Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 50: The Marketing Mistake Killing Your Private Pay Practice

Released: 8/14/2026

Show Notes:

Most therapists change their fee, go out of network, maybe build out a specialized offer, and then wonder why inquiries aren’t converting the way they should. Amanda’s argument in this episode is that the clinical work changed, the business model changed, but the marketing never got the memo. She breaks down what clients paying premium fees out of pocket are actually looking for, why warm and generic doesn’t answer any of their real questions, and what has to shift before the marketing and the fee start working together.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. Marketing an in-network practice and marketing a premium private pay practice are fundamentally different skills, and if your website still reads like a Psychology Today profile while your fee says premium, your marketing and your price are having two completely different conversations.
2. Private pay clients are not deciding between you and the next name on a list; they are deciding whether to spend hundreds of dollars on you instead of doing nothing at all, and warm generic safe space language does not answer a single question that decision requires.
3. The gap between your premium fee and your marketing results is almost never an offer problem; it is a language problem, a mindset problem, and a skill nobody in grad school or supervision ever actually taught you.

Connect with Amanda:

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Transcript:

Amanda Buduris (00:00)
Okay, here’s a question I want you to sit with for a second before we even fully get into the episode. I know I’m coming in hot today. if someone landed on your website right now, could they tell whether you’re an in-network practice or a premium private pay practice? Just from how it’s written, just from the words on the page. Something that I see constantly in my coaching work is there are therapists who have made the leap, they’ve gone.

Out of network, they’ve raised their fees, maybe they’ve built out intensives or a specialized premium offer. The clinical work changed, the business model changed, the fee changed, but the marketing, the marketing never got the memo, the marketing did not change. So that’s what I’m talking about in today’s episode. Welcome back to the Happy Health Fee and Wealthy Therapist Podcast. Today we are going to talk about what I think is one of the most expensive blind spots in private practice right now, which is

Marketing a premium fee practice and marketing an in-network practice are not the same skill. They are not even the same sales conversation. And most therapists are still using their old playbook without realizing it’s the wrong one. Let’s start with what’s actually happening underneath these two models, because I don’t think we talk about this honestly enough.

When you are in network, the insurance company already made the biggest decision for your client before they ever found you. The price is set, it’s covered, or it’s a copay. And either way, the client already knows what they’re paying before they’ve read a word of your bio, right? They probably hardly ever read your website even. So what are they actually deciding when they’re looking at your website or your psychology today profile? They’re deciding things like, does this person have an opening?

Do they take my specific plan of this health insurance? Do they specialize in something close enough to what I’m dealing with? Do they seem safe? That’s kind of it. And that’s a pretty low stakes decision for the client. They’re not weighing whether therapy is worth the money because the money question already got answered by their insurance card. Now, flip it. A private pay client, someone considering a

premium offer an intensive, a specialized program, whatever it is you’re charging real money for out of pocket, that person is not making a low-stakes decision. They are deciding whether to spend $300, $500, sometimes thousands of dollars on you specifically, instead of using that money on literally anything else in their life, instead of a vacation, instead of a different provider who takes their insurance, instead of just

You know, not getting help at all. So an insurance client is deciding between you and the next name on the list. A private pay client is deciding between you and maybe one other person, but maybe doing nothing at all. And again, I know we don’t like thinking about therapy as sales, but it is kind of sales, right? Consult calls are kind of sales calls, and these are not.

The same sale, and they were never going to respond to the same marketing. You have different clients, you have different market research that needs to be done. So here is where it starts to get expensive. Most of us built our marketing instincts back when we were in network, or we built them by copying other therapists who were in network because.

It’s just the water that private practice swims in, right? So the instincts we default to sound like this: Be warm, be safe, don’t be salesy, list your specialties, wait for the referral or the directory search to bring someone to you. Every single one of those instincts makes sense for an insurance-based decision. And every single one of those instincts actively works against you.

when someone needs to justify a premium fee to themselves. Think about it from the client side for a second. If I’m about to pay you privately out of pocket for something significant, I am not just asking, does this person seem nice? I am asking, why you? Why is this worth it? What actually happens if I do this? Am I going to regret this financially? Is there proof that this works or am I the guinea pig here?

A warm, generic, safe space for healing kind of message does not answer a single one of those questions. Right? It’s really built to reassure someone whose financial risk was already handled by someone else, right? Again, the insurance company. And this is the part that I think stings a little for a lot of therapists. So, really, just to put this bluntly and directly, if your website

still reads like a psychology today profile and you’re trying to charge $200, $250, $300 plus a session, your marketing and your fee are having two different conversations. Your fee is saying, I’m a premium specialized service. Your marketing is saying, I’m a safe generalist option. Please pick me off this list. Your potential client can feel that mismatch, even if they can’t name it.

And a lot of the time it’s why your inquiry doesn’t convert, even though on paper, you might be actually a really great fit for them. So I want to pause here because some of you are probably like, okay, yeah, this is literally what’s happening to me. My premium spots are not feeling the way that they should. And I want to be clear about something else because I think this gets misunderstood a lot. This is not just, this is not at all what I want you to hear from this episode today.

This is not a go redo your website problem. You can have the prettiest website in your niche and still not book a single intensive, a single client above a certain fee, because a pretty website was never the thing standing between you and a premium fee caseload. This is a marketing problem and it is a mindset problem. It’s about knowing what to actually say to who and being able to say it.

without, you know, making yourself feel small, without apologizing. And that is a completely different skill set than just like picking a nice template. We literally just kind of had this conversation in my Therapy Intensives Academy program earlier today during one of my group calls of what do you say when you get on a consultation call and someone is like, Why is your fee so high? Why are you charging this? Like, okay, was there a marketing mismatch? Was that

Sometimes no matter how great our marketing is, some people are not gonna read your website. It’s really, really sad for how much time therapists spend handwriting their websites. But you know, sometimes that is gonna happen. And so that gap between I wanna set a premium fee, I wanna be making X amount per hour, and here’s how I’m marketing myself, right? If you have that mismatch, if it’s not aligned, if it is just not working for you.

That is exactly why I built my Therapy Intensives Academy program. And this was not ever just going to be a program about like how to have a nicer online presence. It is about how you actually market and book intensives and higher price sessions overall. It’s what words do you use? How do you position it? How do you convey confidence both on the page and during the consult call, the whole thing so that people say yes to the fee you are charging? And right now.

Therapy Intensive Academy is on sale through, it’s a week from today from when I’m recording, but it’s through August 19th. So you’re gonna hear a lot about it, but I’m gonna get back to the episode. I want to get into why this gap exists in the first place, because I don’t think it is a personality flaw or some kind of confidence issue, the way a lot of us assume it might be. Nobody trained us to talk about money or results with confidence.

Right? Think about grad school. Think about your experience. Think about your supervision hours. Nobody sat you down and said, Here’s how you explain to a client what your fee is, what it is. Here’s how you talk about outcomes without overpromising. Here’s how you make a financial case for your own work. None of that ever happened to me. The one time I got talked to about fees was.

Make sure that your clients know if they don’t come to their session, there’s a $25 no-show or late cancellation fee. And that was actually pretty low. Group practices might do that a little bit differently. I’ve only worked in college counseling centers for both my graduate training and my graduate or post-grad career. So that’s low. I don’t know, maybe you all might have had to have conversations about a higher fee, but that was literally it, right? Otherwise, if

you worked at a group practice or if you’ve taken insurance yourself before, again, insurance kind of did that talking for us, right? The client was probably calling their insurance to confirm their benefits, or they get one of those EOBs, an explanation of benefits. That does the explaining of, you know, this was your cost, this is what we covered, this is what you owe if anything. So the copay does more of the justifying, right? It’s more about, well, these are your benefits and like this is just what it is.

We did our part, we covered our part, you never had to have any of those conversations. And so now when you go premium fee, you aren’t just literally going onto your web page, t deleting a number or two or three and adding one or two or three numbers. You’re not just changing something digitally. You are changing a skill that you were never taught in a business context.

Most of us never wanted to think about too hard because when we went into this field to do clinical work, we thought it was all about the clinical work, right? And I know if you were like me, I thought like, I’m just gonna do clinical work forever. I thought I was gonna work in a college counseling center forever because I like the population, I like the work. And then I realized, my gosh, I cannot stay here for the rest of my working career. So we are in this because we love being therapists. We’re not in this because we wanna think about sales and have conversations about money.

Can we grow in that skill? Yes, a lot of us have, and a lot of us maybe still will always have a level of I don’t love having these conversations, but at least we can do it and we feel better overall. So again, this is not about becoming pushy or salesy. This is not about turning into someone that you’re not. That fear is actually a huge part of why this gap of marketing and achieving a premium fee exists.

Because a lot of therapists would rather leave a premium spot empty than say something that feels the teeniest bit quote unquote salesy. So they again default back to this safe, vague, in-network style language, even though it’s not doing its job anymore. Meanwhile, your caseload isn’t filling. The premium offer just kind of like sits there. And a lot of therapists just come to this conclusion that.

Well, you know, the price is just too high for everyone, or no one just wants to pay me that, or this isn’t gonna work in my area. Maybe this is just for people who do this niche and not that niche. When really it’s not the offer. That’s the problem. the marketing is

Still speaking the wrong language for the price tag attached to it. That is truly the problem here. And we just had this conversation earlier today in my coaching call of, you know, sometimes too, like if you know your ideal client and your ideal client’s pain points, you are going to talk to them about your premium fee, your specific offer differently. You are not going to talk to

A 33-year-old single woman, the same way you’re gonna talk to a 56-year-old married man who’s never been to therapy. So your marketing does have to be elevated and it has to be specific and it has to reflect what it is that you do and how you do it, and that you’re confident in doing that. And there’s one more layer to this that I wanna name because it is not just about words on the page, it is about where these clients.

Who are okay with, who are open to paying premium rates, where are they even looking for therapy in the first place? And an in-network client, someone who needs to use their insurance, prefers to use their insurance, they’re often going to be searching in a directory or scrolling their insurance company’s provider list, or maybe even ask their doctor for a name. They’re searching within a closed system built around insurance. A private pay client.

Looking for something that is for them, they usually search very, very differently. They are searching for a specific outcome, a specific problem, a specific kind of help they haven’t found anywhere else. They are doing more research. They are reading your web pages longer. They’re looking for evidence that you understand their exact situation, not just that you are a licensed, credentialed warm.

Provider, right? They need more from you than that. So if your content, your website, your bio on your website are all still built for the directory search version of a client, you are essentially invisible to the client who’s actually doing the deeper kind of research that leads to being okay with paying premium fees out of pocket.

It’s not because you are not good at what you do. This is not what this is. You don’t suck at being a clinical provider. You do not suck at marketing. You just are kind of standing in the wrong aisle for the person who’s shopping, right? Like you need to get into a different aisle. You need to learn a different way to market. And so here is what I want you to sit with after this episode. I’m not gonna give you a to-do list or a framework, just a question. Go look at your own marketing right now. Look at your website.

Look at your bio specifically. If you have either like an intake page, contact page, whatever it is, whatever your potential client sees first, go to that page and ask yourself very, very honestly, does this sound like it belongs to the fee that I’m charging? Or is it still speaking the language of a system I’m not even in anymore? Or I don’t want to be, or I’m trying to step outside of?

Because that gap is so, so real. It is one of the most frequent pieces of feedback that I’m giving therapists. And I say, like, if this is what you want to charge, this is what you have to do. You have to add more pages, you have to add more credibility, you have to do the SEO stuff, the AIO stuff, you have to show up like you do commend and demand a premium fee. And that takes work to do, but the work is so, so worth it. It took me so long.

To put my own private practice website together when I did it the right way. But now I haven’t touched it in a really long time. I add blogs to it. Well, my virtual assistant adds blogs to it, but you do not have to do this type of work forever, but you do have to set the proper foundation in order for this to truly work. So the gap is real. It is costing therapists premium clients every single day. These clients who are willing to pay premium fee. And again,

Not because you’re not doing good work, but because the marketing might still be just not where it needs to be. And just to say it one more time, because I really don’t want this to land, is just go fix your website. It’s not about a website. It’s not even really about a longer session block or a higher number on your fee schedule. It is about learning how to actually market and book, whether it’s therapy intensives or higher price sessions, with confidence, the mindset and the marketing behind the offer.

not just the offer itself, right? You can’t just again delete and add some numbers and be like all good. And you can’t just add in some web pages that talk about why you know your stuff and be like all good. Everything has to match and everything internally has to shift to. Because if now your website reads as a premium site, now your clients are like, this person must be amazing. Of course I want to work with them. And they’re going to meet with you on a console call and be like,

What the heck happened? If that was not who I thought it was gonna be, obviously that’s not good. So this is mindset work, this is marketing work. And that’s exactly what I teach inside the Therapy Intensives Academy. And again, it is on sale right now, 46% off through August 19th, with some very cool bonuses that I’m very excited about. The link is in the show notes, and I would love to have you inside if you’re not already inside. Thank you so much for listening. I’m gonna be bringing another episode to you on Monday as a part of my brief little

Sprint series. We’re bringing in some extra episodes this week outside of the normal Fridays. So I will be in your ear on Monday and have a good weekend. Reach out to me if you have any questions about joining TIA. And thanks so much for listening in today.