Starting a Dietitian Private Practice? Here's 5 Easy Offers to Sell
Welcome to the Dietitian Boss Podcast. I'm Libby Rothschild, creator of Dietitian Boss. After almost four years of sitting in my dimly-lit windowless clinical office, I’d had enough. I wanted to feel like my work mattered, so I did something about it. I created a program that empowers dietitians and nutritionists to create their own private practice from scratch following my proprietary system.
Before I did this, I had a private practice of my own while working a full-time job, and I learned a lot about building relationships, marketing, and sales. I'm so excited to be able to share my proprietary framework for becoming a private practice dietitian with you!
I'm very excited today to talk about an important topic. This topic has to do with what you do as a registered dietitian in your business. Maybe you don't have a business yet and you're working a clinical job or per diem, or you're still in school, or maybe you've got kids and you haven't been working consistently.
Whatever the reason or your situation is, you want to start serving more people and you're not exactly sure what your options are. There's this big trend going around where dietitians are saying, “I want to have options beyond one-on-one.” And I understand working in a one-on-one setting can be exhausting. It can be rewarding, but you might also decide for your own personal boundaries that you want to create limits on the amount of one-on-one sessions you see per week, or just in general.
And one-on-one sessions are not the only way to make a living. As a dietitian, you have so many different options of what you can do to offer your products and services and help more people while making money. And so today I want to review a few of those options.
I also want to let you know that, in our membership every month, I teach live trainings on these topics, and we offer continuing education credits for the membership, which is really exciting. So make sure to head over to dietitianboss.com if you're interested in having conversations with me and an opportunity for Q&A about these important topics, like what you're offering as a dietitian and how to market yourself. Anything that has to do with packaging, pricing, promotion, mindset—all of those foundations.
As a private practice dietitian who's looking to gain visibility, I first want to give you a list of what the offers are. We have an online course, we've got an ebook, and we deliver coaching and group coaching. I have extensive trainings in my core curriculum that go over how to create these different offer types step-by-step so you know how to price them, how to package them, and how to create sales pages if you do need to do that, because each offer is a little bit different.
But what I want you to know is that you have more options than just coaching. You might like coaching, but you might also want some options. You might say, “I'm cool with coaching, but I want variety.” And in that variety you want to be able to offer courses so you can help more people, or maybe an ebook so that you can really increase your visibility as a dietitian. So I'm going to explain a little bit about the differences between each offer.
You might be most familiar with private coaching in a private coaching relationship. You can offer bundles, you can offer single sessions, or you can offer packages. Let me first go over a single session.
You're probably most familiar with an initial consult—maybe you would sell individual follow-up sessions, but that is a very traditional model. In this model, you would charge a one-off price point for the initial session and then the follow-ups. That is very typical for a private practice dietitian. Unfortunately, that's not the best way to serve somebody, retain a client, and make money because you're offering a one-off opportunity.
It's not longer term, and the price point is usually just a few hundred dollars. It's a good start, but it's not usually a long-term solution. The other option would be if you bundle your services and you sell perhaps five or maybe seven sessions in a bundle, and you charge a certain amount for these sessions that people would purchase at one time. That's a little bit better than the initial and follow-up because you're selling more sessions at once.
So that's an opportunity for you to have a longer-term relationship with that client. Now, it might not mean longer than the five or seven sessions, but that's still better than an initial session and a follow-up. And the price point would be a little bit higher because they're buying more time with you.
The other option, which is my favorite, is one you can work up to in your business: packages. Packages are typically a three- or six-month commitment that offer support, communication, and time, whether it's through video or phone or some type of client platform.
Or if you're doing in-person, you're able to have that longer-term relationship, and that typically comes at a higher price point. So again, in review, you've got the initial follow-up, which is the easiest, lowest-hanging fruit. Then you have a bundle of sessions which you can sell. That's a moderately larger commitment than the initial follow-up.
And then you have the package, which can be three, six months, or more, and it's typically the highest price point. Now what I see our clients do is they increase their prices with time as they get more confident and comfortable. So you're probably going to be offering something a little below market value when you're first starting out, and I have a whole price progression framework for you.
If you were to work with me, I'm happy to share with you how some of it works. You can start with an entry level. Again, it's going to depend on what exact package or service you're offering in terms of what the price plan would be reasonable to charge, but this is how a coaching relationship typically would work.
Now the pros and cons of those different varieties is that you're able to help somebody, and that's amazing. You're able to get confident and build your interpersonal skills when it comes to counseling and communication, but you're going to need to figure out how you can get enough clients for this to make sense for you and your business.
Being a private practice dietitian requires technology. If you want to scale and deliver a standardized experience, you will need to start using software with your private practice. And I want you to have more time to focus on the parts of your practice that fuel you, like helping more people and spending less time on administration.
And that's why I recommend Practice Better to my clients. Inside of our Academy membership and coaching programs, Practice Better is a complete practice management software for nutrition professionals like you who want to start and scale their private practice dietitian business without the burnout. Practice Better helps with automating your bookings, charting, and invoicing, but it's way more than creating protocols and treatment plans and tracking your client's progress is easier than ever. Your clients can be engaged in every step of their plan, and you can provide a high level of care without burning out. Practice Better also integrates with your favorite software so that your client data and recommendations sync securely and seamlessly.
You can import data and results easily from lab orders, fitness trackers, and even integrate Practice Better with your email marketing, marketing funnels, and programs feature, which is my personal favorite. You have everything you need to build and run an automated group or program so you can earn passive income, and it's pretty streamlined in one software. If you're a registered dietitian looking to manage your practice with ease, you can get started with any Practice Better plan for free for 14 days as an exclusive offer for our listeners. Here at Dietitian Boss, you can get 20% off your first four months on any paid plan when you use the promo code DIETITIANBOSS20 at the checkout. It's time to say “goodbye” to a patchwork of software and “hello!” to an organized, efficient practice.
Now other options to make money in your business or as a private practice dietitian, even if you're already working a full-time job, can include things like offering a course.
This is how I got started when I was working as a full-time clinical dietitian and I had my private practice dietitian business on the side: I created an online course and I found it really fun. I really liked teaching and education, and it was something I was able to build on the side.
It took a little minute to learn the technology. It may just take you 60-90 minutes to get comfortable. The technology platforms have come such a long way, and a lot of the electronic medical record systems like Practice Better allow an option in the platform for you to house a course. So it's just easier and easier for you to make a course.
And in courses—you might have heard me say this before—I'm a fan of creating what's called a mini-course. At under an hour long, you're really delivering some information about a nutrition topic that other people don't know about, and you're providing sound nutritional information that's coming from an expert.
And ideally, you're providing some type of a transformation where you're helping them get from point A to point B. So, maybe they're learning what it looks like to assemble a plate. They're identifying what they need to do to meal prep for the week, basic nutrition concepts, or maybe it's even more specific, such as “what does it look like to feed a child to help them grow?”
Whatever the course topic is, you can outline it and package it in under an hour, and you can do short video lessons and use free software like Loom. You can also use Zoom under 40 minutes. It's free, and you can save it and then upload it to your learning management platform. Again, you can use an electronic medical record system like Practice Better, and I'm a fan of Teachable.
Also, there is a percentage fee when people purchase your course, but it's a very good starter platform. We can talk about software another day, but if you know it's your first course and you're starting out, you want to keep it simple. A course is a great way for you to package the information you already know as an expert and sell it and make it easy to sell.
So, we're not spending days and days packaging this information. You're giving somebody a quick win, a simple outline, and you're helping people with nutritional information that they don't know. And I really like a course that has pros like you can package the information and sell it unlimited amounts of times, unlike your coaching which is just a limit.
Even if you love coaching as a private practice dietitian and you want to do 30-something hours a week, there's still a limit to coaching. There's only so many clients you can see. But that's not true with digital products. A course is something you can sell infinitely. And that's what's so cool about digital products like courses or an ebook, which I'll talk about in a minute.
And really, you can help more people and create profits from online products, which is just so incredible. The difficult part that most of you underestimate is how to build an audience and make sure you have enough people who want to purchase the digital product. And I talk about that as a regular theme here.
And then the other option, if you don't want to package information into a course and create video lessons, is a presentation. It's like you're doing a PowerPoint presentation. You can use a software like Canva and they have free options.
The other option would be an ebook. And an ebook is where you are not recording anything. You are packaging written words. You can add a visual, you can add a photo into your ebook, but the ebook would be a fraction of the course. So it's going to be a smaller amount of information. You might be explaining, let's say, macro micronutrients, or self-love, or some type of concept related to nutrition.
And you're going to be giving information to people in a visually aesthetic format. Probably under 20 pages, maybe under 50 pages. And you can also upload and sell an ebook on a learning management platform like Teachable. I'm pretty sure you can sell them on electronic medical record systems like Practice Better as well.
I would just have to double-check because our clients usually don't. I haven't learned that our clients have done that yet. But an ebook is a great way for you to provide people with information, and it's a little bit easier for you than a course—although a course isn't hard—but it's going to take a little bit more effort than an ebook.
And then finally, the last option I want to share as a private practice dietitian would be group coaching. And I love group coaching because you can serve more people. It’s one unit of time. So if you were to run live workshops and you could facilitate a training—let's say teach about macro micronutrients—and then leave some time for open Q&A, it's such a fantastic way for you to bring folks together.
Ideally, there's going to be some common threads. It could be a little more general than disease specific, but you're teaching and training about nutrition with that open discussion. And that's group programming.
So, it's going to be a form of coaching, but you're able to help more people in one unit of time. And you can sell a group coaching program for six weeks. You can even do a four-week program. You could do a workshop as well, if you don't want to do a continued program that has multiple sessions.
I'm a fan of the six-week group program because it allows you to build a relationship, and then from that you can sell somebody. If they're interested and it's a good fit, you can upsell them into another offer. Maybe it's the course that you want to create or that you've created, or you're selling them into private coaching, but they first started with this group experience.
I’d like to summarize briefly what the four offers are that I teach, and I teach these in depth with templates and tools in my membership. I give you an ebook on self-love and macronutrients. All you have to do is just change your name and it's done. You can sell it. I've licensed those ebooks, and then I walk you through how to create a course and an outline and give you support and feedback on the way, because creating products on the internet is new for us dietitians, and it's fun and exciting.
The idea of doing it is just going to take some practice. So I don't know which one stands out to you. Which offer do you think is most attractive and why? Make sure to let us know on Instagram at Dietitian Boss, and let us know what you're thinking. You can offer all of these options, or just offer a couple of them if you're not sure how to make them all work together. Make sure to let us know, and I'm so excited to watch you and support you in your progress of impacting more people while making money and creating a lifestyle business on your terms. If you're looking for support to start, grow, and scale as a private practice dietitian, I want to invite you to work with me and my team.
We have a few different options. Head over to dietitianboss.com and apply to have a conversation with somebody from our sales team. To discuss your options for your budget and stage of business, head over to dietitianboss.com and we look forward to connecting.
