In this episode of The Dietitian Success Podcast, I talk about 5 mistakes I’ve made in my business(es) and consistent themes I see in a lot of other RD businesses. Plus, solutions for how to address them.
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Episode Transcript:
Welcome to the Dietitian Success Podcast. I’m Krista, the founder of Dietitian Success Center, an online learning platform for RDs and students. I am on a mission to help more dietitians build confidence and expertise in running successful, profitable businesses. I went to business school so you don’t have to.
My team and I have grown DSC to a platform that serves hundreds of members. We’ve experimented with all types of marketing, tech, sales strategies, productivity tools, systems, and more. And we want to spill the tea on what’s working, what’s not, and how you can leverage our insights to kickstart, expand, or elevate your own business.
Ready to dive into your business school crash course? If so, let’s get started.
Hey there and welcome to a new episode of the dietician success podcast. I hope you are having an awesome week. I wanted to. Pop on and record this episode because I was feeling really inspired. Because if you’ve been following me for a little while and listening to this podcast, you know, that I took a break from working. With dieticians one-on-one on their businesses. When I got pregnant and when I had a baby. And then I’ve recently brought that service back and I’ve completely revamped that service. Because after some self reflection and kind of better understanding where my. Super powers and strength exists. I’ve sort of landed on the fact that I love. Looking at established businesses and being able to take a more holistic perspective on the business and say, okay, here are some things that could be tweaked or changed or fixed to make massive impact. And so as part of this new offer, Aye. Include a business audit, which is essentially where I go through someone’s business from an outsider’s perspective. And I take the perspective of a potential customer or a potential client or potential member.
It doesn’t matter your business model. So I take that perspective and I look at the customer journey and I identify what are some of those areas where you are losing people every day. And then I also take the perspective of myself as someone who has done a lot of business marketing strategy, et cetera, I’ve done a lot of trial and error around. What. Tends to work well, what tends to not work well? And so I take those two perspectives to do a full audit and identify some of the key areas. That can be fixed in a business.
And that, and th that really becomes our, you know, our, our blueprint, our game plan for like, okay. Here’s what to work on first. Here’s what to work on next. And so I wanted to talk about. Five things that I tend to see pretty consistently. From a lot of dieticians whose businesses I look at whose businesses I have the opportunity to look at it.
And I’m always looking at businesses, dietician businesses, because I also obviously run dietician success center. And as part of that, we have hundreds of dieticians in our community. And so I’m constantly looking at businesses, dietician, businesses. And so I wanted to talk about five easy fixed business mistakes that are costing you clients and money. And so perhaps you can identify with one of these, perhaps you could identify with all of these, but these are intended to be sort of those gut check pieces where you can. I’ll say the item and then you can do a little bit of self reflection and ask yourself, okay, is this something that actually I could fix?
I could tweak in my business. Is this maybe a weak spot for me that I want to work on? And so that’s what I want to go through today. And I also just want to mention too, I have a couple slots open for one-on-one business strategy. Business strategy and coaching. I’m calling it strategy first because that’s really the core component about why this offer is different than what a lot of other people are doing in sort of the coaching world. Because this is super hands-on.
It is like me. You know, diving into your business and, and really providing that super hands-on support. And so I’m calling it strategy. And then also coaching too, because the coaching piece comes into play. When we’re talking about mindset and. We’re talking about, you know, lacking confidence when it comes to selling an offer or increasing your prices or changing your business model or whatever.
So. That is, if that is something that is interesting for you there is a link to that offer in the description of this episode. So you can come, you can check it out. You can hop on a discovery call with me. Even if you’re not sure whether it’s right for you, just book a call and we can talk about it.
There’s no obligation there. We’ll talk about what it would look like for you. Okay. With that, let’s get into the five easy fix mistakes that are costing you clients and money. Number one is website and that your website doesn’t look legit. I think that a lot of business owners undervalue the importance of a professional. Appealing website. Because a website and how it looks really says something about the person behind the website at the end of the day.
Right? If your website is disorganized or sloppy or it looks really dated. That communicate something about the person who created that website. And so we do want to be very conscious of that. And I tend to see this often with WordPress sites because WordPress sites are notoriously tricky to make look good, and they can not always, but they can look really outdated. And I also see this sometimes if someone is using a WIC site or a Squarespace site, and they’ve decided not to use a template. They just say, I’m just going to go freestyle with this because I know best, well, let me tell you those templates are created for a reason because they look beautiful.
They’ve considered, they’ve been created by designers. They’ve considered things like. Things that non designers just don’t necessarily see like, white space, you know, how different text boxes show up on the screen, spacing between different elements. You know, keeping into consideration things like how, what can someone actually process when they land on a website page and what is just too much information.
So I love those Wix templates because they kind of keep us. Grounded and they reign us in a little bit from putting too much information onto our site. So a website is really important and I just think that can’t be overstated. And it’s really important to make sure that your website looks legit. So, if you’re thinking to yourself and you can, you know, find someone you trust and ask them to just give you honest feedback about what your website looks like.
And if it’s not me, then, you know, grab a friend, a business colleague, whatever, and ask them, Hey, can you actually tell me what my website looks like? I’m not going to be offended. What would you change? What is unclear? What do you like about it? What do you not like about it? Because I really want to fix it.
I really want to change it, but I need to know what to change. So that’s number. One is website. Number two, is that your offer isn’t structured for growth. Now I see this oftentimes with dieticians that are offering one-off services, which a one-off service, as in like, okay, I will work with a client for one hour in exchange for $150. And I think that I don’t necessarily think that there’s anything wrong with this, if this is how you, if this aligns with your business objectives and business goals.
So, you know, let’s say that you were operating a business purely for the sake of having. A client or two every week as a side hustle on top of your nine to five. And you’re just trying to keep things really. Simple and easy then. Cool. That is completely, completely fine. But when we start thinking about how do I actually reach these bigger revenue numbers in my business, we start to quickly realize why that pricing model doesn’t align. Because it becomes clear very quickly that unless we’re going to be exchanging an incredible amount of our time for these $150 one-off sessions, we’re not really, we don’t really have the potential to hit some of these higher growth numbers.
And that number is completely individualized. It is up to you to decide what is that revenue target that you’re really after. And so we just have to make sure that our offer actually aligns with that number. And so as part of this process, it’s really about looking at our offer and strategically assessing, okay, how can I add value to this?
How can I make this more valuable in a way that is going to be more passive for me and more scalable for me. So it’s not requiring me to exchange more of our time for money. And this may not. I think oftentimes when we hear about like a scalable offer, people jump to, oh, an online course, I have to create an online course and just start selling that. That’s not necessarily the right answer for everyone.
I think that very much depends on your niche, your target audience. What else is available out there? What type of material it is? And so I never want to make a blanket statement around every single business should do things the exact same way, because that’s just not the case. And there’s actually really strategic ways that we can add things like an online course or a more scalable. Offer to what we’re currently doing.
And we don’t necessarily have to spend 40 or 80 hours creating this thing before we can then start selling it, because that is a big hurdle for people too. Is that feeling or that belief? That. Oh my gosh. I just don’t have the time to create this scalable offer. I don’t have time to spend 40 or 80 hours creating an online course. Only to not know if it’s going to sell or not.
No, that’s not the approach that we want to take. And so we can talk about, okay, how do we incorporate more scalable pieces into the one-on-one services that we’re already offering or offer or into the offer that we already have? So that’s number two is our offer. Isn’t structured for growth. Number three is your down selling yourself because you’re struggling with confidence.
So. I see this often when somebody has a one-off session. And then they also have a package offering and. The challenge here is that when somebody, when you’re showing somebody these two offers side by side, of course, somebody is going to pick the one-off session because. Why would they pick the package unless you’re giving a really compelling reason why the package is so much better than the one-off session and you’ve priced it in a way that it makes so much more sense for them to do that option. Of course, they’re going to pick the one off because that’s way less risk for them.
Right. They don’t know what it’s going to be like to work with you. And so it feels less risky. For them to just book the one-off session versus to book the package. And so that’s something that I see quite a bit too. And so this, and I think what it comes down to as like a core belief for a lot of dietitians, not everyone, but a lot of dieticians is, you know, feeling like, okay, if I just offer. W a one-off session, then it’s also less risk for me.
Right. I feel like it’s less risky for me to offer this than to offer a more high value package because you know, oh, like what if it doesn’t go that well, or. I won’t have to perform as well or whatever. And these are really just self-sabotaging beliefs that are not serving you at all at the end of the day. And so that’s something to really think about too, is if you have more than one offering. What is the reason why somebody would pick one over the other.
And is there even a reason for that? Or are you just self-sabotaging yourself by offering something that’s relatively inexpensive? Because it just feels safer. So that’s number three, you’re downselling yourself because you’re struggling with confidence. Number four, is that your customer journey isn’t clear.
So this can happen a lot. And it kind of ties in with the website piece, which was number one. And this is, this is really around, or it speaks to Somebody not having a clear idea of how to take action when they get to your website. And I think sometimes, you know, because we’re so in our business and because we spend so much time looking at things, looking at our website, We can lose sight of the simplicity here and how important it is and how for, for, to make it easy for people to, you know, To essentially to guide them on that pathway of making it super easy to book a call with you or to book up a session with you. And so ask yourself, like, what is my customer journey?
Does somebody have to book a call first? Do they pay first? Like what does that look like? And ease my CTA, my call to action consistent across the board. So we want to make sure that it’s not that in some places we have Booka call and in some places we have, okay. Book my package. We want to make sure it’s consistent across the board so that it’s not confusing for people.
As soon as you make it confusing for people, you’ve lost them. And so we want to make it as simple as possible. What do they do when they land on your, on your website? And have that call to action littered throughout all of your pages, the same call to action. So that it’s so, so clear. What somebody is supposed to do when they land on your website.
So understanding your customer journey is really important and that extends beyond just getting onto your website. It is also considering how does somebody find out about you and then what if they Google you? What shows up if they type dietician in. New York. What shows up? What is that whole process that takes place? From start to finish.
So that’s number four. Is that your customer journey? Isn’t clear. Number five. Is that your target audience is too broad. So I’ve talked about this on the podcast before. And this idea that if we are speaking to everyone, we are speaking to no one, right? Our messaging gets super diluted when we’re trying to speak to a lot of different people. And I will say, and this is something I teach with a dietician success center.
That nation can be an evolution. And it is often an iterative process. So when you’re starting your business, you will probably start off too broad and you’ll realize quite quickly the types of clients that you actually like working with, or you actually want to be working with. And we do want to try and get as specific as possible.
Ultimately. In order to create an offer and in order to create marketing messaging, that truly speaks to that specific type of person. And so this is something that I see. As well is it becomes quite clear. If I’m looking from an external perspective, we’re all see. That you know, somebody clearly really wants to dial like a dietician.
And again, like it’s, it’s pretty identifiable on a website. When somebody, you can tell, somebody really wants to dial in on this target audience, but you can tell that they’re a little bit scared because. There’s some diluted messaging around speaking to everyone. So it’ll be like, okay. Yeah, so I really want to work like this offer is for you.
If you are an endurance athlete that is training for your next marathon, but then also if you’ve just been diagnosed with diabetes and you’ve recently become pregnant and you or you’ve been diagnosed with iron deficiency anemia, or you’d like help. Help with baby led weaning. I mean, that’s a very dramatic example. But, you know what I mean?
Right. It’s like, okay, we have that first thing, which is like, pay this person clearly. Like this dietician clearly really likes to work with endurance athlete dieticians, but then they’re also trying to like capture too many people, too many other people with those other messages too. And so ultimately you end up losing both groups, right?
Because they’re like, wait, you know, if I was an endurance athlete, I would come to your website and I might think, oh, cool. Okay. She’s, you know, she’s speaking to me directly. She clearly has a service for me. But she also has services for all of these other people. And then all of these other people come to your website and they see that first. Item on your bullet point list that says, Hey, I work with endurance athletes and they’re like, well, that’s actually not me.
So, you know, I’ll find somebody else. So it can be as something as simple as that that can cost you a potential client and consequently revenues in your business. But luckily like these are. Easy fix items, relatively easy fix items, right? These are things that we can and by easy fix, I mean, it’s, I’m not saying that, you know, it’s just so simple to. Map out a new offer.
I’m just saying that it can be done relatively quickly. You know, we can come up with a new offer and we can launch it tomorrow. Right. It’s something that can be done relatively quickly so that we can continue to test and learn. What is going to work best for us as practitioners and business owners and what is going to work best for our clients.
So just to summarize. My list of five easy fixed mistakes. Number one, your website. Doesn’t look like, look legit. Number two, your offer. Isn’t structured for growth. Number three, you’re down selling yourself because you’re struggling with confidence. Number four, your customer journey. Isn’t clear.
And number five, your target audience is too broad. All right. I hope that you enjoyed that episode again, if you’re interested in working with me, one-on-one. I have a couple slots left for starting before the end of the year. So if you’re interested in it, make sure and hop on a call with me, click the link in the description of this episode.
And there’s a link to book a discovery call in that sales page. Make sure you read through the sales page first. Just to make sure that this offer feels really aligned with what you want and what you’re looking for and where you’re at in your business. Everything’s on their pricing’s on their FAQ’s are on there.
All of that good stuff is on that page. So read through it, book a call with me. I would absolutely love to chat with you, and I would love to support you in your business before the end of 2024. Okay. I hope you have an awesome week and I will see you next Thursday.