In this episode of the Dietitian Success Podcast, I’m tackling three topics that are coming up constantly right now for dietitian entrepreneurs at every stage of business.
We talk about how to actually build boundaries into your practice before the burnout hits, what the rise of telehealth companies like Nourish and Faye actually means for private practice dietitians and how to differentiate yourself, and how to choose a business coach without getting pulled in by the most polished Instagram presence in the room.
Inside, we cover:
- Why being always available is not professional and what it actually signals to potential clients
- How to decide your boundaries upfront and communicate them transparently so everyone is on the same page
- Why an open booking schedule can make you look less in demand rather than more accessible
- What telehealth companies like Nourish and Faye have done to the dietetics market and why I still believe private practice has a strong future
- Why the answer to competing with telehealth companies is never price and always brand
- Why niching further and building a more specialized practice is going to become increasingly important
- The two most common complaints I hear from dietitians who have worked with business coaches that did not feel right
- Why I was allergic to the term business coach for years and why I have made peace with it
- How to vet a business coach before you spend money, including the one platform I think does this better than any other
Links:
- Check out the Entrepreneurship Tier of Dietitian Success Center: https://www.dietitiansuccesscenter.com/entrepreneurshipfordietitians
- Fay, Nourish, Berry Street and Beyond: https://dietitiansuccesscenter.com/fay-nourish-berry-street-beyond-dietitian-perspectives-on-working-for-telehealth-startups/
- 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/
Building Boundaries Into Your Business, Private Practice in the Age of Telehealth Companies, and How to Choose a Business Coach
By Krista Kolodziejzyk, RD, MBA, Founder of Dietitian Success Center
Three topics that span the full arc of building a dietitian business, from the daily operational realities of protecting your own wellbeing, to the bigger strategic questions about where the profession is headed, to the very personal decision of who you trust to help you grow. Let’s get into all three.
Building Boundaries Into Your Business Before You Burn Out
The first thing I want to say about this, and I mean it sincerely: having no boundaries and being perpetually available to your clients is not a sign of dedication. It is not professional. And it is not sustainable.
I know that can feel counterintuitive, especially early in business when you are trying to demonstrate your commitment and make every client feel valued. But the impulse to always be available often comes from a place of insecurity, not generosity. It is a way of overcompensating, of hoping that if you give enough, people will have to be satisfied with you. I say that because I have been there, and I think most dietitians who are honest with themselves will recognize it too.
The more experienced you become in business, the more clearly you see that boundaries are not just for your own wellbeing in the present moment. They are essential for the long-term sustainability of your practice. The habit of having no limits around your availability is one that will follow you as your business grows. What feels manageable when you have ten clients becomes a full-blown burnout situation when you have forty. Learning to set and hold those boundaries now, even when you are not that busy, is one of the most important investments you can make in your future self.
Why an open schedule signals the wrong thing
This is worth addressing directly because I see it so often. When a potential client lands on your booking page and sees forty available time slots across the next week, the subconscious message that sends is not I am so accessible and easy to work with. The message it sends is I am not very busy, which makes people wonder why.
Scarcity in your schedule is not a manipulation tactic. It is a natural signal of demand. Think about any other health professional you have tried to book with. Your physiotherapist, your psychologist, your GP. You expect to wait. You do not expect them to immediately accommodate whatever time you suggest. That waiting period actually builds confidence that this person is in demand and worth seeing. The same dynamic applies to you.
Closing off time in your schedule for business development, family, rest, or simply not working is not something you need to justify. It is something you should build in by default.
How to actually structure your boundaries
The most effective approach is to decide what your boundaries are before you need them, communicate them transparently, and put them in writing. This means:
Deciding in advance which days and times you see clients and which you do not. Then actually blocking the rest of your calendar so it is never accidentally available.
Setting clear response time expectations, particularly for any messaging or coaching support you offer. Our on-demand coaching feature in the DSC Entrepreneurship Membership, for example, has a 48-hour response window and operates on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. That is communicated clearly upfront. People know what to expect before they join. No one is surprised and no one is resentful.
Including your boundaries explicitly in your client agreement. Not buried in fine print but clearly stated so that everyone understands the parameters of the working relationship from day one.
Right now, due to my childcare situation with my baby at home, the only time slots available for one-on-one coaching calls with me are three specific one-hour windows per week, generally between 12 and 1 PM. That is it. I communicate that clearly on the sales page, in my client agreement, and upfront in any conversation about joining the membership. That is not a limitation I apologize for. It is a professional structure that I have built intentionally for the season of life I am in.
Boundaries will evolve as your circumstances change. They are not permanent or one-size-fits-all. What matters is that you are making deliberate decisions about them rather than letting your schedule get decided for you by whoever happens to want a booking.
Private Practice in the Age of Telehealth Companies Like Nourish and Faye
This question is coming up constantly among dietitians in the US, and I think it is worth addressing honestly because there is a lot of anxiety around it that I do not think is fully warranted.
For context, for anyone who is not familiar: companies like Nourish, Faye, and Berry Street are telehealth platforms that hire dietitians at scale to see insurance-covered clients virtually. They have grown significantly over the past few years and have made dietetic services accessible to a much larger portion of the population in the United States by removing the out-of-pocket cost barrier for many clients.
Here is my honest read on what this means for private practice dietitians.
Telehealth companies have turned dietetic services into a commodity
In economics, a commodity is something that competes primarily on price. When you go on one of these platforms as a potential client, the experience is essentially: here is a large list of dietitians who work in your area of need, here are their credentials, here are their reviews. Choose one. The differentiation between practitioners at that point is minimal. It is a volume play, not a specialization play.
That is not inherently bad. It has made dietetic services dramatically more accessible. But what it means for private practice dietitians is important: you cannot and should not compete on price. The moment you try to compete on the dimension where these platforms will always win, you have already lost the argument.
The way you compete is on brand and on specialization. Those are two things a large telehealth platform structurally cannot offer at the individual practitioner level.
Brand as your differentiator
Brand is how you present yourself, how you communicate your philosophy and your approach, how you build the know, like, and trust factor with people who have never met you. It is your Instagram presence, your website, your podcast, the way you write, the stories you share, the specific point of view you bring to your area of practice.
When someone finds you through a Google search or an Instagram reel or a podcast episode and thinks this person gets it, this is who I want to work with, that is brand doing exactly what it is supposed to do. That decision is being made on something entirely different from price. It is being made on connection, trust, and the belief that you specifically can help them.
Telehealth platforms cannot manufacture that for their dietitians. You can build it yourself.
Specialization as your differentiator
The other direction this points is toward deeper specialization. A dietitian with a very specific niche, one who has clearly devoted their professional life to understanding and treating a particular condition or population in depth, offers something that a general telehealth platform cannot replicate.
I know a family who has spent years working with general pediatric dietitians trying to address a specific and complex feeding challenge with their child. They eventually found a dietitian in the US who is intensely specialized in exactly this area, with a very specific track record and a body of content that demonstrated genuine depth of expertise. They are paying out of pocket for that person. Not because they could not find an insurance-covered option. Because they believe that this specific practitioner can get them the result that more generalized support has not.
That is the private practice opportunity in a market where telehealth companies are growing. Not competing with them on accessibility or price, but building the kind of brand and specialization that makes someone say that is exactly who I need.
There will never be a shortage of people who need a dietitian
Nutrition-related health conditions represent some of the largest public health challenges globally. The demand for qualified dietitian support is not shrinking. What is changing is the landscape of how people access that support. Private practice dietitians who build strong brands, deep expertise, and genuine online presence will continue to thrive. The pie is not getting smaller. It is getting more competitive, which means brand and differentiation matter more than ever.
We have also published a detailed blog post on this topic that includes survey data from a hundred dietitians who have worked for companies like Nourish and Faye. If you want a deeper look at the pros and cons of working for these companies versus running your own practice, search Dietitian Success Center telehealth companies and you will find it.
How to Choose a Business Coach as a Dietitian
This is something I think about a lot, partly because I am a business coach myself, and partly because I hear regularly from dietitians who have invested in coaching programs that did not deliver what they were hoping for.
Let me start by being honest: I was allergic to the term business coach for a long time. The business coaching world online has a significant problem with people who are better at marketing their coaching than they are at actually coaching. The polished Instagram, the six-figure launch screenshots, the aspirational lifestyle content. It is easy to be drawn in by all of that and then realize once you have paid that the substance does not match the surface.
I have been there myself. I once joined a program based entirely on compelling Instagram content, paid my monthly fee, and within ten minutes of engaging with the actual material knew that it was profoundly misaligned with how I actually wanted to show up in my business. The tactics being taught were manipulative in ways I found genuinely uncomfortable. I got a refund and moved on. The lesson was clear: shiny Instagram content is not a proxy for quality or alignment.
The two most common complaints I hear from dietitians about past coaching experiences
The first is that the coaching was too narrow. They learned one specific skill or completed one specific process, like developing a signature program, but walked away without the context to know what to do with it. They had the thing but not the bigger picture of how it fit into their business.
The second is that the coach was not a dietitian and did not understand the specific context, ethical obligations, and relational dynamics of working as a health professional. Marketing and sales strategies that work fine in the general entrepreneurship world can feel completely misaligned, or in some cases genuinely problematic, in the context of a dietetic practice. If your coach does not understand why certain tactics would not work for you, or would not be appropriate for you, that is a significant gap. Now, I’ve never actually worked with a dietitian as a business coach, but because my business operates outside of therapeutic nutrition client relationships, a lot of marketing tactics I learn from others, I am able to implement in marketing to other dietitians.
How to actually vet a business coach before investing
Look at how they show up in the world and ask yourself honestly: does this feel like something I would want to replicate? Because a coach is going to teach you what they do. If the way they market themselves, sell their services, or talk about their work feels even slightly off to you, that feeling will compound when they ask you to do the same things in your own business.
Listen to their podcast if they have one. There is genuinely no better way to get a sense of someone’s philosophy, personality, and approach than to hear them talk at length about what they believe and how they think. A few episodes will tell you more than any sales page.
Pay attention to whether they have specific experience with businesses like yours. Not just general business coaching, but an understanding of private practice, of the dietetics profession, of the specific regulatory and ethical context in which you operate.
And do not be afraid to reach out and have a conversation before you commit. Any coach worth working with will be happy to talk with you about whether their program is actually the right fit for where you are.
If you are a dietitian who has been thinking about business coaching and you want to understand whether the DSC Entrepreneurship Membership is a fit for you, send me a DM at @kristako.rd on Instagram and we can talk through it.
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.
