Episode 1 - Our Key Strategies When Building a 7-Figure Nutrition Business
Tue, Jan 30, 2024 10:53AM • 19:13
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
clients, business, great, coach, built, meal plans, dietitian, work, dietetic, doctor, grants, bit, caseload, partnerships, numbers, ndis, diversify, service, challenge, pay
00:02
Welcome to How to Build a Profitable nutrition business. If you love nutrition, and you love helping people, and you want to be in the game long enough to keep doing that, then this is the podcast for you. Let's get into it.
00:17
Alright, so I'm with my wife and business partner, Stacey Hughes. And today we're talking about all the key moments in our business that allowed us to go from negative however many dollars to 1.4 million in about four years, I think that growth happened. So stays what's top of your list we briefly introduced so just to recap, the first one was coaches productizing, your service and understanding the importance of value? Should we dive a little bit deeper into the coaches side of things? Yeah, so coaches, we started out with business blueprint. It was a it's a membership, where it's probably the best business membership that you can find in all of Australia, led by Dale Beaumont, I was a bit hesitant or annoyed. Yeah, I was expecting to Stacy had been and then like, It's a free event. You know, it's like a lead magnet, and then come back wanted me to go and I'm thinking I'll go, we're gonna be walking across hot coals. And within an hour, I'm like, Yeah, that's unbelievable. And still to this day. Yeah, we're still a member of that community and have been since like, 2017. And so it's been well worth it, but not just professionally, also, personally, as well. It's great personal development for both of our mindsets to really work on that growth mindset. And it gets you out of the business, you go away, and you think of things that you'd never think of when you're when you're buried in the business, just that opportunity to get away and have international conferences. We've been to Fiji with the kids in Singapore. It's I can't speak highly enough of it. Right. So we're going soon in a couple of weeks again. And then the other coach that was pivotal in our business was Pete Clark. You watched a webinar by him? And this was a specific dietician, coach. Yes. Yeah. So the he was really good in helping you come up with different ideas about your business. Yeah. And he wasn't looking to coach or reached out through. Yeah, I wanted him on a webinar, just like I want to speak to this guy. Help. Help is great. And the other one was when we were looking to productize our services to because you'd written a book and to move online. We were I joined up with Tina tower. And that's when we moved our, you know, moved the book to an online course. Yes. Yeah. And that's another program that you still remember. Oh, yeah. Tina is amazing. The content that she puts together?
02:32
Yeah. So it's tapping into that knowledge, which is kind of being really fundamental for our business. So the coaches, I cannot stress enough thing, this is coming from someone who never would have considered hiring a coach. Yeah. But also it's you got to see that it's a return on your investment as well. So you actually have to take action, from what you learn. That's the biggest part, isn't it? For me, as a dietician, there's no there's very little business marketing, like, you know, half of our profession goes into private practice. So there's very little training in that. Yes, yeah. So it's kind of I think it's a, it's a key skill. Now a key thing to consider when you when you're starting out is get yourself a business coach. Yes. And then having various locations we had we, you know, we explored different areas around Central Queensland, which were really pivotal in. Yeah, so that was born out of the need to have a full clinic every day. So we had to have a full clinic. Because I had mouths to feed, I needed to see as many people as I could. I never factored in my time traveling, so be traveling hours a day to get to a clinic to fill it. So early on. It was just born out of desperation, I guess. But later on, it actually enabled us to put a footprint into these areas. So like, if you're starting a practice in your you're in a big capital city, the travel is not going to be as bad. So it's a great idea to diversify, and have some locations around the city. And that way, if you're big enough, which is what happened with us, we sort of grew. And then by the time I was really I could put a staff member in that place. And it didn't take long to build a full time caseload. So that worked out really well. Grants accessing government grants really helped us as well because that allowed us to hire dieticians, because we have regional locations, we're able to use those grants to hire dietitians and hire our admin staff as well. We couldn't have grown really couldn't have grown without it. No $20,000 each. Yeah. And that, you know, when we were employing new grads, because we're most was seeing, you know, bulk billing or like government funded clients. And without these grants when you're employing a new grad who essentially lose money for you for the first six months because they're just finding their feet. Their retention rates are great with clients. These grants really buffered that enable us to set up an office in McCoy which is the only place we went that was a cold audience. Yeah.
05:00
I will pick it up again, this is the business Brian's I've never heard of grants. And then the next one was you wrote a book, that was another one, you resisted as well. So I did not want to write a book, I did not want to write a book at all. But I went to the free half day seminar, and I was like, this is something you have to do to reach more people. I just knew I could see Chris just seeing so many people every day. And it's just that one on one and you just can't reach enough people. I was burning out. Yeah. Yes, this is a bit of marketers delight. But a lot of that has paid off for us. So right, the tweaking diet, which we went into a second print run with that eventually, so something we could sell through the clinics, we could give away to people. Yeah, just gave you credentials, I guess. Something else doesn't that you're an author, I was shitting. Myself, because massive imposter syndrome, or who am I to write a book and Stacy had signed us up for this program, which wasn't cheap. And we couldn't get out of it. I was like, Why did you do that for and so there's a bit of tension there.
06:02
For a little while, but anyway, the process clinically, for me has been fantastic. Because it's like, even though I you know, I was extremely busy writing it. The process that net them puts together makes it very easy. But the review part of it you still to go and you mentioning a year ago. And again, check all your research and make sure it's all up to date and valid. great feedback from peers. So yeah, and client clients. Yeah. So it was a great success. It was and then from that, that led us to then productizing our service, because then we had a framework then to really work from to create an online course. So we did that and then created a health challenge. Yeah, and just really, we just knew that we had to, you know, offer people more than just
06:53
the health challenge was kind of born out of how do I get people to access the online course that we'd built. And the online course was built out of the book. And so the health challenge, which is a little bit controversial, probably in dietetic field, but it was really about trying to educate clients, because you know, we get we get such a short period of time with them, how can you get them to learn at their own pace, or just like an incentive to do the work, wasn't it? Yeah, we put up big prize money. So there wasn't a lot of profit in in the challenge for us. But what it did is it grew our private list, we doubled our social media following from 3000 to 6000. Within an ad, great brand awareness. A lot of people knew about us from the health challenges where they hadn't known about us before. Yeah. And we've done it evidence based it was yeah, it was bad. We've done the health challenges, but it was a lot of work. Yeah, it was a pain. It wasn't a scalable model at that point where there's a lot of things we can learn from it, you know, that we can now put into place. Other things. Yeah, absolutely worthwhile doing. And then with our software, we always used how Aleksey as the system, which was good, we had Dialpad, which was our phone system so that we had a phone system where an admin could enter a call from any location and then book it in. So because we had the four or five locations, so that really helped, you know, get those calls answered. And so that helped having that online telephone system. And then you we built her clinical software solutions. Yes, we used galaxy as our calendar. But I didn't quite like the speed of it for the clinical purpose. And so we kind of built this makeshift thing, which in the end was phenomenal, wasn't it? Yeah, we're not selling this, this is not a I'm not promoting it. But essentially, we get a referral from a GP in via fax or via email, a PDF, he would scan it, pull out all the doctors name, client's name, details, send the client a text referral acceptance to the doctor, and then a calendar link for the for the client to the booking appointments, I was saving a so much in admin time. And then clinically, I'll just enter all the clients data, as I'm seeing them height weight, actually, we had a pre appointment form, so they could fill that out, they would actually enter all that data.
09:08
And then it would as I sort of type things or checkboxes, it would build out a letter that I can send to the doctor. And we can literally hit the send button and it would have a pay statement or you know, all the clinical information will be sent before they've even booked their next appointment. It was a bit of a makeshift thing that we built, but it was such a time saver. It really affected our revenue didn't Yeah, because like our business is built on numbers like seeing volume and so we needed to be as efficient as possible. So that software was pivotal for that. Yeah. And then you taught yourself Power BI so you can read the numbers on those stats. Yes, yeah, that was that was and that's sort of come from Pete out coach. He was really big on numbers and analysis and so I taught myself Power BI which was like Excel on steroids if you like and that was really great because then I could see okay, which doctors are referring the most number of visits or the whole
10:00
higher ticket price lockers in dva Department of Veteran Affairs, which we get more money for, you know which doctors are sending them, which ones are referring private most bulk bill the NDIS. And so just pulling all that apart, which you need to do easily didn't want you. And so you couldn't do that by just looking at all the numbers on an Excel sheet into Power BI was great for that. Yeah. And then we had the online calculator on our website, and we use that as a lead magnet. Yes, the import? Will you really big on lead magnets in this come from business blueprint? Yeah. And so we built we had a number of them, like, free things to give away to people your plan is meal plans. Seven Day meal challenge. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, the online calculator was powerful. Yeah, cuz he was on our website, we would people would go there and have a really good SEO and they didn't, you know, people would look up how many calories in this little website from a dietitian practice in central Queensland would be highly ranked. And we're getting leads from all over the place, which is great when you've got an online course. So that was quite useful. The meal plans were like, looking at our numbers, we and this is before we had meals easy. So I built a little bit of meal planning software into the back of our clinical database, nothing compared to what you know, meals you can do. But we had like something, basically, we would do a diet history. And then it would copy and you can do an alternative. So you could just modify and do a few tweaks. That was good. And I noticed the retention improved with that. And that's when we made the decision are really big and meal plans. People want meal plans, we couldn't customize them because it was just too much work and wasn't viable. There was no software there to do it quickly. But what we did was just build out hunt like 108 or something different meal plans. So at least then there was some providing, we'd have.
11:50
Yeah, it was a new one each month.
11:54
And we all have clients coming back month after month just for the new meal plan. Wow, we have to pay the dietitians to create those meal plans. Because now you can do it in meals so easy. Yeah, so that was good. The embody. That was quite a big purchase. I mean, we were paying $25,000 per machine, we had six machines. In the end, we have one in a gym as well. But clients love that didn't
12:19
come back for that. Again, it's something that couldn't get at home. Yeah. And then the results from one scan to the next variables that could affect it. But over time, it was a great tool when you could see that trend tracking. Yeah, so it was great. It was an app and your clients really and that would pivotable in our health challenges as well. Yeah, we also done the metabolic rate testing in colorimeters. Yeah. And we we, as part of our staff retention, we would take as a staff member over to the fancy conference over into the US if they had remained with us for two years. And the very first one we went over, one of the sessions was about cutting edge technology in the dietetics space. And it was so rewarding for me because here we were, again, a small regional dietetic practice that was doing all of the cutting edge, you know, evidence based but cutting edge technology that can help you clients. And so that was all about, you know, in bodies or bio pins measures and the indirect colorimeters. And that was great for me clinically, to be able to get an idea of, you know, what we are dealing with? Yeah, so that that was another big one. Okay, the next thing was we you spend a lot of time with creating partnerships or relationships with doctors, you do Doctor lunches, you go to the practices, and other dietitians put as well, you put on a lunch talk to the nurses. And you try it. I think we in a week in a team meeting, we talked about who what ones he had booked up. So there was a number we had to meet each month, didn't we, in terms of those Doctor meetings, we take the embody sometimes colorimeter. So just to give our referring partners some sort of insight into what their clients would receive. That was really great. And James as well, you had a lot of partnerships with Jim. So you do a lot of the embody. You take your body to a gym, and they would when they do their challenges, you'd measure all the people, and then the gyms would pay for that. So it was another revenue source. Could have done that a little bit more like that was quite a profitable, profitable arm of our business. Yeah, definitely. Something that we probably didn't do enough was with partnerships with other allied health. Yes. But
14:29
yeah. And then you diversified your services as well with NDIS. Yes, I dva. That's something we explored a lot more as well. Yeah. And it was because initially, it was just both both both bills care plan, see as many as I can,
14:46
you know, really hard work low return. Whereas the DBA there's a much better return. There's a price for doing a meal plan. So all the things you would love to do for a client you could actually get remunerated in full
15:00
And then the NDIS come about. And so it was then offering a rate the remuneration was way better as well. So you can actually provide that service that you've wanted to provide the $50, Medicare wouldn't allow. So that was great. And then some corporate partnerships, we also went out to some of the power station. And again, that that is something that that just that diversity, and we don't menu reviews, and it really just showed up our business. And you tracked all that to like in a pie chart, didn't you like, and then we could see over the years, how we moved away from bulk billing and into other revenue sources. So that really helped were private, or private consults become our dominant revenue stream, which as opposed to billing, yeah, yeah. So just tracking that and keeping an eye on it. And, in always, we're always coming up with ideas. Why don't we always diversify? Yeah, because I think we were scarred by the boat builders. But I'm glad we did do the bulk billing, you know, and, you know, okay, if we're starting again, we'll do it again. Our advice from Pete was the loss leader, you know, you're getting all these people. And we did like as soon as we started bulk billing, because initially, I never I would bulk Bill healthcare card holders and children and pensioners. But anyone else I wouldn't. And then when I just thought this was too hard, because I was processing the payments myself. And so when we got rid of and just went 100%, bulk billing for everyone, the referrals flooded in.
16:28
It was it was a great referral source that then introduce people to our practice that would then come back year after year. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that's the so that's the key learnings that we experienced, that really grew our business, all of those things, working together, really grew our business to you know, that $1.4 million in revenue grew, the locations grew the staff, every location had an admin and at least 123 dieticians in each location. Yes. Which again, so that was when we become profitable, too. Because when you got one dietician in a location, and this is this is a debate that happens about should you just work out of a doctor's practice? Well, the the problem with that was that, that, you know, other doctors are less likely to refer if you're taking their patients to another doctor's practice. And so we've made that decision. We did work at a doctor's practice in, you know, places where we went for one day. But when we were establishing a full time caseload in an area, we always got our own office, which initially when there's only one dietitian, it's not that profitable, it only becomes profitable when you put two and three dieticians and that's where we started to see some profit in the business, which is quite useful. All right, so the biggest thing starts getting a coach, get a coach, I cannot stress that enough. Look into what grants are available, absolutely transformed our business. Know your numbers, both from a financial perspective and from your current caseload, what type of clients were the referrals coming from productize your service, understand the importance of value, making sure your clients feel value, and they're walking away. If you've got a team, really nurture that culture employee well and have like employee bonuses, making sure staff retention because it's quite that was what we did with our fancy conference, didn't we like we try and keep them as long as we could, because it was quite costly to employ a new dietitian.
18:24
Diversify your caseload, build partnerships with your referrers and look at some really good software solutions to streamline your business or to you know, to make your business more profitable. I'm probably guilty of looking at the cost of something and not the return. So you got to look at okay, what if I'm gonna pay a lot for this? Am I gonna get a good return?
18:47
Right, so yeah, hopefully you've got something out of that and the things that you could implement yourself. Thank you.
18:55
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