In this episode of the Dietitian Success Podcast, I’m tackling three topics that are all connected by the same underlying theme: what it actually takes to build a business that grows, without burning yourself out in the process.
We talk about how to carve out time to work on your business when your client schedule is already full, where I land on the hustle culture versus soft girl era debate and why I think both extremes are doing you a disservice, and a transparent look at a $19,000 line item on our corporate tax return and what it taught me about how to think about money in a growing business.
Inside, we cover:
- Why nothing changes if nothing changes, and what that actually means for your schedule
- The people-pleasing habit that is keeping your calendar too open and your business too stagnant
- Why an overly open booking schedule can actually make you look less professional, not more accessible
- Where hustle culture gets it right and where it goes too far
- What the soft girl era gets right and where it becomes a convenient excuse
- Why I take issue with the phrase “giving yourself grace” and when I actually think it applies
- The real middle ground between grinding and coasting, and what it looked like when I was building DSC while working a nine-to-five with a three-hour daily commute
- $19,000 in transaction fees, why I am completely unbothered by it, and what my accountant said that reframed everything
- Why your job as a business owner is to grow revenue, not reduce expenses
Links:
- Check out the Entrepreneurship Tier of Dietitian Success Center: https://www.dietitiansuccesscenter.com/entrepreneurshipfordietitians
- Join the Dietitian Success Summit 2026: https://www.dietitiansuccesscenter.com/the-dietitian-success-summit-2026
- Follow @dietitiansuccesscenter on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dietitiansuccesscenter/
- Connect with @kristako.rd on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kristako.rd/
- Free Starter Kit: https://www.dietitiansuccesscenter.com/
Working ON vs. IN Your Business, Hustle Culture vs. the Soft Girl Era, and What $19,000 in Transaction Fees Taught Me
By Krista Kolodziejzyk, RD, MBA, Founder of Dietitian Success Center
Three topics that are all connected by the same underlying thread: what it actually takes to build a business that grows, and how to think about that in a way that is honest, sustainable, and not driven by the extremes you are seeing on social media. Let’s get into it.
Working ON vs. IN Your Business: How to Actually Carve Out the Time
Here is the mindset shift I need you to make before anything else: your business will stay exactly where it is right now if you do not spend time doing the things that move it forward. Full stop.
If you are genuinely okay with that, if you are in a season where status quo is actually the right call, that is a completely legitimate choice. But if you have a bigger vision, if you want to build something more scalable, add a new revenue stream, grow your audience, or create anything beyond what exists right now, then nothing changes if nothing changes. That is not a judgment. It is just the reality of how businesses work.
The most common structural reason dietitians do not make time to work on their businesses is that their booking schedules are too open. And I want to talk about this directly because I see it constantly.
When a potential client clicks on your booking page and sees forty available time slots across the next week, the subliminal message that sends is not I am so accessible and available for you. The message it sends is I am not that busy, which makes people wonder why. Is the service not that good? Are other people not choosing this person? An overly open schedule can actually undermine your credibility before a client has even had a conversation with you.
Protecting time blocks in your calendar for business development work is not just good for you. It is actually good for your professional image too. A booking page with genuine constraints signals that your time is in demand.
The people-pleasing pattern that keeps you stuck
There is a version of this that shows up constantly among dietitians, and it goes like this. You block off Monday morning to work on your business. Someone wants to book that slot. You accommodate them because you do not want them to have to wait, or because you feel guilty protecting that time for yourself, or because turning away a client feels counterintuitive when you are trying to grow.
But what other health professional does that? If you want to see a physiotherapist and she has nothing available for two weeks, you wait two weeks. You do not expect her to rearrange her entire schedule to accommodate you immediately. The same professional standard applies to you.
Right now in my own business, the only times clients can book a one-on-one coaching call with me are three specific one-hour slots per week. That is it. Three. I communicate that clearly upfront and I do not apologize for it. That is not scarcity for the sake of scarcity. It is an honest reflection of my actual capacity, and it allows me to protect everything else that needs my time and attention.
What to do when the schedule math does not work
Sometimes the honest answer is that in order to carve out time to work on your business, you may need to see slightly fewer clients in the short term. That can feel counterintuitive when you are trying to grow revenue. But if your goal is to build something more scalable, the investment of time now is what makes the bigger revenue possible later.
Other options worth considering: bringing in a contractor to take on some of your client load so you can redirect that time to building. Being more deliberate about which hours are available for client bookings versus protected for strategy and marketing work. Even two to three dedicated hours per week of protected time, consistently honored, will move things forward significantly over the course of a year.
The work of growing your business is as legitimate and as important as the work you do with clients. It deserves protected time on your calendar, and you deserve to honor that.
Hustle Culture vs. the Soft Girl Era: Where I Actually Land
This topic came out of a conversation with two of my closest business friends, and it is one I have been wanting to address on this podcast for a while because I think there is a lot of messaging out there that is genuinely unhelpful, coming from both sides of this debate.
Let me start by being honest about where the extremes of both camps fail.
Extreme hustle culture, the grind at all costs, sacrifice everything, sleep is for the weak mentality, leads to burnout. This is not controversial. Burnout is real, it is common in entrepreneurship, and a business model built on unsustainable personal output is not actually a business. It is just exhausting self-employment.
But the soft girl era, in its extreme form, is doing an equally real disservice to a lot of dietitians who are trying to build something. Here is what I mean.
Starting a business is hard. Building a business is hard. It is going to require more of your time than you expected, more of your emotional energy than you expected, and a degree of accountability and discipline that is genuinely uncomfortable, especially when you are also doing it alongside a full clinical schedule, a family, or both. That is just the truth.
When the messaging dietitians are consuming tells them that if it feels hard it must not be aligned, or that they should only do what feels easy and effortless, it sets up a completely unrealistic picture of what building something real actually looks like. Hard does not mean wrong. Uncomfortable does not mean misaligned. Sometimes the hard thing is exactly the right thing, and doing it anyway is exactly what is required.
The specific phrase that bothers me
I want to talk about “give yourself grace” for a moment, because I hear this phrase constantly and my relationship with it is complicated.
I do believe in grace. I believe in not judging yourself harshly when you are in a learning curve, when something you tried did not work, when you are doing your genuine best in a genuinely hard season. That kind of grace is healthy and important.
What I take issue with is when “give yourself grace” becomes the language we use to avoid doing the things we know we need to do. When we use it as permission to not show up, not market ourselves, not do the uncomfortable work of putting our businesses out there into the world. Avoiding a hard thing that you know you need to do is not grace. It is avoidance. And avoidance has a cost.
Here is the question I would ask instead: how would you feel if you just did the thing? If you stopped talking yourself out of it and just posted the content, sent the email, made the offer, published the episode? That feeling on the other side of doing the hard thing is what builds confidence. And confidence built through action is the only kind that actually lasts.
What the real middle ground looks like
When I was building DSC while working a nine-to-five with a ninety-minute commute each way, I woke up an hour earlier than I needed to, worked on my business before driving to work, spent the commute listening to business podcasts, and worked evenings and weekends. I was not a parent at the time, which gave me flexibility that many of you do not have. But the point is: the vision required the work. And I knew that going in, and I did it anyway.
I am not sharing that to glorify overworking. I am sharing it because I think it is important to be honest that there was a season where I had to do more than felt comfortable in order to build something that would eventually give me more freedom. That season was finite. It produced something real. And it required me to make choices that were not always easy.
The middle ground is not a fixed point on a spectrum. It looks different for everyone depending on their season of life, their obligations, and their goals. But it is always grounded in the same principle: do the work that the vision requires, protect yourself from the work that does not move you forward, and build in a way that you can sustain over time.
$19,000 in Transaction Fees and Why I Am Completely Unbothered
When we filed our corporate taxes recently, I noticed a line item I had not really paid close attention to before: $19,000 in transaction fees for the year. That is the amount Stripe and our payment processors charged us to process digital payments across our memberships, courses, and other offerings.
My reaction when I saw that number? Completely unbothered. And I want to explain why, because I think the way you think about expenses in your business matters a lot.
Every business costs money to run
If you were opening a brick-and-mortar boutique, you would spend significant money on rent, utilities, build-out, inventory, point-of-sale systems, and staff before you made a single dollar. Online businesses have dramatically lower overhead than almost any other business model. The fact that our biggest recurring operating expenses are software subscriptions and transaction fees is, objectively, a beautiful thing.
But more than that, when I looked at that $19,000 figure, what I actually saw was evidence that we had processed a significant amount of revenue. Transaction fees are a percentage of what you bring in. The more you earn, the more you pay. If I am paying $19,000 in transaction fees, that means I am running a business that is generating at a scale that requires $19,000 in processing fees. That is not a problem. That is a signal that the business is working.
The most important thing my accountant said
A few weeks ago our accountant came into the DSC Entrepreneurship Membership to run an open Q&A on bookkeeping. And she said something that I have been thinking about ever since: your job as the CEO of your company is not to reduce expenses. It is to grow revenue.
That reframe is everything. Because the alternative, spending two hours ruminating on how to reduce transaction fees, researching alternative payment processors, strategizing about how to migrate clients to a different platform, is time I could have spent marketing to new members. And new members generate far more revenue than the marginal savings from a lower transaction fee would ever produce.
Being mindful of expenses is smart business. Being obsessive about minimizing costs at the expense of growing revenue is not. The CEO mindset is: I believe in my ability to grow this revenue, so I am going to put my energy there. Not: how do I shrink the costs of a business that is already working?
Applying this to your business
You do not have to be paying $19,000 in transaction fees for this to be relevant. The principle applies at every stage. If you are paying for Practice Better and it is saving you hours of administrative time every month, that cost is worth it. If you are investing in a course or a coaching program that gives you the strategy to grow your revenue by more than the cost of the program, that is not an expense. That is a return on investment.
The question to ask about every business expense is not can I eliminate this. It is what is this enabling me to do, and is the output worth more than what I am paying for it? For the tools and systems that power a real business, the answer is almost always yes.
Bring the energy of growth to your business. Believe in your ability to make the money back. Invest in the things that allow you to serve more people at a higher level. That is how businesses grow.
Krista Kolodziejzyk is a Registered Dietitian and MBA, the founder of Dietitian Success Center, and the host of The Dietitian Success Podcast. She has supported over 600 dietitians in building and growing their businesses.
