episode 10
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Chris Hughes: [00:00:00] We're a profession of caring people. That's right. I haven't found too many people in the industry that aren't willing to offer something.
Dr. Peter Clarke: Not being afraid to ask and then just listening to them and then just persisting. And sometimes you might need to adjust the gyroscope and do things a little bit differently.
But if you persist, then the rewards will come.
Chris Hughes: 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, keep doing that. Then this is the podcast for you. Let's get into it.
Welcome back to How to Build a Profitable Nutrition Business. Today I have a very special guest by the name of Dr. Peter Clarke. Now, Pete is someone who was pivotal in my business back in 2015 or 2016. I reached out to him at a really desperate point in our business. We weren't doing very well and I watched a presentation of his and the advice he gave us.[00:01:00]
really shaped our business from that point on and allowed us to flourish. So Pete's an advanced accredited practicing dietitian. He's an advanced sports dietitian. He's a member of the nutrition and dietetics Academy in the USA. He established his own business called healthier you on Port Macquarie and over 18 years helped over 11, 000 people.
So he's well equipped to, to give advice in the nutrition space. But recently, He's actually undertaken a PhD that he's completed, which is going to transform the nutrition business space moving forward. It was some pretty pivotal research. I was able to take part in that research and I'm really excited to be able to share some of those findings today.
Let's get into it. Welcome back to another episode of How to Build a Profitable Nutrition Business. Today, as I have just introduced, I've got with me a mentor of mine, someone that certainly helped shape my career. And that is Dr. Peter Clarke. So Pete is a dietician who had his own business for a number of years down there in Port Macquarie.
a really [00:02:00] successful dietetic practice, which we'll get into, but has also recently completed his PhD in some groundbreaking research that is much needed in the nutrition industry, particularly the dietetics industry. But I think there's more than just the dietitians and nutritionists even that can benefit from your research, Pete.
Thanks for coming on mate. How are you?
Dr. Peter Clarke: Thanks for the lovely introduction, Chris. It's a pleasure and an honor actually to be involved with your group now, and we're excited for some of the things that you're doing and where the direction of that's going too, so congratulations on that.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, thanks mate.
It's all very exciting. I'll give a bit of background on how our paths crossed. Because it was, I did talk about this in one of our earlier episodes. I started our business in 2015 and was just head down, bum up, working as hard as I could, actually flogging myself to the point of I had kids to feed and mortgage to pay.
And I was like, I've just got to work hard, but was burning myself out at a rate of knots. And then for whatever reason, I tuned into a presentation that the sports [00:03:00] dietitian association run. And I don't think I've ever actually attended any webinars before. And I signed up to this one sliding doors moment you presented and you presented on The statistics of your business and it blew my mind like it was, you're basically presenting on a lot of your referral statistics, the numbers you were seeing my mind exploded, but it was about then where to address your focus when it comes to your referral base and your doctors and who's referring, I'll let you talk about it, it's more profitable, low volume versus high volume referrers and which ones to nurture.
Yeah. And I'm like, I've got to reach out to this guy. I just sent you an email straight after I'm like, if you're available, can you help me? You weren't really in the mentoring space, but you agreed to help me out just cause you're a good bloke. And we've, I've got to know you quite well over the years and you transformed our business.
Like the advice you gave us. That's essentially my wife and I, we put things in place. And then over the next four or five years, we went from just [00:04:00] me to a team of 18 and number of practices. And I owe it all to you, mate. So thank you very much.
Dr. Peter Clarke: I think you're being a little bit too kind there, Chris.
I just gave you a little bit of focus and a little bit of guidance at the beginning, but I think you took it to a whole new quantum level than I could have. So congratulations on that. Yeah. Good luck. By way of a bit of background I started out life having graduated school with a master's in science and started in the medical research world and then decided it wasn't floating my boat.
So I joined the pharmaceutical industry and anyone who wants to understand about. Data assessments to identify business opportunities, and that's one industry that you really want to have a look at what they're doing because they don't make any decision in practice unless there's a a solid evidence base for what they're doing and what the return on that investment is going to be.
So I spent 7, 8 years in sales and marketing roles. Both in Australia and the United States, I was in a corporate [00:05:00] role where we had a major anti psychotic and we were responsible for the global marketing of that product. And so I'd spent a long time in the industry, my last role was the marketing director for Australian New Zealand, and I just turned 40, I was on my way to a heart attack and a stroke because I was just working and working.
I went to a dietician as a client and she helped me lose weight and that was great. Went away, kept working so hard went to another dietician, I couldn't lose weight. So I came home to my wife and I said, look, I think I want to be a dietician. We've had enough of the pharmaceutical industry. And I want to get on top of my health.
So I quit a very high paying job, went back and became a student, which is probably a little bit unusual. But for us, it was the best thing we could have done, both for our quality of life and for our family. And then financially, it proved to be an even better decision as well. So I started out my dietetic practice.
with 17, 18 years of [00:06:00] pharmaceutical business and marketing experience. And I took the newly acquired nutrition knowledge I had and started a practice and we were very successful with that. And so you mentioned before, what are some of the things that we spoke, I presented on one of the approaches that the pharmaceutical industry has is looking at things like so what's your return on investment?
So they use the Boston Matrix, which I'm sure a lot of your subscribers would be very familiar with, but for those who aren't, the Boston Matrix came from the Boston Consulting Group that looked at a simple assessment, but a very effective assessment. Looking at with the customers that are referring new clients, are they low referrers or are they high referrers?
And then with those same customers, are they low volume referrers? Or are they high volume referrers? So the clients they're sending you, are they low value clients or are they high value clients? So you've got a matrix there. So obviously the [00:07:00] group that everyone wants to have is the high volume, high value referrers.
So these are people that refer you a lot of clients and the clients that they refer you are valuable. They've got more discretionary income and they're able to spend more on your services. So obviously they're the group that you want to retain and make sure they're core part of your business. The opposite quadrant from that, the low volume, low value referrers.
So they're people that might refer you a handful of clients and the clients they refer you and they may have not a lot of money and they may not be able to provide and make most of all the service you're able to provide. Those type of referrers, you can, and it sounds a bit silly, you may not need to pay any attention to.
Then you've got the high value. low volume referrers. They're the group that you need to focus on the most. So these are people that are sending you, the clients that they're sending you are very valuable. They've got [00:08:00] a good discretionary income and they can spend more on services and you can provide additional services.
You may have add on services you can provide, but at the moment those referrers are only sending you small volumes of clients and that's where the growth that you practice should come in. So obviously protecting the high value, high volume referrers is important. But if you want to grow your practice, then those low volume, high value referrers are the one that you want to look at.
And that's what we applied to our practice. And when we did that, we saw our growth accelerate. And I know, Chris, you took that on to a An even far greater degree than I did with your practice and grew it up to be, I think you were saying at one stage one and a half million dollars a year turnover. And so looking at the data for your practice is the most important thing.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. Like you inspired me when like looking at your numbers. So from your presentation, because of the data's there, like we were using what's called health kit, now Haloxy. And we could just [00:09:00] pull out the CSV Excel files and put them into, I then actually learned Power BI and taught myself data on steroids because there was just so much value that we were leaving on the table.
And that was the thing you taught me. It was like, I was low vol, high volume, low value, that we were, a lot of our work was the bulk bill Medicare. So for those that don't know what bulk billing is, the government picks up the bill, the client doesn't pay, but they don't pay as much. And you always gave me an interesting point about that and it's Those clients are your lost leaders.
It's not that you completely ignore them like that. They can potentially come on.
Dr. Peter Clarke: Yeah. And for those who don't know, lost leader is like just simple analogy. If you walk into a pharmacy or you walk past the pharmacy and they've got toilet paper on special outside and everyone uses toilet paper and you see it's on special, then you go into the pharmacy to buy it.
And while you're in there, you get your prescription, but you might get your nail polish or you might get. Deodorant and all those other add [00:10:00] ons that perhaps if the loss leader wasn't out the front may not have attracted you in. And so for me, bulk billing is, there's a few reasons why there's a benefit in a dietetic practice.
One, it does, as you say, keep the revenue coming in. It may be low value revenue, but at least it does keep the revenue coming on. In my practice, we found that 24 percent of people that we bulk build went on to become private clients. So there is clients that, although you may discount the first few visits, they become ongoing or higher value clients.
The other aspect is that as a dietician, I went into the practice to help people. And I found that unless we bulk build some people that I couldn't enable to do that. So for certain people that we would bulk build, But the other thing it does is once someone gets into your practice, if they've had a success, then they become your biggest mouth voice.
Okay. So all the promotion we do individually as practitioners in advertising our services, whether it be through social media or direct marketing, [00:11:00] all those things are superseded by the word of mouth. And I'm sure Chris, you'd probably agree in your practice. Although your success came from the great work you did with your referrers, I think that when you get a clinical result with a client, that's usually the best way to get another client into your practice.
Chris Hughes: You cannot beat it, can you? You just cannot beat word of mouth. I love that you brought up that third point because that, for me, was really important that you got into this industry to help people, essentially, which is, you May also be our weakness as a profession because we're not as business focused and more about helping people, but it was important for us to still be able to provide that service for the people that couldn't afford it.
And yes, you may not have been able to provide the full suite of things that the amount of time and everything, and that's just the reality of running a business, but it certainly served a purpose for us to still be able to see people in that capacity.
Dr. Peter Clarke: Yeah, exactly.
Chris Hughes: Pete, you've now got on to do a PhD, [00:12:00] which I'd love for you to talk about because that PhD basically has filled a massive void in the industry and has got the ball rolling and some momentum to really try and mold the landscape for nutrition or even allied health.
Moving forward in that business space. Do you want to share some of the insights that you've been
Dr. Peter Clarke: part of that? You probably don't know this Chris, but as Chris and I developed a relationship and I helped him out establishing his practice, he was doing some things that I realized that I wasn't doing in my practice as well.
And it made me think, what should we as a profession do? Now, some of the latest data says that about 35 percent or one in three dieticians are working in private practice. But importantly, 50 percent of new grads are ending up in private practice. And that's either by design, because they want to, or by default, because they've got a hex debt and they need to pay it back.
And so as a profession, We've got a large proportion of our [00:13:00] workforce working in private practice. Now, nine in ten Australians suffer from a chronic disease and nutrition is a major modifiable determinant to overcoming chronic diseases. So we do a great job in practice at being able to prevent chronic disease.
But unfortunately, as a profession, there's no standardised way of operating a private practice. Now, we get trained at university or educated at university, I should more apresay, on the basic fundamentals of the Australian dietary guidelines. And as a profession, we're very good at implementing those. And I'll talk a little bit later on about some of our studies, one of our studies clearly demonstrated that.
But where as a profession, we aren't so good. Is standardized approaches to our business metrics and what's some of the data that we should capture. And so after discussing with Chris and a [00:14:00] few other people, I said, why don't I embark on a PhD and trying to scratch the surface on this? Because when you look at what's published, there's very little published evidence on what you should look at.
Both from the clinical aspects are clearly well established, but the business aspects aren't. And that was the area that I think Chris was really accelerated the growth of his practice on when he focused on making smarter decisions as opposed to just working harder and looking at some of the business metrics there.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. Oh, thanks, Peter. I knew I took part in the research. I didn't know I had much more of a role. Do
Dr. Peter Clarke: you know what? Success has many values than orphans. So because I got the PhD, then we can talk about how much you're involved. But in all seriousness, it's the observation of what others do, which was what I was interested in.
I knew my little geography in Port Macquarie, which was a 50 kilometre radius from a small country town in mid north coast of New South Wales. But what I was interested in is, what [00:15:00] do others do? We spoke to 26 leading practices across the country. We spoke to people that, as Chris grew his practice, he was, is managing a very large volume.
profitable practice. And we said, what are some of the other practices across the country that are doing that type of thing? And through some snowball recruiting, which is asking people who do it, who else does it? Cause everyone knows someone who you may not know. We identified 26 practices across the country and those 26 practices combined the clinicians who were running those practices had more than 400 years of practice experience.
I was in practice for 17 years. But if I can, And I can look at all the things that I did, but if I can compare that to someone who's been in practice for 400 years, I know which one's going to give you a far better response. And so we spoke to these experts and the pleasing thing for me as a practitioner is I rang [00:16:00] these people a lot of times cold called.
So I rang people that I didn't know. And I would say that someone suggested I call you and virtually to a person, there was only three people that said. They weren't able to participate just because of timing things. But the people that we approached, all of them said that they'd be happy to be involved.
And we paid them a very small honorarium, which was not commensurate at the time, but was a reflection of the type of people that we recruited to say, Look, they want to play a role in maybe getting our profession more professional at some of the data capture that they have in practice. So look, just to let you know, so we spoke to 26 practices.
They came from all Australian mainland states and territories, relatively are proportional to the population. They are predominantly east coast, but that's where the population is. And we did two things. So firstly, before we spoke to them, I did a literature search and I said, what does the literature say that [00:17:00] we should focus on in private practice dietetics?
And literature searches are a bit like driving your car along the road. and heading in a direction where all you're looking at is the rear vision mirror. If it's been published it means it's been around for a while, someone's identified it, and then the process of publication is 12 months in a lot of cases.
So it's like driving your car looking in the rear vision mirror and expecting that you're going in the right direction. And I realized that a literature search wasn't going to capture all the things because when you do the literature search, I identified things just in my practice that we were doing that there's no published evidence for.
And a lot of the times in areas that are not well studied or areas where the current Treatment outstrips the pace of the research. People do things that there's no published evidence for. So if all you're doing is focusing on, what does the literature say, as the academics talk [00:18:00] about, then you may not capture all the things that are being done in practice.
So we identified in that, we identified 105 things that the literature says that we should focus on in practice. So that's a pretty good start.
Chris Hughes: That's huge.
Dr. Peter Clarke: Then I did half an hour to 45 minute interviews one on one with the 26, I called them thought leaders, because these are people that are well respected in our profession and Chris you were one.
And these people spoke to me about, just in a general conversation, the way we are now what are the things they do? And a lot of times they'd say, what are we focused on here? Are you focused on just the clinical aspects of dietetics? And I said, no, I'm interested in your whole practice. And they said, the far bigger aspect where I spend most of my time is the business aspects of practice.
And so we explored those. Combined out of the 26 thought leaders, we identified another 115 things. Predominantly business things [00:19:00] that these thought leaders said are crucial for practice.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, wow.
Dr. Peter Clarke: 216 things, of which only 105 there's published evidence for. Wow. And then what we did is we did what's called a Delphi approach.
And a Delphi approach, for those who don't know, is like a consensus review, but a very sophisticated consensus review. And it's been proven to be effective at elucidating a consensus. So it was developed by the Rand Company in 1950s. Yeah. They basically said if you ask people a question and ask them to rate things from one to four or one to five on a Likert scale, people will rate things, and even if you give them guidance, they will rate things where they think it is.
So they did that with their group of customers, and then what they did is they combined the results, and then they sent the same questions, and they picked out the top responses, and they sent the [00:20:00] questions back to the same people who participated and said, Here's the group average of what everyone thinks.
Do you think you would still rate that? So you might have been asked something where you rated it as a five, which is a high. And when you get the group average back as a result, the group average might have rated it as a two. You go, maybe in reflection, maybe I haven't been as Maybe I've been a little bit too kind because everyone else is thinking it too.
And the converse is true too. So some of the people who rated it two might decide to rate it a four. And so if you do that consensus review twice with the same process, you develop an evidence based consensus. And that's what we did. So we took those 216 items down. After the first round, there was about 152 of those that still remained.
So what you do is you take them all and then you cut out the [00:21:00] bottom, we cut out the bottom quarter, or bottom third, sorry. And then you focus on, in the second round, you focus on the top 20%, okay. So if someone achieves a rating that is agreed upon, By the vast majority of your customers. So that means that more than 80 percent of your customers have agreed or 80 percent of the people involved in the survey had agreed.
These are things that we should focus on. And that is considered a consensus amongst those. So we identified out of that approach. We identified taking 216 items down to 78.
Chris Hughes: Yeah,
Dr. Peter Clarke: there's 45 business related items.
Chris Hughes: Yeah,
Dr. Peter Clarke: and there's 33 clinical related items. So for those dietitians watching, the clinical aspects would be the standard stuff that most of you would focus on.
The A, B, C, [00:22:00] D, anthropometry, how often do you measure someone's weight or waist circumference, biochemistry, have you looked at their blood glucose or their blood lipids? Okay. Clinical. How's their bowel function? Has that changed? What's their sleep like? What's their mental health like? Dietary. Are they meeting the dietary requirements for core food groups?
So those clinical aspects that we identified, 33 of them, very important. There was a consensus on those. That there was nothing in there that was earth shattering to me, but the business related ones were the most interesting. The business
Chris Hughes: ones would have potentially been the ones where the data was significantly lacking too, I'd imagine.
Exactly
Dr. Peter Clarke: right. Exactly right. And just to that point, it's very good pickup there, Chris. We've implemented these standards with a group of 45 practitioners in the, in a follow up study, and about 79 percent of the clinical standards are routinely used in practice, so that's great.
Chris Hughes: Yeah.
Dr. Peter Clarke: [00:23:00] Because people get educated at different times of their life, yet When you do a survey some of the people we spoke to in that survey were new grads and some of the people who had been in practice for 25 years, but 79 percent of them used the clinical standards all the time.
So I thought that was a great result, a strong reflection of the standardized nutrition training that we've got in Australia, headed by the Australian Dietetic Council. But the business standards, only 24 percent of those were used routinely in practice. Okay. So the business standards fall into 10 different categories.
So there's things like, what are you doing with referrers? Have you identified your referrers? What are you doing with your, on a consultation? Is it an initial consultation? Is it a review consultation? What are the types of services you're offering? What are you doing for cancellations? When some, someone cancels, what's your standardized approach to cancellation?
Firstly, are you capturing that data? A lot of people aren't [00:24:00] capturing that data. Cancelling may be a strong indication. In fact, one of the standards, which is an interesting one, is how many people came for a second visit. Okay. So think about that. You're not going to be able to retain a customer and develop some type of treatment approach for a disease that they're going to have for the rest of their life without long term treatment.
I often get asked how long Should someone see a dietitian, my philosophy is for as long as they've got the illness that requires treatment, because it's ongoing treatment, will you need to provide a service for them because while they've still got it, there's certainly ways that nutrition can play a role.
The
Chris Hughes: obesity guidelines is 14 visits in the first six months to a health.
Dr. Peter Clarke: Exactly right.
Chris Hughes: But I think as dietitians, there's a real conflict, isn't there, that And we're just doing this for the business, but it's not like you can't help them on one visit. It's not that took a lifetime for them to get to this position.
You can't fix it.
Dr. Peter Clarke: [00:25:00] Exactly. Exactly. And it requires multiple visits, potentially over long periods of time. And in a lot of cases, it may be over a number of years before. before everything can get to a state where you both agree that things are better than what they were previously. One of the, so I won't go through all 10 aspects of the business.
If people want to, they can either, I can provide a copy of the paper. Or we can certainly put a QR code available. I might. Yeah, we can do that for sure. Put that up and people can have a look at that. One of the areas that's interesting in dietetics is customer satisfaction. Now, this is an interesting approach that As a profession, we don't do customer satisfaction well at all.
Okay. Now, ad hoc on the 26 people I spoke to, some people do, there was one, one practice in North Queensland, a great practice run by a guy named Mitch Smith up in North [00:26:00] Queensland. And he has a simple measure of customer satisfaction, which is after every new client visit he gets his admin to ring them up and say, You've been to an initial visit with us.
You've got a, you may or may not have another appointment booked, but would you refer us to a friend of yours? Not asking him to do it, but saying, based on your experience, did you consider it worthy that you would talk to someone else about us? And I thought that was a very powerful way of saying, Simple way.
Now, if someone says, Hey, look, you guys were great. I've got another appointment book next week. And yeah, sure. I'm talking to my friends about this. Cause I really thought you're great. That's a positive result, but you might also get the opposite, which is what I refer to my friend. Look, you guys were good, but I probably wouldn't refer to a friend.
And I think that to me speaks volumes about the service you provided. And so certainly customer satisfaction is an area. And in fact, one of the recommendations, my PhD was that, Someone should [00:27:00] undertake a PhD looking at satisfaction metrics across different professions, whether they be health professions, or whether they be outside of health, because we can learn a lot from the pharmaceutical industry.
What do they do with customer satisfaction and client satisfaction? And how are they using that information? A lot of us are frequent flyers with airlines and the value of that information to that airline is dramatic compared to how much effort that you need to attract clients. So certainly retaining clients and making sure your customers are satisfied is a crucial element of your success.
Chris Hughes: I think it's critical that we look outside the industry because we're not traditionally, we're not good at customer satisfaction. We're not business minded. So I think
Dr. Peter Clarke: there's only one place to
Chris Hughes: look.
Dr. Peter Clarke: Interesting point you made there, Chris. Three, five of the thought leaders that we had participate in the studies I talked about before.
So of the 26 people recruited, [00:28:00] Five of them weren't working as dietitians. Now, two of them were dietitians, but they weren't working as dietitians. But when you speak to people and you say, hey, look, hey, look, we're doing this study on dietetics. We want to understand all the data metrics with dietetics and some of the standards that we should implement as a profession.
Often another dietitian's name will come up. But what I also found is they said, look, this guy is not a dietitian. Or this lady's not a dietitian, would you speak to them? Because they've got all these things that they do on retaining clients and data capture, that you should speak to them. Because if you're fair dinkum about understanding what are the standards approach, you can't just be limited to your own world.
And in the same way that I used to, Dietetic Association meeting. And Every couple of years is just to say, Hey, look, take yourself out of your comfort zone, go somewhere else where they don't have managed structured care the way that we do in [00:29:00] Australia and universal health care and have a look at what's happening in other countries and see if there's things there that you can cherry pick some of it you won't.
Some of it is just, it's not relevant, but there'll be other things that you might. And so looking outside your field is certainly a very important aspect.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, a hundred percent. And so what are the key findings? If you pick the top three, if we talk about customer satisfaction, what would the next two be, Pete?
Dr. Peter Clarke: Yeah, I think it may sound obvious to you and I, Chris, because we are a bit business focused by nature, but just examining your finances. Not just the top line, but the bottom line, and how's that been driven? Is it being driven by people coming along to your service once? and trying you which might look like the top line's going, okay, because a lot of people are coming in, but are they retaining and what type of retention you're getting with those types of people?
And how does [00:30:00] that impact both the top line and the bottom line? It may also in tough times, certainly when things were happening around COVID, if you've got a good understanding of your costs of doing business, then if things suddenly change, Then you know exactly where you can perhaps trim to make sure that you maintain your profit.
And that's certainly an aspect that, that a lot of people by nature, they may be interested in, but don't just leave it to the, don't just leave it to your accountant to tell you how you've done. You need to have a good grasp of those types of things overall. Yes. So I think there are different things that you do.
Probably the last thing I'd say, and it relates to a point you made when we first started, was the importance of business mentorship. Now, all of us who become dieticians, we have brilliant nutrition knowledge and some of us by nature are great at business as well. But what I found with these. thought [00:31:00] leaders that participated in the study was that most of them had a business mentor or a business coach.
Okay. And that person may or may not know anything about dietetics. Okay. Now, when I worked with you, Chris, I knew enough about dietetics and business that I could help you out. But a number of the other people that participated in the study found that they got a lot of very valuable advice from people that weren't dietitians because they could focus on the business aspects.
They may have, they may be an accountant. I may be a financial planner, whatever it may be, someone from outside their world who was able to just give them that business mentorship and support. And that's crucial because as you're running a practice, you're a solo practitioner, you're doing everything, you're trying to be jack of all trades.
But even when you're the boss, And you're employing three or four or five people. Sometimes you just need someone to bounce ideas off. I'm doing this. Is that right? [00:32:00] I had this problem with one of my staff the other day. How would you have managed it? That type of stuff. And I think, don't be afraid to reach out for support.
And most of the people that I spoke to in the study had a paid business mentor. In the same way you pay for subscription to your data management system, where you might pay. for promotional material or whatever you pay for then certainly don't be afraid to pay for someone because I think you might find that the return on investment for that type of sport can be quite large.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, that's fascinating. I, we haven't talked about that. I didn't realise that was one of the findings, but it's something cause I've had a couple, Jodie Sheridan, on before he does business coaching and then also Rebecca Jones on who are both business coaches. And then I've had Lena. So they actually got into the consulting side of it, born out of the, again, the void that's there, but Lena Brake, who's an amazing dietitian.
She actually had her on a few episodes ago and she has a non [00:33:00] dietitian business coach. So after having you help with me, you were fantastic for me because you had that inside knowledge of the industry. And Stace, my wife, already had business coaches as well for herself. So we had that external lens to look through, but then I had your, because you helped me so much in the industry with billing codes and stuff with DVA that I didn't even know existed.
Yeah,
Dr. Peter Clarke: it's an important aspect of, we've talked a number of times about the nutrition training for dietetics and it's brilliant at nutrition education. And the studies that we did showed that the implementation of a standardized approach across Australia is widespread. Where I think our current nutrition programs fall down a little bit is the business aspects of practice.
And look, nutrition in Australia has been a profession since the 30s. And really since the turn of the century, people have Started to establish effective and profitable private practices. And that [00:34:00] partly is driven by the advent of the chronic disease items with Medicare. But currently, I think I might have mentioned this before.
One in three dieticians work in practice. One in two dieticians are entering private practice. And I think our profession needs to catch up with a bit that being successful in practice you have to be a good dietician or a effective nutrition counselor to be successful in private practice. But it doesn't matter how much nutrition knowledge you have if you can't retain clients.
Work out where your cancellations are coming from. What are you doing with your referrers? How are you managing your clients socio demographics? What are you appealing to with a satisfaction? All those types of things, unless you're doing the business aspects, then it doesn't matter how good a dietician you are, you won't be in practice for long because you won't be able to make a living.
And that's unfortunately why a lot of people in our profession leave the profession because they just can't make a living. And it's [00:35:00] not that they don't have the nutrition knowledge, it's just they haven't been taught how to put it into practice. And so that's why some of this work, I'm very pleased that it's been done.
It's helped scratch the surface on that, but it's also identified. What do we need to do for a generic approach for our profession? So one in two dietitians end up in private practice, but one in two don't. We need to provide the business training for people that don't have a focus on establishing a private practice.
They might want to work in food service, so they might want to do. social media counseling or whatever they might want to do a media, whatever it may be corporate work. So they may not need the general business knowledge that we're talking about. For those who do it might, it would help to incorporate as part of the core nutrition course, or maybe the idea of micro credentialing comes out.
So we're currently having discussions with some people about the potential of putting together a micro credential. So if you're If you know that private practice is an area that you want to [00:36:00] go into then maybe you undertake some extra study that gives you some type of credential while you're doing your undergrad degree and then you, when you establish your practice, you hit the ground running, and particularly if that's tied in with ongoing mentorship, then I think then you'd be set up for success.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, I think that's microcredential because you could assume then that if it's built into the degree, because I guess in the degree we could have streams like we currently do, you could have clinical streams or exercise streams kind of thing, but we're excluding allied health. As a microcredential, you could have nutritionists, I
Dr. Peter Clarke: can tell you that the clinical aspects that I spoke about before with my studies are dietetic specific.
But the business aspects, whether you're a dietitian, a physio, a podiatrist, an exercise physiologist, or even a GP, Understanding where are you [00:37:00] getting your referrals from or where are you getting your clients from. Are you providing all the services that they want? And how satisfied with your services are they?
And how likely are they to stay with you long term? It doesn't matter what. area of allied health you work in some of those aspects, I think are pretty generic. And so that the, a micro credential may appeal to more than people just that are going to become dietitians.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. A hundred percent agree.
Pete, just to finish off, mate, something that I tend to ask my guests is if we were rewinding 17 years and you were talking to Peter Clark going into practice, what advice would you be giving to anyone that's entering the nutrition business space that you think is going to give the most value? Thank you.
Yeah,
Dr. Peter Clarke: look, it's not just for dietician centering practice, but it's particularly relevant to them. But the phrase that sort of motivated me all the way along was persistence beats resistance. Now, if you've got a [00:38:00] business and you're working hard at it, then you've just got to persist and sometimes like you did, Chris, you're working hard at and I think you're on the edge of throwing it in, but you decided I've got to keep persisting and maybe there's a different way and attending a webinar, whether it just be fortuitous or whether it was a sliding doors moment, set up a relationship between you and I, And you took your practice to a far bigger practice than I was running.
I think persisting with it and sticking with it is a very important thing. And don't be afraid to call out for help. None of us is as smart as all of us. And sometimes a call to someone, whether it be through a formalized agreement, Or just one of your mates or some of the someone in the profession that you respect.
Sometimes just the call to say, Hey, look, give me a second opinion here. How could I have done this? And this is where it's at. And what do we need to do? And as a profession, as I said, when I was talking about some of my [00:39:00] studies, virtually everyone I spoke to when you ask them, Hey, could you help out?
Because this is what I'm trying to do. They'll help. Okay. We're a profession of
Chris Hughes: caring people. That's right. I haven't found too many people in the industry that aren't willing to offer something for us. Exactly right.
Dr. Peter Clarke: And not being afraid to ask and then just listening to them and then just persisting.
And sometimes you might need to adjust the gyroscope and do things a little bit differently. But if you persist, then the rewards will come.
Chris Hughes: Love it. Now Pete, I know you're more in the academic space. Love it. These days, but if someone's listened to this, like I did so many years ago, I listened to you and they just wanted to tap into your wealth of knowledge.
Is that something you are open to, or you'd be willing to help out?
Dr. Peter Clarke: I've got a few balls in the air at the moment. We're doing a little bit of academic work on the Gold Coast and I've got a advisor role, national. Advise role with Department of Veterans Affairs, but certainly I have got a little bit of capacity if someone's particularly interested and they want to explore either some of these studies a little bit more or how I might be able [00:40:00] to support.
I'd certainly be able to listen to you and they say, if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person. And so sometimes the answer is going to be yes, even though it maybe takes the water from here to there, but you just keep paddling and so you get it done. But yeah, sure, more than happy to help out if he thinks I could add value.
Chris Hughes: I, I can certainly attest for that because you were extremely busy when you helped me out, but we, but you made time for me on a Saturday. I used to meet on a Saturday just to help. And look,
Dr. Peter Clarke: it was mutually beneficial, right? Cause as I said, it was, yeah. As I said, you were part of the people that said, help me identify that maybe there's a need for a more broader approach to this.
And anytime you connect with someone, there's always a relationship that, and we've helped each other out at different things over the years where, I think nothing ventured, nothing gained. And so it's been a, it's been a good thing and it will continue for years to come, I'm sure.
Chris Hughes: Yes, absolutely. Thanks for your time today, Pete.
I very much appreciate you giving up your time and we'll put some links in the show notes where people can access [00:41:00] your research findings from your PhD. And then we'll put your contact details if anyone was in dire need like I was. I was and want to reach out and seek your expert help.
Dr. Peter Clarke: Sure. Thanks Chris. Thanks mate. Do you
Chris Hughes: find this podcast valuable? There may be other nutrition professionals out there will also. If you like, share and subscribe, it's going to help other nutrition professionals make an impact on the world, just like you. Thanks.
