I Grew My Side Gig Into a $2M Business After 20 Years at IBM

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Becky DeGrossa, a 66-year-old who is founder of CounselingWise from Boulder, Colorado. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

I earned a degree in computer science from Cal Poly and then spent 20 years in total at IBM, leaving the company in 2003. When I left, I was a consultant and managing principal, and I was supposed to be leading the team up the hill — but I just really wasn’t passionate about it at all anymore.

I spent a year thinking, “I’m going to go do something else. I’ve been here forever. What do I know how to do? What do I like doing?”

When I thought about what I liked about my Big Tech job, it was being a manager. The most meaningful part of my job was meeting one-on-one with employees to help them out with a problem or coach them along. I’d also been in therapy and had found it extremely helpful, so I thought I’d change careers to become a therapist.

I earned a Master’s degree in psychology from 2003 to 2006 and then worked as a practicing therapist. While doing this, I started a side gig from my therapy office, organizing little groups of therapists to show them what they needed to do to create their own Google business profile and promote their website. This was the beginning of what became my marketing agency CounselingWise, which helps therapists get found by clients through these services as well as custom websites, SEO, and Google Ads.

As I spent more and more time on my business, I didn’t have time to be a therapist and build my business. So I closed my therapy practice four years after I started it to pursue my business full time, combining my technical, marketing, and psychology backgrounds.

It was hard to stop my therapy practice — I felt honored to walk alongside my clients through some very difficult things in their lives, and I didn’t take leaving lightly. I stopped taking new clients right away, but I gave my existing clients six months’ notice.

We’ve been a seven-figure company since 2022 and hit $2 million in June 2026. The business has made approximately $300,000 in profit each year for the past five years. About 99% of our revenue is generated from done-for-you services, including content writing, website development, Google business profile optimization, and Google Ads.

Here are the key strategies that helped me build it.

1. I helped people do what they didn’t want to do themselves

When I started working as a therapist, it took me a while to figure out how to make my website visible. I thought it’d be easy to just put up a business site and get my phone to ring, but I found that Google’s local algorithm was actually a specific way of marketing I knew nothing about.

So I took classes to learn search engine optimization (SEO) and content writing. I first took a course in copywriting, then learned about ranking in Google Places, and later learned about on-page SEO.

Once I started implementing what I learned in these classes for my own website, my phone started ringing. At that time, all my friends were therapists since we went to school together, so I started teaching a class to other therapists about online marketing strategies. I held the classes in my therapy office. We brought in chairs and sat in a circle and I taught them what I was doing with my website.

I thought they’d do it themselves once I taught them, but most of them didn’t feel technical enough or like they were good enough writers, and I realized there was a demand for these services. It was literally one step at a time, realizing, “Oh, people don’t want to do this — I could do it for them.”

2. I systematized what I learned

What helped my business’s growth was putting my time equally into learning the technical side, and then focusing on management and systematizing techniques to scale.

I learned that in a small nimble market like mine, when I find a good idea, I test it out a number of times to see if it works, and then I systematize it and hire people to do it. And then I go back around — wash rinse, repeat — to find the next hopeful thing that I can test.

So I have a little business development team that does all this testing on SEO techniques to become visible in Google and AI search. This consists of on-page optimizations to the website, off-page link-building, and optimizations of Google business profiles. If a particular SEO technique works, then we systematize it, scale it, and roll it out. We’re constantly changing our strategy to stay up to date.

One example of testing a new idea happened in May 2024, when a major Google Search documentation leak occurred. Based on that documentation and our testing, we added schema to our home and specialty pages. We tested this with several of our clients and it helped them rank better, so we rolled it out as a new part of our strategy.

3. I created a culture where my team cares about my clients.

The other part of management I focus on is creating a culture where my team — which fluctuates between 40 to 50 contractors who I pay hourly rates depending on their role and experience level — cares about my clients. In my world, our clients are therapists who are extremely sensitive to human interactions, so we don’t just hire smart people who can crank out code.

We hire project managers, for instance, who have very good people skills. They can work alongside a non-technical client to reassure them the whole way that we have their best interest at heart, and we’re going to represent them well on their website.

Because of my management experience in corporate, I have a perspective of what it takes to be able to build a really good reputation as a therapist. So I insist on this whole client care piece for our clients, because they do wonderful work in the world, and I want to take care of them.

The key is making sure that my technical strategy and systematizing go hand-in-hand with client care, to make sure we take care of our clients in the process and make them feel held by us. Those are the three legs of the stool that have allowed us to continue to grow.

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