Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 64: Should You Wait Until Your Practice Is Full to Scale?

Released: 10/30/2026

Show Notes:

Amanda is heading into her yearly reflection season. This time she starts with a decision: after the November cohort, she’s pausing the HHW Mastermind so she isn’t launching it every three months. That leads into the story of the first coaching program she joined, which worked on paper but left her running a business she didn’t like until she burned it down and started over. She explains why blueprint programs leave so many therapists feeling burned and why she chooses long-term coaching relationships. Her closing advice for anyone choosing their next program: look past the deliverables, and ask whether you want to work with this person and whether you’ll show up for the support.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. There is no universal rule that says you must wait until your therapy practice is full before scaling, because full means something different for everyone and there are many ways to expand income that build naturally on what you are already doing.
2. Trying to market two businesses at full speed simultaneously with limited time and no team support is one of the fastest paths to burning out and drawing the wrong conclusion that you personally are not capable of making it work.
3. You do not have to do everything yourself to scale successfully, and accepting that you can give 60 or 70 percent to two things rather than 100 percent to everything is the mindset shift that actually makes building both a therapy practice and a second income stream feel sustainable.

Connect with Amanda:

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

This episode is sponsored by:

• Alma – learn more here
• Jane – use code: AMANDA2MO for a 2-month grace period

Resources & Links:

• Join the next cohort of the Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Mastermind – we kick off November 3rd!
• Therapist Scaling Intensive – 4-hour on-demand scaling workshop
• The Wealthy & Worthy Retreat – Vancouver, CA, June 2027
• Click here for more resources & links

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Transcript:

Amanda Buduris (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Happy Healthy and Wealthy Therapist Podcast. I have been talking with a lot of therapists in the past couple of weeks about my scaling mastermind. And there’s this question that keeps coming up that I thought would be helpful to bring to the podcast, regardless of if people join my mastermind or not, because I think that everyone has mixed views on what the quote unquote right answer is here. And what that question is, is

Should I wait to scale? You know, should I fill my therapy practice up? Whatever full means to me if that’s a certain amount of hours per week, if that’s a certain amount of clients per week, whether that’s a mix of weekly plus intensives. So should I wait till my therapy practice is good before I choose to scale? Or when should I start scaling, right? Like if I want to have X amount of therapy clients on my caseload and I also want to.

sell courses or host retreats or whatever it is. Like essentially, I think what some people are looking for is this permission of like you’re good, you’re ready. And I’m gonna give everyone’s favorite it depends answer, which I’m gonna d dissect a little bit more too, because truly like everything is always gonna depend on your needs, right? Your needs and your wants. Your wants are really important here too, obviously. But when we think about

What is your full, right? Someone’s full practice depending on what’s going on at home. If you have a partner who helps with, you know, the primary income, or, you know, that’s just not as stressful for you. You don’t have children, you don’t have debt, you know, your full might just be like, I need to take care of some basic needs and save for retirement. Great, awesome. And how you get to that full depends. How many weekly clients do you need? How many intensive clients do you need?

But your full might also be such that, you know, I just need X amount of income coming in per month to contribute to my household, and we’re all good after that. So when it comes to, I’ve heard some advice out there of do not scale, do not look into diversifying your revenue until you have a full practice or maybe until at least you’re 80% full. And I don’t in a black and white way agree with that.

Because, you know, number one, again, full is different for everyone. But number two, there are so many ways to earn income out there as a therapist that are related to therapy and that are completely non-related to therapy. So whether you’re a therapist who can offer CEUs or do trainings or wants to coach other therapists or, you know, coach an entirely other different population, there are so many skills that you can offer someone that

I remember a therapist I was working with a couple of years ago was like, my SEO is doing great for bringing people in for my specific thing, but my niche is so niche and there’s not a lot of people that offer it, that I am getting clients from, you know, potential clients from out of state saying, can we work together? And because of licensure laws and restrictions, we can’t. So is it time for me to actually start looking into coaching, even though, right?

Even though my caseload is not full by the standard definition of full, is that okay? Is that what’s going to work for me? And we had this conversation around, you know, it sounds like in some ways you are actually actively turning away money right now because you’ve been following this guidance of you’re supposed to wait till X until you can expand and add coaching. And so ultimately that therapist decided to add coaching and take on some coaching clients. Obviously, it’s very

important if that’s something that you’re interested in and that you want to do that you get the right kind of consultation and guidance around how do you separate your therapy practice from a coaching practice, et cetera, et cetera. But I think that that happens to so many therapists who either, you know, want to do a different type of work with their ideal therapy client. Like you might work with a specific type of client where you really see the benefit of a couple’s retreat or an individual healing retreat or

You know, if I could just get these people in a room together, but I’m licensed in forty-three plus states if you’re a CyPact member, and not everyone’s in one state. So like now what am I supposed to do? Like, can it be a therapy group or can it be a coaching group? Like there’s just so many, again, opportunities and potential for what therapists can do that I don’t think it’s fair to assume everyone needs to follow the same roadmap of wait till X happens.

before you why. And in this case, that’s wait until your therapy caseload is full until you scale. So some things to think about in this conversation because what I’m not saying is, okay, make sure like you got two therapy clients and then go ahead and start scaling. You might want to think about a couple different things. So number one, when it comes to your therapy practice, is your practice at least generally meeting your basic financial needs right now?

Because I think that’s really, really important. And for a lot of therapists, that answer is no. And that’s either because they are working a network and not getting a rate that they feel fairly compensated for or that just isn’t matching their financial needs. Or, you know, they want to set their rate to something exciting and kind of terrifying, like 225 or 250, but their marketing isn’t matching. They’re not finding the right type of people who can pay those rates. So there are some genuine times where it does make sense of

Yes, could you add on, you know, let me create a course, let me create a digital product, let me try to get brand deals. But those things do take work, right? That is ultimately the biggest I don’t want to say that it’s a con, but I do think Amanda three and a half years ago had no idea how much work it was to diversify my income. I was like, yeah, just add coaching. And like, yeah, that’s true. I did quote unquote just add coaching.

But there was a lot of tech and a lot of systems and a lot of different marketing strategies that I had to learn that were very, very different from what I’m doing with my therapy practice. Because my therapy practice genuinely runs on SEO, AIO website stuff. That is all I do. If someone says I was referred to you by X and X, I’m like, no, you weren’t. I don’t know that person. So they found me on Google or they found me with AI Search. So when it comes to your

therapy practice, you want to make sure that that is generally filling enough of your needs. And then this really does come down to, I don’t want to say like financial budget, but at least financial plan and financial stretchiness. Because I don’t think it’s about comfort. I think there’s not a lot that we do with full financial comfort, right? Every decision, every time we invest in something, it does feel risky. So as you are thinking about, okay, I want to create a course, I want to host retreats,

Well, you have to learn where to do that. Whether you are paying a coach or consultant, whether you’re buying a course or a workbook or whatever it is, like you are probably paying to learn something from someone because AI is gonna have its limits, people. AI can give you a lot of information and it’s gonna have its limits. And beyond that, the getting the information part, there’s the implementation part. So when it comes to implementing, okay, so you want to host a retreat.

What’s the price of hosting that retreat? What’s the price of reserving the accommodation space? What’s the price of marketing? What’s the price of the food? Are you getting gift bags when you think about hosting a course? Okay, how long is it going to take me to film that course? What technology and platforms do I have to use to host that course? And again, you’re paying for a course course hosting thing. You’re probably now paying for email marketing. Are you marketing with ads or social media? So there’s work to be done with that.

And if you’re at a stage right now where it’s like, I want to do that one day, but my brain is already exploding with the 17 different things I’m trying to do to market my therapy practice. Again, there’s not a right or wrong here, but it takes intentionality in making that decision. Because if you are gonna say, okay, yeah, I’m okay with splitting my attention, I’m okay with I’ve got seven therapy clients, but I want to really go all in on this digital product, that’s fine and great, but do not expect yourself

To market two businesses a hundred percent with the limited capacity that you probably have, because you’re probably stretching yourself thin, trying to work on two businesses at once. I will say that’s probably one of the biggest things that I’ve seen therapists struggle with inside my mastermind, inside my therapy intensives academy program, is just trying to do way too much at once.

Right. There’s something to be said for, okay, if you’re focusing on the therapy practice, let’s do, let’s do a little sprint where we are focusing on SEO and how do we improve that? Let’s work on some blog strategy. Let’s get everything up and running and focus just on that. But when you’re focused on that, what you’re not doing is trying to go viral on your coaching account so that you can get some sales that way. Because it’s just not gonna happen. Like at some point, we need to accept the trade-off of.

We can’t do everything at once. And if we want to do more, if we want to make more progress on things, the biggest thing ultimately that we have is either our time or our money to give. So are you willing to work 80 hour weeks? I’m not, so I’m not doing that. Or are you willing to spend $600 a month on a virtual assistant who can help you with writing your blogs and answering some emails and putting together a funnel for your freebie opt-in? If you are comfortable with that, okay.

Great. So now you can make momentum in the way that you’re hoping to without you having to work 60 to 80 hour weeks. So that is something important to consider how do I focus in on the thing I need to focus in on, the thing I want to focus in on. And I work with a lot of therapists who are trying to add intensives, trying to book private pay clients while also trying to launch a coaching business. And the ones who

don’t make momentum in the way that they want to make momentum, aren’t doing it because they’re trying to do everything on their own and everything all at once. And I think what’s really dangerous there is honestly and truly, you can end up overspending your money and feeling way too stretched thin. Because now you are I can’t think of a good metaphor for this. I probably should have. I’m not one of those therapists that’s really good at thinking about metaphors on the spot, but it’s kind of like if you

Have all these, all these eggs and all these different baskets, and all of a sudden all the the chicks start hatching and you don’t know which one hatched first. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with this, guys. I’m coming up with this live on the spot. if you don’t know which chick was hatching first, you may not know which one needs your attention first, right? So what that practically means here is if you are putting a bunch of effort into SEO and you’re not seeing anything come out of that, then you go to, okay, well, I need to

Hire a Google Ads expert. Let me hire some money. Let me put money towards ads. Let me do that. And clients still aren’t coming in. So you’re like, okay, it’s the SEO that’s not working. And it’s like, mm-hmm, maybe it’s the Google ads that aren’t working. It’s like, mm-hmm, if you just don’t, if you’re doing too much and you can’t pinpoint what the right problem is, which generally what I work with, because I help so many therapists with SEO and AIO marketing, I know that if visibility is not the problem, then it’s the conversion that’s the problem, which is either

Your copywriting is not good. Your copywriting is not where it needs to be. Your user experience is not where it should be to easily get a client to not only find you, see that you’re the best fit, but then how do I contact you? Right? Is this is it a contact form? Is it a calendar link? Is it an email? You want me to text you? Like if there’s not a clear path to booking, right? Then people aren’t going to book and to reach out. And I will say this, even for my own practice.

On weeks when I am very busy, my therapy practice, not super busy. It’s the busy I need it to be. But there are some weeks in my coaching business where I’m very busy. I’ve got a lot of one-to-one calls, I got a lot of group calls, maybe I’m doing a presentation or a coaching intensive, or I’m doing something, and there’s not a lot of availability on my calendar. And then all of a sudden, my therapy email account gets flooded with secure contact forms that are like, I’m trying to book an appointment, but I see no availability on your calendar.

Right, because there’s no availability on my calendar. So that is slowing down my conversion process because the path to booking got a little bit more complicated now. Now they have to email me, they have to wait for me or my assistant to email them back. We have to go back and forth on well, what about this day in time? It’s not ideal, right? But for me, that’s not a problem because my therapy practice is where it needs to be. I just keep opening still for intensives. I’m not looking for weekly or bi-weekly clients at this point. So

If you’ve got again, your attention is in too many different places. I’m working on too many different things at once, then we don’t know where to stop the leak in the bucket, right? I probably should have said something about a leak in a bucket, not about chicks and hatching in baskets. I don’t know what I’m doing here. But if we don’t know how to tend to the right problem, that’s where we start making problems about our problems, right? That is when the therapist who is trying to grow their practice and grow their alternative streams of income.

That’s when they burn out. That’s when they get defeated. That’s when they think, I just suck and this coaching program burned me and I’m clearly not gonna be capable of doing anything ever. And then consider going back to, you know, W-2 work is not a bad thing, right? Private practice is not superior in any way. But that’s where people decide, maybe I’m just gonna go back and be employed by someone else because it can be easier in a lot of ways, right? You’re not marketing yourself if you’re a W-2 employee. So that is something to think about.

Is where is my capacity and can I let myself focus on just one thing? Because you can build both, right? Do some work on your therapy practice, work on the SEO, work on the AIO, let it build in the background and wait for clients to come. Then that might be you wait for two weeks, you might wait for two months, and then stop touching it. Stop touching the therapy practice and trust that it’ll be fine, and then move your eyes over into whatever it is that you want to scale.

So that is one option. Number two, then, I think comes into this question around are you ready to scale a different offer? Or are there ways that you can scale within your therapy practice first so that you fix this time problem and this money problem? So that’s where I started talking with people about therapy intensives, right? Because you already know how to do therapy. You’re doing all the same marketing strategies of how you would market an intensive and how you would market just a

I don’t want to say just a, but you know, your weekly therapy sessions. Some marketing needs to be a little bit different, especially if you’re trying to try to charge a premium fee for it, but you still have a website, you’re probably still networking, you don’t need to buy a course hosting platform, you probably don’t need to do email marketing. So it is easier in some ways to start with intensives. And they can again fix your income problem and they can fix the time problem if you are charging more per hour and therefore seeing less clients.

Right. So that might be a place for someone to start if they know that they want to scale. And usually when people say, I want to scale, it’s I want to scale my income. And that’s something to really think about. And it doesn’t have to just be intensives. I know a lot of therapists who do group therapy because therapy groups can be really profitable if you’re charging a hundred, a hundred and fifty dollars per member and you’ve got like four to eight members, what you’re making in 60 to 90 minutes now, astronomical.

In some ways it can be more than a therapy intensive. So there’s still ways to scale your therapy practice revenue without going into a group practice. That’s something I know nothing about. It’s something I have no capacity to even learn about. But there’s ways that you can scale that if that’s where you feel like that’s where my time and my energy needs to be. But again, right? Up to you to make that decision of what ultimately works for you, what feels good for you.

A lot of the therapists that I work with in my mastermind tend to be people who are pretty good at the therapy practice part, right? Like they’re full for what full means for them. And what they’re focused on is how do I make my therapy practice be the revenue that pays for my basic needs, right? It pays my rent, my mortgage, my car, student loans, credit card debt, whatever it is. That takes care of my basic needs. And then my scaling things are the thing that

Hello, kitty, are the thing that really, you know, put me above and beyond in terms of paying down that debt faster, paying down the mortgage faster, paying down my student loans faster, helping me to actually save for retirement. So that’s really helpful to think about what is your intent with the thing that you are trying to scale, right? Is it because you want therapy and your therapy caseload to feel more manageable and more sustainable? Is it because

You like me have ADHD and you want to do 15 different things at any given point in time. Is it because you just feel kind of limited by what you can do in your therapy practice? Is it because you want to move the fuck out of the United States at some point because, my god, it’s a hot mess. I just filled out my ballot form for the November 3rd elections here.

Is it because right you want to move out of here because you want some more flexibility and you know that therapy is it’s always gonna kind of be a little sticky? Like, yes, you as an out-of-pocket provider generally are fine. Sometimes out of network is a little bit more tricky for sure. Insure in network with insurance is tricky or maybe impossible. I don’t know much about that because I’m not in network with insurance. But there’s probably a lot of reasons why you are looking towards scaling. And really it comes back to this question around.

What do I have time and capacity for? Do I want to be my version of full first? Or do I have capacity or do I have some money where I can again hire a virtual assistant to help me earn back some capacity to work on both at once? And can I accept that working both on both at once does not mean that I’m giving a hundred percent to each one all the time?

And this happens all the time with me, even in my practice, where, you know, if I just get trained in something like ketamine assisted therapy, yeah, I’m taking the trainings for that. I’m updating my website on that. I change some of my forms around in my EHR Jane, but I’m working like 25% on that. And then I go back to focusing on everything else in the coaching business. Right. Like me working on both businesses at the time.

At the same time, does not mean I’m doing everything myself. It’s my virtual assistants who help with the blogs. They help with posting on Google Business. Y’all, I have not touched my psychology today in I don’t know how long. It’s probably been like a year and a half. And I just got a therapy-intensive clam from it a couple of weeks ago. So you do not have to do it all. And I think that when it comes to scaling, that is one of the biggest things that most therapists really need to not just learn, but embody.

You have to let go of some amount of control or you will burn out and your therapy practice isn’t gonna be where you want it to be. And the thing you’re trying to scale with isn’t where you’re gonna want it to be. Right. All you’re gonna know is that you’re gonna feel stretched thin, you’re gonna feel miserable, and you’re gonna make this in untrue conclusion that it’s something about you, right? That you can’t make it, that you’re too late to the game, that you know, this it just isn’t possible for you, which is just not true.

It just means we have to let go of something, right? We have to stop saying yes to everything. We have to start saying no to more things, and we have to be a lot more flexible with ourselves about what can I say yes to, what can wait, and what is a complete no for now. So again, everyone’s situation is going to be super different in terms of time, capacity, interests, your why, whether therapy practices, your main income and the

I don’t want to call it side hustle because that kind of diminishes it. But whether the side thing is, you know, the fun money or is that flipped around? Does therapy become the fun money and your primary thing become, you your main source of income? So really, really helpful before you just jump into anything to think about your why, to get the support that you need, whether that is from a coach, whether that’s from a virtual assistant or both, and you know, just

Be intentional about it again and again. That’s what I always come back to is why am I doing this thing? Because you can scale income in a lot of different ways as a therapist. If you’re trying to diversify, there’s probably a reason for it around unmet needs, interests that you’re not tapping into, skills you’re not tapping into, and how do I think about? I can do both, but I can’t do both at 100%, and that’s okay. Right? So I hope that that was helpful. I felt a little bit rambly.

that is the ADHD. I’m also filming this at 7 p.m., which normally I don’t do, but I needed to get it done. And that is the trade-off of doing 15 million things is sometimes I mean, I took a lot of time off of work today. I was out for a training, I ended early, and so I’m coming back to work. I don’t always work till seven o’clock at night. I don’t ever work till seven o’clock at night. This is it’s always I gotta come back and record the podcast because my podcasts, what would you call them? Editor.

needs to edit the podcast on time for this podcast come out on time. So that is why I’m doing that. But really think about again your why, what is it you want to do and who can help you? Because even if you’re like me and look like you’re doing it all, I know I look like I’m doing it all. I guarantee you I am not the person running every single aspect of my business. If you have emailed me, you know that my online business manager Holly is going to answer you before I will because

I can’t manage my inbox where we get hundreds of emails a day. And a lot of them are marketing and a lot of spam. Anyway, I’m gonna go down a whole other separate rabbit hole. And instead, I’m going to wrap up this episode with again an invitation of if you are really thinking about whether it’s time to scale your therapy practice, you want to do some new things there. You want to expand that income first before you look towards diversifying outside of your therapy practice.

My Therapy Intensive Academy would be a great fit for you to learn about how to market, sell, and actually book premium fee therapy clients. And if you have already done that, or if you’re like, no, I don’t want, I don’t want more therapy sessions. I actually just want to scale with coaching, retreats, brand deals, whatever that might be, then that might be a good fit for my happy, healthy, and wealthy therapist mastermind, which is closing doors November 3rd.

that’s when our first group call is going to be. So there is still time to join. For those of you who have been on the fence, DM me. I do respond to all my DMs. Sometimes you will get my annoying many chat automations, but I will get in there. and then usually I just unsend them to unclutter the messaging boards. But I will respond to your messages if I haven’t in a timely way. Bump again. Again, I get a lot of DMs too. So just do not feel like you are annoying me because you are asking questions. But you can DM me, you can email me if it’s a

Basic logistical question, my girl Holly will probably answer you first. And if not, I will get back to you as I have a moment to. But thank you so much for listening today. I hope this was helpful for you to think about if you are questioning, should I scale my therapy practice first or should I look towards scaling outside of therapy, if that’s what works best for me. Thanks for listening today, everyone. I will talk with you next week. Bye.