I am so happy to be here today with Krista Kolajesic. Welcome. Krista is from Dietitian Success Center, and we're going to be talking all about the dietitian resources she provides for registered dietitians, as well as a little bit of behind-the-scenes membership. So happy to have you, Krista.
Thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to chat with you today. I've listened to your podcast for a while, so it's really cool to come full circle and have the opportunity to be a guest. So thanks so much.
Thank you. And we’re happy to connect with you and support your body of work as well, being an international dietitian and supporting dietitians’ clinical skills.
So, let's first kick off a little bit about Dietitian Success Center, and then I'd like to talk a little bit as well about memberships. Do you offer a membership? I think that concept is still really new for dietitians. I think it's really cool to dive in, but let's first talk about what Dietitian Success Center is and why is this resource important for registered dietitians.
Sure. Yeah. So, I started Dietitian Sucess Center back in 2021—that’s when we officially launched. I actually started working on it well before that, but we ended up launching in April 2021. And the idea behind DSC—that's what we call ourselves for short—really came from the challenges that I, myself experienced as a practitioner working with patients and clients and hearing from peers and colleagues across the board that there were so many nutrition-related topics that we were being asked about in practice that we felt like we didn't learn about in school. So, you know, some of the new emerging things like digestive health, or some of the women's health topics like PCOS and fertility, and all of these different things that were just not covered in school or an internship, and then feeling like we were spending hours on Google. Trying to Google our way to having some clarity around some of these topics, and struggling to find some of those really good quality, evidence-based pieces of content that were really designed for practitioners. So, I felt like that was a big gap, and that was sort of a big stressor for me in feeling like a bit of an imposter in that role as a new dietitian. But then, also finding myself spending hours every week trying to create materials that I could give to clients, right? Handouts and dietitian resources—trying to summarize the information that I learned into something that was going to be concise enough that I could give it to the patient or client. And it was just so time consuming.
And I was thinking to myself, “Well, I'm sure somebody's already created this, but I don't know where to find it.” It felt like I was just reinventing the wheel constantly, and so there were a lot of those sorts of different pain points for me personally at play. And I was hearing similar things across the board from all of my friends and all of my coworkers, so the thought dawned on me: “Well, what if we created something that was really designed for practitioners and specifically for dietitians?”
Now, we have members who are non-dietitians, but, really coming from that place of “Let's create content and resources for dietitians created by dietitians.”
And so, that's where Dietitian Success Center was born. Essentially, the mission behind DSC is to make it easier for dietitians and dietetics students to build their confidence and expertise in nutrition-related topics and to really help save them time and allow them to just do their jobs easier. We refer to ourselves as an online learning platform.
How it works is, our members will pay a monthly or an annual subscription, so, it's on a membership model where you can stay for as long as you want and you get access to all of our content. What that means is we essentially create three types of content that's designed for dietitians. We have online courses on various nutrition-related topics. We have what we call evidence summaries, which are basically where we do a deep dive into the literature related to a specific topic, and we summarize it in a way that's going to be more concise for the practitioners so they can read through that background document and they don't have to spend hours searching PubMed looking for articles. And then, we also supply client handouts as well. So we take all of that information and we translate it into really plain language, user-friendly, beautiful handouts that you can directly use with your clients.
Over the years, we've really built out our content library to include a lot of different topics. We have a ton of different topics available and dietitians can go over to our website, dietitiansuccesscenter.com, and look at our library and really see everything we have available.
We've made it super visible and you get access to everything, and then we release new content every month. So, that’s the bulk of what we do. We also have a community component too, but the bulk of what we do is the dietitian resources.
Thank you for sharing that, and thank you for your questions and dietetics to really solve that problem of saving time for the clinician and, first and foremost, giving a clinician confidence, A lot of times clients will tell me— especially if they're in a setting like acute care, or maybe even outpatient where there is a counseling component, or even in an assessment component—and they're just not as familiar with different disease states. I remember in grad school I had to become an expert in pediatrics, which, we all know, is very different than an expert answer.
And this was all so much information. I felt like it was so much for me to grasp, and, as a registered dietitian, before you specialize, having a wealth of knowledge in these different topics and being able to access them and make sure they're up to date definitely is helpful for our full acumen, because, as you know, we always hear in school that we need to be focusing on our clinical skills. I'm all about continued learning in a way that can save us time and build the confidence to have dietitian resources that are accessible.
So, let me make sure I got this right: Krista you're saying that there's a course that appeals to the learning style of visual video/audio, right? And then that's for the dietitian to learn and you have the dietitian summary? And that would be more for the practitioner to understand the research speak, right?
Yeah. Then that would be written in a way that is also the third piece of material where dietitians can send out a digestible information handout to the patient or client who wants to learn.
Is that correct? So, there are three different ways that the information has been tabulated for learning styles—not just for the practitioner, but applicable for the end user, or the patient.
Yeah, totally. The evidence summaries and the courses are really designed exactly for the practitioner to use to be able to refresh their knowledge. And, you know, “Oh, I have a client coming up that has PCOS and I feel like I need to just get up to speed. I haven't seen this in a while, or I haven't seen this before.” The idea is that they can read through the evidence summary and they can watch through the course. We intentionally made the courses very concise because we know that our users are strapped for time and they're not looking to spend more and more time watching video courses or doing more research. And so, we really try and keep the course super concise.
Generally, they come in a three-part series with a background, nutrition implications, and then a case study where they can observe how that's put into practice. And then, the handouts are designed for them to be able to give to their clients.
Thank you for sharing that. And again, one thing I love about what you do is that this is for the dietitian, by the dietitian, and that's important for our brand here at Dietitian Boss. We like to recommend products and services like practice better that happen for other nutrition practitioners.
And I'm not saying that any of the other EMRs are not fantastic, but something like simple practice is for a therapist. Something like Practice Better is created for us. So, I do tend to lean towards work with a CPA who’s a therapist, right? And she's a therapist. She's also a CPA. So, we like to partner and advocate with those that really do align with the field, because our mission and vision is aligned with helping the body. And we've talked about this before—about helping the future registered dietitians and increased access to education. So, we have a parallel that your business and mine are more on the business end.
Clinical skills are part of improving the dietitian's ability to find success and being able to master their craft and being able to communicate it and understand sales and marketing and all the other facets of communication, as well as running a business, whether it's a consultant, private practice, or any of the other various non-traditional ways to make money.
I have a couple of questions. One about how you like your process of building The Library, because it’s so scientific. How did you do that? What did you do? Did you build this by yourself at first? Did you hire out people? Like, how did you get these? I'm thinking PCOS, cancer—all these disease states, and these summaries need to be accurate. So, how did you do that? Did you outsource it?
It's been an evolution for sure. At the very beginning, I outsourced, and so I would hire a contractor RDS who are subject matter experts in different areas of practice. It was really hard to control for quality and consistency in terms of content, right? Every time I would work with somebody new, it was trying to retrain them on what we should do, and here's what it should look like, and here's what the end product should be. It was just really not a great process, but you know, it's, that's just how it works in business, right? You start with something and then you're like, “That was interesting, and now we have to refine the process a little bit more.” Yeah: guiding a contractor. That could be a whole podcast.
That's a whole different issue in terms of what control you want to build your product, but I'm glad you're sharing that. That's a really good business tip for our listeners. Since then, what we've done is we've developed this into a better, more efficient process. It's really been over the last 2 years that we've been working on this process and refining it. Essentially, we now have our own internal team of content creators. It’s a team of dietitians led by Olivia who's our content manager. Olivia has a master's in nutrition communications. That's really her expertise: taking information and translating it right into these different materials, and so that's essentially the starting point. Now, we try and keep everything internal. The first step is that Olivia does a full literature review on a topic, whatever that topic might be.
Actually, I should rewind and say that our topic ideas come from our audience. Our members will request things, and we have an ongoing poll that runs through our community where members can request different topics. We'll literally take the most popular topics and that will be our priority for the upcoming months.
Olivia will do a deep-dive literature review on that topic and that's sort of phase one of the process. Phase two of the process is that the content goes through a series of what we call practice-based reviews, which is where we have RDs who are actively working in those areas do a full review of the content to make sure that there's nothing missing, it's accurate, it's up to date, etc. And then we have a third round of reviews we call technical reviews, where we actually take all of that information and we do that final polish to make sure references are all there, references are all correct, values are all correct, check spelling, grammar—all of that good stuff—and then it gets recorded, turned into the handouts that are nice and pretty, and it gets put onto the site. It’s a step-by-step process now that involves a lot of different dietitians, but we find that this allows us to keep things internal and be able to have the same level of quality for all of the content that we publish.
I'm so impressed with your process. I have a couple of follow-up questions on that and then we'll move along because I want to make this applicable to how dietitians become thought leaders and what it's like behind the scenes building a business. And, of course, how valuable your assets are as a body of work to contribute to saving time and simplifying the resource generation for the practicing. Do you have that documented on your website? Do you share that three-step process of how you're able to get the content out there?
We do. We have it on our About page, but I honestly think we could do a better job of explaining it and telling people. I think that, because it's been an evolution and we've gotten to this point where we have this awesome process, now it's just about communicating it better. That's definitely something that is on my mind for sure.
Well, I think it's really impressive. So, to come up with that three-step process, that's been an evolution in just the last couple of years. Has that been you mostly behind that? I know you mentioned Olivia—is she the one getting this as a content manager or are you the entrepreneur?
I would say both of us. Olivia has been with me almost since the beginning, and so I feel like she knows the business as well as I know the business, which is really cool. It’s so valuable to have somebody like that on your team. We’re constantly talking about how to make things better, how to make systems better, how to improve things—all of these different things. I think we're very clear with each other if we feel like there's a pain point in our process, you know what I mean? And when she feels like something is a little sticky, then she feels like she can come to me and say, “Okay, I think we need to look at this and we need to improve this,” and then we'll collaborate on a solution. So, it's been a super collaborative process, but it's been both of us sort of working on it together.
And is Olivia an employee or a contractor?
Olivia is an employee.
So, you have a variety of employees and contractors?
Olivia is the only employee and then the rest are contractors.
My other question is, in addition to learning about your process and what the evolution would be when building out your resource library—the DSC—how is it different from other dietitian resources that help clinicians save time and increase their confidence? And how did you engineer that to try to make sure you stand out, as a business?
The biggest differentiator that we are so obsessed with is making our content as user-friendly as possible. And what I mean by that is, you don't have to take information that you have found online and then make it into something that you can give to your client. We do that all for you. In Canada, we have something similar to the nutrition care manual, and one of the biggest complaints around it is that there are summaries of information for dietitians, but then, what do you do with that? You read through it, but then I still feel like I have to create something that I can give to my patient or client. So, we're super-obsessed with making sure that the content is as user-friendly for the practitioner as possible so they're not having to go through those extra steps.
And then—I also think what we touched on before with having the course component—there’s also the evidence summary, right?
If you prefer the course, go ahead and watch the course if that's how you like to learn. If you prefer to just read through the content, you can totally do that too. We give you both of those options. And then—and I hate to use the word obsession again, but it's true—we have this idea of keeping things fresh and up to date. Our goal is to have everything updated every six to 24 months depending on the topic. Of course, some topics just. don't change that much, so we don't feel like we need to update it as frequently.
But then there are other topics where there's stuff coming out all the time. So, it does need to be updated regularly. That's part of it too: just having that update process really built into our content creation. We're not just pumping out new content. We're also thinking about how we make the old stuff better and identifying which stuff to update as soon as possible.
So, your differentiating factor would be that you appeal to different learning styles, which is actually one of the core components of creating great educational materials; you want to be accessible to different learning styles whether they're the practitioner or the client that's neurodivergent or disabled or something like that. You want to make sure that you don't just have the written format—that you have video and that you are making it understandable and digestible, right? And then, I'm also hearing that you're breaking it down even more than some of the other competitors. So, you've gotten feedback about that in terms of your clients, meaning the dietitians or whoever they're serving are finding it digestible enough. Do you have any way to measure that as a business?
We get feedback a lot, which is really cool. That is the best part about what we do is just getting, random DMs or random emails from our users. And we hear this all the time where it's like, “Oh my gosh, I had this client, and I was feeling really nervous about it because I haven't seen this type of nutrition-related condition in a while. I watched the course and I feel so much better. This saved me so much time!”
When people comment with things like, “I feel so much better,” that to me is such a win, because I know how stressful that can be and how those feelings of imposter syndrome can be so real, especially as someone who's working with a lot of nutrition-related conditions.
Those are the comments that resonate with me a lot in terms of measurability, and I've really been working on myself as a skill as an entrepreneur over the last year. How do I track and measure success in different parts of the business?
I'm like such a naturally creative—that's where I go. I love to create and I love to envision and I love all of that side of things, and I'm really trying to develop my skill in more of the analytical side of running a business and sort of thinking about, “What's the pre- and then what's the post, and how do we measure that, and how do we measure success?”
I think I'm getting better at it, but I definitely have a lot of room there for sure. Every year we're trying to do a feedback survey for our members to really understand things like “What is the impact of the business on you and the work that you do?” I think we're just scratching the surface and I'm excited to go deeper with it.
I'm really interested that as an entrepreneur—you're able to so clearly articulate your strengths and what you need to work on without beating yourself up. Our clients get down on themselves, and they have a lot of perfectionist tendencies like “I wish I was better at A and B.”
I want the listeners to go back and re-listen how you articulated so well that you're naturally creative. Obviously, you're a business owner, so you'd love to ideate, and then there's also an opportunity to hone in on other aspects, because, as entrepreneurs, we're always learning and growing and can't be 10 on every aspect. There's nothing wrong with being more or less analytical. It's just a matter of knowing how to make it work for your business to support your mission and vision.
I really liked the way that you spoke about that.
I appreciate that. That's been, I think, one of the best learning experiences for me as a business owner. It’s about ditching that perfectionist mindset and really adopting that growth mindset around like, you know, “Maybe I'm not so strong at this right now, but I could be, I will be, and I have the potential to learn.” So that's been sort of a cool evolution.
Let's go dive into that a little bit, because that's an important pain point for our listeners, especially whether you're a new clinician listening. We have a lot of dietitians and programs that come to us, and they've been in practice for five or 10 years but they've been doing something specific. Anytime you change—and there are so many different career opportunities in dietetics—I don't want it to feel like you're starting all over again. But because it's a broad career track, some of our peers feel that way. So, I think it's important to have this growth mindset, especially if you want to be successful as an entrepreneur. I know I have my stories too, but since it is about you, would you be willing to share some specific examples of what you have done or what you do now to help you with your growth? You've already shown what it looks like because you've been able to speak about yourself in a positive light. Now, can you share what did to be able to get to that point?
You know, it's such an interesting, it's such an interesting topic because I really do believe that the perfectionist attitude is drilled into us from day one of our education. I think it's how our education is structured. I think it's how the internship is structured. I think it's how all of these different things are structured that have told us you have to be perfect to succeed, which, when we start to actually think about perfection, we recognize that it's a moving target and we start to realize that there is no such thing as perfection.
And so, when we're trying to achieve perfection, we're never going to be satisfied in the work that we do because we'll never get there. That's just how it goes. And I think there are a lot of feelings of vulnerability for a lot of us who identify as having that more Type A perfectionist mentality, right? Where we're like, “But I don't want to be a beginner at something again. I want to feel equipped. I don't want to have that imposter syndrome.” That's my background thoughts on that topic. But I think for me, some of the biggest, most impactful things that I feel like I've done have just been reading books about business, entrepreneurship, and mindset.
I have a whole list of books that I've shared on my Instagram recently, but I'm happy to share the link with you. They’re all about mindset and challenging your mindset and learning, like “What does it actually mean to be an entrepreneur and what does it actually mean to have a growth mindset?”
I think that listening to podcasts gives you so much free information out there on mindset and entrepreneurship. You don't have to buy some expensive course. There's so much content out there for free, and building that into my routine, I try and read for 10 minutes every morning. It doesn't have to be hours where I'm sitting down and reading a book, but just having that constant refresher and fresh perspective on mindset around business really helps me, and I've seen my process and my evolution over the last few years from being this scared dietitian to being who I am now. I still have fears, but I feel a lot more confident for sure.
Just beautiful. Thank you for sharing the specifical the specific tactic of minutes a day, reading books where you can access this information with the link that you're going to provide the listeners. That's all really helpful. One thing I've observed from talking to you—specifically this segment of the conversation—is that you're an introvert. Is that correct?
Yes. How, how did you make that assumption? I'm so curious.
Well, first of all, like I have this thing where, when I talk to people, I just start identifying their personality traits. I have everyone I work with take tests so that I can understand how we could better work together. But mostly, if someone's highly sensitive, I try to be really careful with that because it's something that people need to learn how to work with. There's no right or wrong, but a lot of dietitians have a very particular set of traits. I think it's important to learn how to function within our strengths and understand how we navigate and see the world.
That's all part of the process of growing as an entrepreneur. It doesn't happen overnight, but it definitely helps. And I agree with you fully about how our schooling, at least here in America, the dietetics program is very much structured around fostering that perfectionism. The debt-to-income ratio is huge because it's so much money for school, and then we're offered such a small salary. It takes us forever to catch up to pay it, which is why I started this business: to get out of debt and not feel like I had to be a prisoner to the nine-to-five forever and feel like I was independent.
I also wanted to not be visible more in the clinic, but there were multiple reasons. I do think that perfectionism is definitely something that we are almost conditioned for. When it comes to being a better clinician, we always have to improve our clinical skills and it’s never enough. And I think that's something that it takes a while to unlearn, and it's something important. I hope the listeners can maybe reflect a little bit about their process while listening to this episode.
Is there anything else, Krista? I'm going to mention just a couple of quick things about memberships to wrap up today's episode, but before we switch from your business to talking a little bit about your business model—and we both have a similar model called the membership model—is there anything else that you want to share that you think would be helpful for the listeners about Dietitian Success Center?
We do have a number of free dietitian resources available on our site as well, which can be really helpful. If you just pop on over to dietitiansuccesscenter.com, you click on the freebie tab and we have a client resource kit. That's a collection of five or six client handouts that practitioners should just feel free to start using. We have a PES statement cheat sheet, which has been really helpful for people. We get a lot of good feedback on that. I think it's like 10 or 15 pages. It's a big, hefty freebie, but it's an awesome resource. And then we also have a business planning workbook as well if you're somebody who's more in the private practice space.
One of our goals over the last year has been trying to stay more current with regard to hot topics and the world of nutrition. That's something we've really been trying to prioritize. For instance, when everyone was talking about Ozempic a month or two ago, we wrote a really extensive blog article on that topic. That's all available for free for practitioners. If you join our email list, you'll get access to all of that stuff. Even if you're not ready to be a member at this point.
Great! And I believe you and I are going to do another podcast episode. We'll talk more about membership. Running a membership is such an important topic—especially for innovative practitioners—whether you're already in private practice and maybe you take insurance, maybe you don't, but you want to create another revenue stream. Running membership can be a really great accessible way to help more people.
So, I want to dive in, but I first wanted you, the listeners, to learn about Krista and the work she's done, and the contributions you've made to the field. I wanted everybody to get a sense of learning about you first. Let’s talk just very briefly about the membership and then we'll do a separate at another point.
Why did you choose the membership model and why has it been beneficial for your mission and vision?
As I was thinking about what the business was going to look like, it became very clear to me that, when you have an on-demand tool like a resource library that somebody will go to before a client comes up, it's not necessarily a start-to-finish process, which is typically what we would see in an online course. It's more about, “OK, I don't need this now, but I feel like I'm going to need it in a few months.”
That's where I feel like it became quite clear to me that a membership made the most sense. When we have these tools that people are using on demand, I just wanted them to have the option to be a part of it for as long as they needed it. That’s really where the concept came from behind the membership, or the rationale came from behind the membership.
The biggest benefit of a membership is the monthly recurring revenue piece, right? As a business owner, it allows you to have a little bit more of that predictability in a business because you have a sense of approximately what your revenues are going to look like month-to-month. Whereas, if you're operating with other business models of, if you're selling online courses, it can be a little bit more of that feast and famine sort of cycle where we go through a launch and we have a ton of people and then when we're not launching, we're not bringing in money. There are ways to mitigate that, but a membership just gives you a little bit more of that consistency.
As a business owner, I really love the idea of having something that feels a bit more predictable so we can plan for growth in the future and we can plan month-to-month, and it just keeps things easier from that perspective.
There are other reasons too, but I feel like those were the key elements.
Thank you for sharing that. I think they feel inspired because I do know a lot of listeners either want to build a membership or even be part of yours or mine so they can get a sense of improving their business skills.
Right: to learn a little bit about the behind-the-scenes for us here at Dietitian Boss. With the membership model we did for customers, it was really for their need for community. So, having each other as resources as they're going through building a private practice or an online business or growing it is helpful.
I know that the big feedback we get from our clients is that they love knowing that other dietitians are hiring. I think it really helps us improve our interpersonal skills because business is a lot of foundational ideas like having conversations and practicing empathetic listening skills. Those types of things are just what we do. Counseling, right? Similar to how we operate as business owners, whether we're talking to our peers or whether we're talking to prospects or existing clients.
Or maybe, depending on what we're doing or who we're working with, it could be referral partners. I think that creating a membership where we can foster community among other dietitians is great, and our value proposition is we're for dietitians. Even students can get started, but there's legal stuff that they have to be careful of in America.
Knowing you can join a community where you're going to meet other practitioners who are going to support you along the way and building tolerance to people who might think and act differently than you is really helpful because we've had people create lifelong friendships and grow together. I love that, as a business owner, I can be with peers as I learn and grow. So, that's one component. And then the other component would be that I love the idea of the membership getting better with time. I've run everything from courses to coaching to masterminds, and I really like the idea that, with a membership model, as you add more content, you can learn from the input of your customers.
I know we'll talk more about that later when we get more to memberships, but when you get the feedback straight from the members’ mouths to improve the experience, then The Library could be your database of dietitian resources where the members can access it. You can customize it, and the more feedback and the more adjustments that you make with time—whether you're selling resources for clinical skills or, like, me more business-building resources, it really supports our mission and vision of increasing access to business education for registered dietitians and having us be seen as an expert because we're equipped with the skills that we didn't learn in school.
also know that their feedback matters to us in terms of how we can improve what they get access to behind that paywall. I always have free content, and clear expectations help you as a business with how you finance everything. So, when you're able to look at revenue in the business and make decisions based on hiring and employees and all of that, having that recurring revenue can be really helpful. Being able to provide that to your community and then being able to make adjustments and improvements with feedback only makes the membership better.
How cool is that? If you're doing it right, you know, it doesn’t get better overnight by you just sitting there—do the work and make sure you're getting feedback and applying it. But as we talked about earlier, that’s your three-step process of how you go through improving content.
I'm sure you have something similar in terms of getting feedback and telling what folks want.
I know that you already gave some plugs—any final thoughts? Otherwise, I know we mainly covered your business and your background about how you got here. Do you have some tips that can improve their mindset a little bit about our business model, why we chose it, and what it provides for the field?
No, I just so appreciate this conversation. It was so nice to chat with you, and I'm excited to talk more about memberships because, as you said before, I think it's sort of a bit of a foreign concept sometimes for dietitians, but it's so fun and so interesting. Just to reiterate, people can go over to dietitiansuccesscenter.com and check out our freebies. I also have a podcast as well, and we'll post our membership discussion there. It's the Dietitian Success Podcast, so people can check that out as well.
But absolutely—I appreciate you and I appreciate your content! It was a pleasure to have you and I look forward to talking to you again, and thank you!
