In today’s episode of Nutrition for Your Business, we are taking a good hard look at how health professionals are scaling their businesses to help more people and increase their impact.
Seeing clients one-on-one is super important for getting real-life experience. There’s nothing like it, especially when you are in the early days of your nutrition business. In fact, we believe that working with clients one-on-one is absolutely critical. It’s how you build your knowledge, get really good at your craft and start building your brand.
If your business is at a point where you are ready to start building on that one-on-one experience and seeing multiple clients at once, earning more money and impacting more lives this episode is for you. Today we are taking a look at how health professionals are scaling their businesses to increase their impact and their income.
But first, let’s talk about what we mean by “scaling”.
Scaling your business means:
- Putting things in place that will enable your company to grow without being constrained.
- Requires planning and having systems in place.
- You can take on double or triple the number of clients without doubling or tripling your working hours.
We have chatted with health professionals who are successfully scaling their businesses so we can uncover how they’ve been able to go from seeing a few clients to hundreds and even thousands.
We’ve discovered you can earn a full-time income while changing lives and doing work that fills you up. We’ve also discovered that there are many ways to scale a nutrition business. The health professionals we chatted with are all scaling their businesses in their own unique ways, on their own terms and they are doing it full-time earning the money they need to live the life they want to live.
How you scale your business depends on many factors: your niche, your clients, what you love doing and so much more. Today we’re going to explore a few paths to scaling so you can choose which is best for you.
If you are looking to start impacting more lives and are ready to scale your business then you are definitely in the right place. Keep an open mind and we promise you are going to walk away from this episode feeling inspired and ready to take that next step.
1. Group Programs
First up, we have group programs. We love this method of scaling because it’s relatively easy to execute, and can take you from serving a handful of clients to hundreds if you do it right.
A group program is a nutrition program created for your ideal client. It has a specific topic and a determined start and end date. Clients sign up and work through the program together, and you lead them through it. Everyone gets the same materials, and it is a great way to start forming a community around your brand.
We’ve noticed that the most successful nutritionists who are scaling their businesses using group programs have built a solid audience before launching their program. This has made it easier for them to market it.
This goes back to seeing clients one-on-one. You can’t just jump from serving zero clients, to serving many through a group program. It doesn’t work that way. You have to lay the foundation first by getting experience and building your audience before you are ready to scale with a group program.
Another thing we’ve learned is that marketing the program is super important. The most successful health professionals who are running group programs do an amazing job at marketing them. For example, take one of our That Clean Life members, Mandy, who runs a 10-day sugar-free program. She runs this program a few times per year and provides participants with sugar-free meal plans, daily guidance, and mindfulness strategies.
There are four key reasons why Mandy's program is so successful:
- She has put in the time to build up a client base and a social following
- She has chosen a topic that resonates with her audience
- She clearly communicates the value of the program and everything people get when they sign up.
- She also does an amazing job at marketing the program and talks about it a lot over the course of a few weeks to get as many people signed up as possible.
Same with Amy who runs a Real Food Reset Program a few times throughout the year. She offers weekly meal plans, shopping lists, prep guides, unlimited email support, weekly video calls, and a private Facebook group. Just like Mandy, Amy is a pro at communicating the value of this program and markets it over the course of several weeks, which creates a lot of buzz and gets a ton of people signed up.
We talk to a lot of health pros who are seeing clients one-on-one and want to run a group program but are just too busy to figure it out. So they just sit on this idea forever, without taking action.
Maybe this is you and we totally get the resistance you might feel, but we can also say that this tactic for scaling your business is a lot easier than you think. It doesn’t need to be complicated. A great topic that really solves a nutrition-related problem for your audience, a meal plan, a Facebook group, and a solid marketing plan for the program can go a long way.
2. Corporate Wellness
Companies that can keep their employees healthy and happy are more likely to build productive teams who perform well and feel good at work. Corporations know this, and many are looking to invest in the health of their employees. This is why corporate wellness is an amazing revenue stream for nutrition professionals.
Offering services to corporations allows you to expand your reach, serve many clients at once and charge more.
Take Sarah for example. As a nutritionist, she offers a variety of services designed for corporations and their employees. She gives talks and offers three main topics:
- Nutrition for the Workplace and Beyond,
- Healthy Lunches
- Nutrition for Stress Management & Energy.
You can see how these topics would be interesting to both the employer and the employees, right? They make employees healthier, happier and more productive. Everybody wins.
Another service she offers to businesses is "On-Site Nutrition Consultation Days" where she spends around six hours at the office providing individual consultations for employees.
Sarah is able to charge a higher price for these services than what she charges for her other services. To read more about how Sarah got started in corporate wellness, read her full case study here.
Corporate wellness constantly puts you in front of new audiences, which is great for building your brand and attracting new clients.
If you are interested in scaling by offering corporate wellness services, the best people to get in touch with are those working in the company’s human resources department as these are the people who usually organize wellness events.
To get started, simply create a pricing sheet with the services you will offer and your base prices, and then, start reaching out to your contacts in HR to book your first corporate wellness events.
Again, this method of scaling really isn’t that complicated. It just requires you to put in the work.
3. Workshops & Cooking Classes
Another great way to scale your business is by hosting workshops and cooking class events. These allow you to provide value to a room full of people who are paying to be there. Generally, these happen in-person, but workshops and cooking classes can also happen online.
In order for this tactic of scaling to be successful, the topic of your workshops and cooking classes needs to be super interesting to your ideal client.
You need to price your classes in a way that helps you profit and you need to market the event in a way that sells it out to maximize that profit.
One of our That Clean Life Members, Ashleigh, has really built her community by offering workshops. She covers topics like Fermentation and Sustainable Living. Doing this has allowed her to get in front of larger audiences and build trust. She can serve a room full of people all at once and earn more money per hour than she would working with clients one-on-one.
When pricing her workshops, Ashleigh takes into account the cost of the venue, how long they are, the supplies required and the value the workshop provides. Again, it is so important to assess all of these things when setting the price of your class so you can make a profit. Read more about Ashleigh's workshops here.
The great thing about workshops and cooking classes is that you create the content for them once and then can present them over and over again to new audiences.
For example, Rachel runs the same Kombucha workshop in the same venue and continues to sell it out over and over again simply because of great content, a good marketing strategy and strong word of mouth referrals.
4. Membership Sites
If you are looking for a way to scale your business that is purely online and you’ve built a loyal following, you may want to consider building a membership site.
So many health professionals dream about building a membership site because the recurring revenue it produces seems like a dream. However, it is so important that your business is at a stage to support a membership site. It is also really important to acknowledge how much work goes into constantly creating content, marketing and managing a membership site.
We’re not saying you shouldn’t launch a membership site, but we are cautioning you to really assess whether your business is ready to scale like this before you invest a ton of time and money into it.
One member of That Clean Life, Lauren, is really crushing it with her membership site that she has designed to help women quit dieting and make peace with their relationship with food. She was in business for six years working with clients one-on-one before launching her membership site, which allowed her to establish herself as a respected nutritional therapist and build an audience.
Lauren's membership site gives her members access to meal plans, recipe bundles, a private Facebook group for support and accountability, weekly live Q&As and more.
Again, the success of her membership site is greatly due to the fact she had an existing audience, had built trust and marketed it really effectively. Read more about Lauren's membership site here.
One of the things we really love about scaling your business with a membership site is that it allows you to work with clients longer. After clients graduate from working with you one-on-one, you can refer them to your membership site so they can keep up the momentum.
5. Courses
Courses are a great way to teach your knowledge to hundreds of clients. They can be taught in-person or online.
We’ve seen health professionals creating amazing courses around topics like healing eczema through food, herbal remedies and dealing with Hashimoto’s disease.
Being successful in scaling with an online course is the same as any other method of scaling - and you are probably seeing the trend by now. You must:
- Create the course around a topic your audience wants to learn about.
- Create great content.
- Have a solid marketing strategy.
6. Hiring People & Software
As you can see, there are so many things you can create to scale your business. But beyond creating new products or services, there are two main things you can hire to scale your business: people and software.
Hiring people is a great way to offload tasks that you do not need to be doing yourself. And as much as we all tell ourselves as business owners that no one can do these jobs except us, trust us, they can.
Hiring people to help with your business will require you to invest time upfront in training them, but will end with you having more time to invest in other areas of your business.
It’s very difficult to scale a business alone, so if your business is at a point where you feel like you are just jumping from task to task, checking the same repetitive items off of a checklist and super caught up in the “busy work” - you may be ready to scale by hiring someone to help.
But sometimes it isn’t necessary to hire a human to automate or streamline a job. Instead, you can hire software.
We are living in an amazing time where there is so much technology to help you automate jobs or do them so much more efficiently than you could ever do on your own, saving you a ton of time and really empowering your business to scale. For example:
- Scheduling software can automate your booking process.
- Meal planning software can streamline your ability to customize meal plans for clients.
- Electronic health record software can make documenting and managing clients so much easier.
We often hear from health professionals who say that investing in people or software is too expensive, and we think this is absolutely bananas because great people and great software do not cost you money, they help you make more money.
We just covered seven powerful, tried, tested and true ways to scale your nutrition business. These are real ways health professionals are out there building businesses that change lives and help them earn a great full-time living.
We know that many of you are ready to scale your businesses, and with a bit of strategizing, great content and a solid marketing plan you can absolutely take your business to the next level, as long as you are willing to take that next step! Now stop dreaming and start getting after it.