By Dr Tracy Thorns | Clinical Psychologist | Founder of The FearHacker Program | Host of the BBD VIP Studio

If you're a coach, therapist, counsellor or psychologist who has found yourself wondering whether James Wedmore's Business By Design could work for someone like you, this blog is written for you.

Not for the general online entrepreneur. Not for the YouTuber or content creator. For the helping professional who has spent years training, qualifying, and genuinely caring about the people they serve and who is quietly asking:

"Is there another way?"

I know that question well. Because I asked it myself.

First: A Little Honesty

I am a BBD affiliate. That means if you join through my link, I receive a commission. I'm telling you this upfront because that's exactly what any good therapist, psychologist or coach would do.

I've been inside BBD for years and later in James' Next Level Mastermind. I've invested well over £40,000 in my business education overall, including programmes that were a complete waste of money and time. BBD was not one of them.

Over the past few years, I've supported more than 800 helping professionals to explore and begin building digital practices. I've seen what works, what doesn't, and what the specific blocks are for people in our professions. I'm not writing this to sell you something you don't need. I'm writing it because helping professionals are massively underrepresented in the online business world, and the ones who do make the leap often do it alone, without support from someone who understands both worlds.

That's the gap I'm here to fill 😊

Why Helping Professionals Struggle With Digital Business

There's something nobody tells you when you enter the helping professions.

You'll spend years developing expertise that genuinely transforms lives. You'll accumulate knowledge, frameworks, and skills that most business coaches could only dream of. And then you'll spend most of your career delivering that expertise one person at a time, capped by your diary, your energy, and a model that hasn't fundamentally changed in decades.

I remember the moment it hit me most clearly. I had to tell a client with complex PTSD, someone I had worked with for years, someone who had finally begun to trust the process, that our sessions were ending due to a service reorganisation. I watched her face change. I felt completely powerless. I drove home with tears on my face. And when I got there, I'd missed my daughter's school fayre. My other children were already in bed.

I was giving everything to help other people rebuild their lives. And I was missing my own.

For a long time, I thought that was just what it meant to care deeply about this work. I now know it doesn't have to be.

The truth is, most helping professionals carry beliefs that quietly block them from building something different:

• Selling feels uncomfortable
• Marketing feels manipulative
• Charging more feels unethical
• Business feels like it conflicts with vocation
• Technology feels overwhelming

And the painful irony? The people who feel this way are often the most skilled, the most ethical, and the most genuinely helpful practitioners out there. The ones the world needs most online, who aren't there yet. And the world really needs you right now more than ever!

What Is Business By Design? (BBD)

Business By Design is James Wedmore's flagship programme for building a digital business. At its core, it teaches you how to package your expertise into digital offers: courses, programmes, memberships, group coaching, and sell them in a way that creates leverage.

Leverage meaning: you help more people, without giving more hours. And still being able to have a wonderful life, knowing your legacy is bigger than it ever would have been behind the therapy door.

For a helping professional, that reframing is everything. This is not about abandoning your clinical work or becoming an "internet marketer." It's about asking a different question:

Instead of helping one person at a time, how might you help many?

Inside BBD, you'll learn:

• How to develop a digital offer your audience actually wants and will pay for
• How to build simple, repeatable sales systems that don't rely on sleazy tactics
• How to launch your programme using proven frameworks for webinars, challenges, email sequences, and more
• How to build a team and scale without working yourself into the ground
• The mindset work required to actually believe you deserve to build something like this

The programme is structured across six core modules, from foundations through to scaling, and includes live coaching, a members-only community, launch templates, and now AI tools integrated throughout.

Is BBD Ethical for Therapists and Psychologists?

This is the question I'm asked most often. And my honest answer is: it depends entirely on what you create and how you apply it.

Digital education is ethical. Workshops are ethical. Courses, online communities, psychoeducational programmes, skills training, parent education, translating therapy into online coaching, professional CPD: all ethical.

The key is staying within your professional competencies, your ethical guidelines, and your scope of practice. BBD teaches business principles. What you build with those principles is your professional responsibility. To remain true to your registration, guiding ethical principles. To remain focussed on the clients transformation in the decisions you make. 

What I would say is this: the helping professions have something the wider online business world desperately needs right now. Qualified, ethical, properly trained practitioners creating digital content. The alternative is the gap being filled by the unqualified, the unregulated, and the downright unhelpful (yes 'Rachel1996-no face' with your ring light telling people to breath into paper bags we see you! 👀)

Your expertise online is not just commercially valuable to you. It is a genuine public good.

What BBD Actually Gave Me

I started exploring digital business six years ago. It took years, a significant financial investment, a lot of wrong turns, and eventually finding the right mentor and the right room to figure out what actually works.

Here's what changed for me inside BBD specifically:

Permission. The biggest thing BBD gave me wasn't a business model. It was permission. Permission to imagine a different future. Permission to believe that wanting more didn't make me less of a professional. It is okay to want more. It is okay to build wealth. It is okay to help more people and to earn well from doing so.

A framework that actually works. Not a generic "build a funnel" approach, but a complete system for understanding your audience, creating an offer they want, launching it repeatedly, and growing a business that compounds over time.

A room full of people doing it. One of the most important shifts in my journey happened not in a training video, but in conversations. When I started seeing what was possible, psychologists, coaches, therapists building six-figure digital practices, my thinking expanded. Same skills. Different structure. Completely different life.

Today I run a six-figure business working one clinical day a week. I haven't left my profession. I've expanded it. My FearHacker Program reaches people I could never have reached through one-to-one sessions. And my family has the life I could only imagine seven years ago standing in an NHS corridor feeling powerless and comforting myself with Haribo. 

What Other Helping Professionals Say

I've now supported over 800 coaches, therapists, psychologists and helping professionals on this path. You can hear directly from some of them at drthorns.com/bbd, where I've shared what they've said about the support, the process, and what's become possible for them.

Their experiences are varied, their backgrounds are different, but one thing is consistent: having someone alongside them who understood both the professional world they were coming from and the digital business world they were moving into made the difference.

The Honest Pros and Cons

Pros:

✅ Lifetime access with free updates: you own it forever and the content evolves every year as the world of online practice does too

✅ A genuinely complete system: not one piece of the puzzle, but the whole picture from offer creation through to scaling

✅ Mindset and business combined: rare in the online business world, essential for helping professionals who carry a lot of beliefs about money and selling

✅ Live coaching and a real community: not a Facebook group that goes quiet after launch month

✅ New AI tools integrated throughout: making implementation significantly faster

✅ Works for coaches, therapists, psychologists, counsellors, counsellors, life coaches, social workers, OTs, nurses and any professional with expertise worth sharing

Cons:

❌ It is a serious investment: the price sits around $2,997. This is not an impulse purchase, nor should it be.

❌ It opens once a year: miss the window and you wait another twelve months

❌ It requires action: the framework is exceptional but it won't implement itself. Many helping professionals struggle with the "therapist's curse": understanding everything deeply but staying in analysis rather than moving forward

❌ The community is large: which is mostly a pro, but can feel overwhelming if you're not used to navigating big groups. Find the coaches, tag them, they respond. Or get a bonus package that offers you an extra smaller container to bring your ideas to. 

❌ James and the BBD coaching team are not therapists, psychologists or counsellors. They are world-class experts in online business — and that's exactly what BBD is. But they won't be able to guide you on how to apply these principles within your specific professional context, ethical framework or scope of practice. That's why choosing a bonus provider who is actually from your profession matters. You can run a brilliant digital business and stay fully within your professional guidelines — but you need someone who understands both worlds to help you do that.

Is BBD Right for You?

BBD is likely a strong fit if you:

✓ Are a coach, therapist, counsellor, psychologist or helping professional who feels limited by one-to-one work

✓ Have expertise you'd like to share more widely through courses, group programmes, memberships, or digital resources but don't know where to begin or how to scale what you already have

✓ Want greater flexibility and income without leaving the work you love and were born to do

✓ Are open to building something: not looking for overnight passive income 

✓ Are willing to invest in a proper system rather than piecing things together from free content forever

✓ Want to be in a room with people already doing this, not doing it alone

BBD is probably not right for you if:

❌ You want a quick win or passive income without significant effort

❌ You're looking for a social media growth strategy or follower-building programme: that's not what this is

❌ You're not ready to examine your own beliefs about money, selling, and what you deserve

❌ You want to stay in one-to-one work forever and have no interest in scaling your impact beyond the consulting room

🌵One More Thing: The Cactus Moment

A few years ago I was in Arizona with a group of course creators from around the world. We went on a road trip to Sedona to hang out with James. One afternoon I sat looking at a magnificent cactus in the desert.

And I thought: Oh s***. I've been like a cactus for years.

Yes Strong. Resilient. Still standing (just!). Still doing the job. But surviving on what was left over after everything else was done. Believing that was just what this career looked like.

The helping professions tell us implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, that this is what dedication looks like. That wanting more is somehow incompatible with caring deeply.

It isn't.

It is okay to want more rest, more money, more time, more freedom. It is okay to build a life you actually enjoy alongside work that matters. You don't have to choose between them.

🚫 Don't be a cactus! 

How to Join BBD and What You Get When You Join Through Me

Business By Design opens once a year, in June. The way in is through James Wedmore's free training series, the Business Breakthrough Experience: a multi-day live event where James actually teaches real business strategy. It's genuinely worth attending whether or not you join BBD.

At the end of the Experience, cart opens for BBD.

When you join through my link, you get access to my BBD VIP Bonus Package, available exclusively during this launch window:

• Six months of live group support calls with me, a Clinical Psychologist who has built a six-figure business using exactly this programme
• Implementation support specifically designed for helping professionals
• Additional resources to help you apply BBD within your professional context
• Access to my Momentum community

This is not a PDF bundle. This is six months of real, ongoing support from someone who has walked this exact path as a qualified clinician. You can read what others have said about this support at drthorns.com/bbd.

Cart opens 22nd June. Cart closes 25th June.

Claim Your Bonuses Here: drthorns.com/bbd

Final Verdict

Business By Design is the most complete business programme I've encountered for helping professionals who want to build a digital income stream alongside, not instead of, their clinical or coaching work.

It is not magic. It requires effort, belief, and a willingness to do something different. But if you are a coach, therapist, counsellor, psychologist or helping professional who has quietly wondered whether there is another way, the answer is yes.

BBD was the right room for me. It might be the right room for you.

Whatever you decide, I hope you keep asking the question. Because sometimes that question is the beginning of everything 🌍

Dr Tracy Thorns is a Clinical Psychologist, Founder of The FearHacker Program and Host of the BBD VIP Studio. She runs a six-figure digital business working one clinical day a week and has supported over 800 coaches, therapists and psychologists to build digital practices of their own.

Dr Tracy Thorns

Clinical Psychologist & Digital Creator

No longer a cactus 🌵