Can therapists make money hosting workshops? The short answer is yes. Workshops can be a really useful additional income stream for therapists. They allow us to take knowledge we already have and deliver it to more than one person at a time.
A good workshop can also be a lot more than just a money-making exercise. It can build your reputation, grow your audience, introduce people to your work, generate therapy or coaching enquiries, and help you understand what your audience actually needs.
The long answer is a little more complex. Let’s get into it…
What Kinds of Workshops Can Therapists Offer?
There are lots of possibilities, depending on your expertise and who you want to work with.
1. One-Off Educational Workshops/Masterclasses
These can be relatively short — perhaps 40–90 minutes — and focus on one very specific problem or outcome. Generally, I think you can charge up to £100 for these, depending on the audience, subject, and what else is included. Increasingly, I think people appreciate shorter teaching with really useful resources rather than sitting through three hours of Zoom.
Examples might be:
Understanding panic attacks and what maintains them
An introduction to intrusive thoughts
Understanding OCD and ERP
Managing worry
Improving communication in relationships
Understanding perfectionism
Supporting an anxious child
Managing burnout
Compassionate approaches to self-criticism
2. Skills-Based Workshops
With this format, people leave knowing how to do something rather than simply knowing more about a subject. These workshops often have a very clear proposition: ‘By the end of this workshop, you will be able to…’
3. Spotlight Programmes
These tend to be a more intensive four to five-week programme built around one outcome. My Getting Started in Private Practice programme is a good example of this. It takes people from wanting to start a practice to having the foundations of one in place.
4. Teaching Other Therapists
Your clinical or professional expertise can become CPD: risk, OCD, trauma, EMDR, working with particular client groups, private practice, supervision, documentation, contracting or another specialist area.
5. Corporate Workshops
Don’t forget other organisations. There’s a whole B2B market for corporate workshops, half/full-day training, and lunch-and-learns on topics such as stress, burnout, mental health, difficult conversations, psychological safety and managing anxiety at work. Find out who is responsible for training events, ask HR, and put forward some ideas for them to consider.
This isn’t Passive Income
You won’t find me presenting workshops as an easy route to ‘passive income’. In my experience, creating the workshop is often the easy bit. Getting the right people into the room is where the challenging part.
Who Are You Going to Sell It To?
This is the bit people tend to overlook. You can create the best workshop in the world, but if nobody knows about it, it won’t sell.
A rough conversion figure I work with is around 1–3% of a relevant, engaged audience buying a workshop or course. It isn’t a guarantee — price, subject, trust and urgency all matter — but it is a useful reality check.
If you’ve got 100 relevant people on your email list, you cannot automatically expect 50 workshop sales. This is why I’m such an advocate for therapists building an email list before they need to sell something.
📌Email Marketing for Therapists: Starting and Growing Your List from Zero
Crucially, it needs to be the right audience. Five thousand people who aren’t particularly interested in your subject aren’t necessarily more valuable than 500 people who have joined your list specifically because they want to learn about it. It’s also worth noting your audience on social media is probably less engaged than your email list.
Below the paywall, lessons I’ve learned the hard way about making money from workshops, and more expert tips and ideas to get you started…