an hour to $175 an hour, or then to move to $250 an hour. Like whatever your fee is, you had to do a lot of logistical and emotional work to kind of defend your fee, right? To say,

This is what I need to make. This is what I want to make. And this is how I’m like justifying it, right? For those of you who are like, well, I’m gonna raise my fee once I get that certif certificate or certification or whatever it is. some people have even gone back to school for a PhD so that they could raise their rates. So we’re thinking a lot about what our time, what our hour is worth, what we want to be paid for per hour, but then we’re doing things like Canva graphics and

responding to all DMs that we don’t have to s spend send. What am I trying to say? Respond to. right? That math doesn’t math. That math is not, you did not raise your therapy rate so that you could see less people so that you could work on camp graphics, right? Even if you love working on camera graphics, there are things I love doing tech wise in my business. It is so fun for me. I am, I’m not like a computer science techie person, but I like tech.

I like automations. I like creating things and setting them up and point and click and stuff like that. But that’s not my task to do. My task is be a therapist, be a coach. That those are my tasks. Anything where someone is not paying me $350 an hour for my therapy session fee. it’s hard to exactly tell what my coaching fee boils down to per hour because there’s, you know, I charge in a container format. So that’s a little bit harder to say, but it’s definitely more than.

a $35 an hour task that I pay one of my virtual assistants to do. So we really have to remember and again be cognizant of what is the thing only we can do and what do we want to be compensated for that versus when is it helpful to hire someone else to do that work. Like if I do my simple math of my therapy session fee one hour is $350, I can pay one of my virtual assistants

$35 an hour for 10 hours of work for that one hour. If I’m like, this will be really quick, I’ll just do it. And it takes me one hour. I could have paid a VA 10 hours to do more work for me, right? So the math is very much in your favor. And buying back your time isn’t a luxury for when you are big, right? Like, well, when I made it or when I start making X amount of money, that’s when I will hire those tasks out. Like,

Buying back your time is the thing that makes bigger possible in the first place. Because if you are a therapist who whether it is, I don’t want to say just, but you know, just scaling their solo practice, whether that’s a group or whether that’s diversifying, like I’m doing weekly and intensives and maybe assessments or whatever it is you’re doing, therapists are so ambitious. Whether that is your primary focus or whether you are scaling in the sense of adding a new arm of your business.

You already have you already are big, right? Like you cannot do the emotionally taxing work of being a therapist and then try to create a course when you’re burnt out, as well as try to maintain your relationships with significant others or children or friends or things like that. Like you are going to be burnt out capacity-wise, right? So when we do think about

How do you know you are actually ready for a virtual assistant versus like, I just had like that was just a rough week, right? Like this week was just hard because I was launching something or more people reached out than normal. Or I just had, you know, too many people reschedule and I got double booked because I’m out of office next week for vacation. It’s so easy to see things as one-time things as opposed to problems to be solved. But here is what I tell my coaching clients, which is you are probably ready.

For a virtual assistant, if you can say yes to most of these. You have consistent revenue coming in, even if it’s not huge, right? So you might just be having your consistent therapy revenue. If you’re not watching this podcast, if you’re just listening to it, my cat just crawled into my lap and she currently wears a vest. We’ve noticed it calms her down and keeps her from attacking some of the other cats because she gets feisty. So if you hear her purring in the mic.

And it’s because I have a cat in my lab right now. So if you have consistent revenue coming in each month, right? Again, this does not have to be huge. You don’t have to wait for a specific income goal. But if you can cover a couple hundred, a few hundred dollars a month for support, then you are ready for that support because again, they can do so many more tasks for a lesser amount than you doing that task yourself for what your therapy fee is.

If you are spending hours a week on tasks that don’t require your clinical judgment or your specific voice or whatever it is that you are doing, you are ready for a virtual assistant, right? Think you don’t have to be the one doing all the scheduling yourself. You don’t have to be the one doing inbox management. You can get a virtual assistant who is already trained in HIPAA compliant practices so that they, you know, are aware of PHI and stuff like that.

You can get someone already trained in that, or you can hire someone and buy a HIPAA training for twenty bucks and have them go through that. So you do not have to manage your inbox by yourself. You don’t have to repurpose your content from a blog into a reel into a I don’t know, Pinterest post. I feel like a lot of people are back on Pinterest these days. You do not have to be the one who is formatting things or doing data entry or any like basic customer service, especially if you start selling a course or digital product. Like

That does not have to be you doing all of those things. So you are definitely ready for virtual assistant if that is happening. If you’ve noticed you are avoiding growth opportunities, not because you don’t want them, but because you genuinely have nowhere to put them, that is a sign you need a virtual assistant. Right? If you would love to be on more podcasts to gain more exposure, but you don’t have time to do those, then we’ve got to offload some other tasks.

If you can’t go to a networking opportunity or a business retreat or whatever it is you want to do, if you keep saying no, because there are so many admin things you don’t have to do, but you are currently doing them, you’re definitely ready to hire some help. You are ultimately the bottleneck in your business, right? Like when we work in a service model, whether that’s one-to-one, whether you do group therapy or group coaching.

If you are the one doing everything, then things are always waiting on you. And things don’t always have to be waiting on you, especially the things that don’t actually need you. Like at some point, I hired my assistant. One of her very first tasks was take over my blog posts. And then we had it as a process of you write the blog post, I’ll review the blog post, you post it, you do the update on Google Business and Search Console and things like that.

But like at some point, I didn’t have to read the blog post, right? I had to train her what I want them to look like, what I want them to sound like, how they should be formatted for SEO and now AIO. But I don’t have to read those, right? I can give feedback on here’s what I want the topic to be about. Please write it about that. Let me know if you have questions. But again, I do not need to be the thing finalizing everything. And that does take trust, right? I would never do that first off. But one of the most helpful things I heard.

about hiring is you know don’t just think about delegating tasks think about delegating decision making right what is your definition of done because there is a difference between a Canva graphic that is just completed right it met the criteria but what is your definition of done when it has all the right little pieces of the template, your logo, it’s got the right calls of action, et cetera, et cetera.

Like those are all things, again, you can train someone to think like you. They’ll never think exactly 100% like you all the time, but you can train someone to take tasks fully off of your mental load list, as opposed to everyone’s, you know, someone’s doing something, but I’m still the one that has to approve of and finalize and post things. You can outsource a lot. So definitely need a virtual assistant that case.

And honestly, one of the biggest determinants of are you ready is if you are just so tired that when something exciting happens in your business and like you don’t feel excited, you’re feeling exhausted, again, you are burnt out and you you need help. Right. That was one of my biggest signs was I felt like I was just going through the motions of everything. And I didn’t want to just go through the motions. I wanted to actually feel excited. I wanted to love my business because that’s the whole, that’s the whole point, right? So if

That is you. If you’re saying yes to any of those things, you are not too early for support. Right. Now is exactly the time to get started with that. You can start with some VAs will do as low as five hours a month, right? You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to have them for hundreds of hours. It took me a while to scale to where I am today. My virtual assistant started at 20 hours a month because I had two businesses that needed supporting. And nowadays,

My coaching business specifically is so big. There’s so many different offers and we get so many emails and there’s so many things we’re doing. that across my therapy and coaching business, I have approximately, I think it’s about 150 hours of support a month. So I pay my team about what is that? It’s about 6,000 a month. with they’re at they’re all at different like pay structures. So it’s a lot, but like I don’t want to be working an extra $150 and an extra 150 hours per month.

So that is way worth it for me knowing where I can get that return by picking up another intensive or selling a coaching program or something like that. So you do not have to start huge, you do not have to start with a huge budget. So when you think about, okay, I’m small, but I need some support now. What is it that I hand off first? So when you think about those tasks, we want to think about what is anything repetitive and kind of rule-based.

So scheduling and calendar management, you probably have rules around that. There’s probably some repetitiveness around that. Email inbox sorting and drafting responses to common questions, a lot of that can be outsourced. There’s a lot that my team helps me with when it comes to inbox management because we get the same questions over and over again. So I do not need to respond to those. My team can help me draft responses and either if it’s a pretty frequently asked question that we always respond to in the same way, then they just full send.

Sometimes if it’s something a little bit more unique or complicated, they at least draft the response sent to me to approve or change, and then they can send it on my behalf. But repurposing a podcast episode or a workshop into social captions or show notes, that does not have to be something that you can do, updating a website or a sales page with copy you’ve already written, writing your blog posts, any kind of basic client onboarding, like sending welcome emails or intake paperwork or contracts.

Course access, whatever it is, all of these things that are simple repetitive tasks that again, anyone can do, those are the first things that you outsource. So again, notice what all of those things had in common, which is that none of them require you to be a licensed clinician, right? You might want to get some HIPAA training if you’re getting them involved with your therapy clients, but none of them require your specific clinical judgment. Or if someone is paying you for coaching, it doesn’t require coaching input.

Right. They just require clear instructions and a competent person to execute them. You are obviously not offsourcing therapy. You are not offloading strategy, but you need to hand off the 50 things surrounding those so that you are not just working so many hours, 60, 80 plus hour weeks, right? That is just not worth it. So I want to name the fears because I had every single one of them.

Right. Number one being, I can’t afford that. Right. I was like, I can’t afford that, or I want to keep all of my money. So I’ll just do all the things myself. And again, I’d ask you to actually run the math on what your hour is worth, what you could make in an hour, versus what a few hours of a week of support costs before you really assume that you can’t afford it. Like I said, with my $350 fee, I could hire someone 10 hours worth.

of tasks compared to my one hour where I could be making that money. So that that is not worth it to me, right? If someone else can get 10 hours of things done, very, very worth it. And I can definitely afford it. Most of the time it’s not actually that we can afford it. It’s that we haven’t really looked at the actual numbers. It’s that we don’t exactly understand what to hand off first, what to be doing. So it’s just worth taking a look at those numbers.

And then the second thing I hear is, well, I don’t have enough time, I don’t have enough to hand off. And again, I get that. There’s a lot of things I was protective of of okay, well, you can’t do this, or I don’t want you to do this. So what can I give you? But once I really started making a list of those repetitive rule-based tasks, my gosh, I could not give my virtual assistant enough. And then we we kept increasing her hours basically every month. It’s like, do you have another five hours you can give? Do you have another five hours you can give?

I put her like out of work. She stopped nannying because she was able to replace that income with the the fee that I was paying her. So you had just there are so many things you can hand off, especially if you’ve been in business for more than a few months. Like you have way more than enough to hand off. You just haven’t documented it because you’ve been the only one who’s ever needed to know what you’re doing. So even writing down like what am I doing in a given day.

Right. Okay. I wrote a blog. I sent three networking emails. I printed more business cards. Like all of that stuff can be done by someone else. The other biggest thing, which is so huge and is something I’ve had highs and lows with when it comes to hiring a virtual assistant, is, you know, well, I don’t trust anyone else to do it right, or no one’s gonna do it as good as I would. And this is very real. And again, it usually means you just haven’t hired for the right thing yet.

Or you haven’t given clear enough instructions, and both of those things are fixable, right? There are times where it is just generally a bad fit. I have had a bad fit virtual assistant. They were not dependable, they were late on things, they didn’t communicate about things. And that’s obviously, you know, you can’t just instruction someone to have better work ethic. Like at the end of the day, a portrait is a poor fit, and that’s fine. But if it is a matter of like,

Ugh, I’m always having to update this blog post, or I’m always having to give feedback on these social media things. Is it something that you can give better feedback on or be more kind of firm in terms of some of your feedback? my God, business and hiring a team brings up all of my attachment stuff. And I’ve talked with so many therapists about how it brings up theirs too, around, you know, how do we give feedback? How are we taken seriously? Do I feel like I matter?

But you can find team members who do honestly like care about you and want you to succeed and want to work with you long term. Again, I’ve worked with one of my VAs over three years, the other one over two years. Our most recent hire has been with us for like maybe seven or eight months at this point. So you can find good fixes out there. You want to learn how to screen for them. You want to learn how to train them the most efficiently, but

None of these fears ultimately are like stupid or like, it’s just a mindset issue I have to get over. It’s just you need strategy and you need support around how do I hire, how do I screen for good fit hire, how do I manage a team? And eventually you might grow to a place where you actually have what’s called an OBM, an online business manager, who manages the team for you. And then again, that’s another, that’s one more thing you do not have to manage. But none of the fears in and of themselves are reasons why you should keep doing this work alone.

So here’s what I want you to take from this episode. The number one thing that changed my ability to grow had again, literally nothing to do with a better offer or smarter marketing or getting better at selling. It was capacity. It was deciding that my time was worth protecting before I was quote unquote big enough to protect it. So if that’s something that you

kind of struggling with or thinking through. These are a lot of the conversations we have inside my Happy, Healthy, and Wealthy Therapist Mastermind. Literally, we have so many conversations about team support and how to know when to hire, when to fire, how to train, how to improve, how to expand, how to delegate so that these people, these therapists who do such great work in therapy and in their second businesses, so that they can continue to feel like they are actually doing great work.

And they can actually celebrate themselves, right? Again, that’s been the biggest thing for me is the more I offload, the more I feel stable, I guess, in my life. The less my mind. My mind is always gonna wander all over the place when it comes to business because ADHD. but it at least helps me to feel like and excited. There’s all this stuff on my brain, as opposed to I’m overwhelmed, there’s all this stuff on my brain. So

If you are looking to expand, if you’re looking for support with all of that, go ahead and check out the details in the show notes about the mastermind. We are closing enrollment soon, but there is still space in this August cohort that I have. So feel free to check out the information, submit an application, and let’s meet for a call to just chat more. But otherwise, thanks for listening to the Happy, Healthy, and Wealthy Therapist podcast, and I will see you on the next episode.