As a nutrition professional (or aspiring one), there may come a time when you’ll need to consider scaling up or developing a multi-service practice.
This isn’t as simple as it sounds! Scaling your business requires careful planning and an understanding of how to expand your client base while handling new volume.
This is why we’ve put together this Quick Start Guide, to help you grow your business in a way that’s sustainable and responsible.
We’ll be covering:
- What business do YOU want?
- Your target audience and your potential
- Investing in your skills to grow your capabilities
- Your limitations and solutions
- Speed, not haste!
- What makes a multi-service practice right for YOU?
Let’s jump right in!
Every nutrition business is different, and how you proceed with growth is ultimately determined by YOUR personal and professional goals.
Below, we’ve listed some angles you can consider to boost your chances for success.
What business do YOU want?
We always recommend our students and graduates to plan for the type of business you want.
You can’t just run willy-nilly into business expansion without taking the time to carefully plan for it.
We’ve seen that far too many nutrition professionals make the mistake of biting off more than they can chew, and end up sacrificing the quality of service in the process.
Before you expand, take a day or maybe a couple of hours every day for a week to go over your business as you run it today.
For example, check how many clients you’re working with at the moment, how many hours a week you have left, what projects you were able to deliver (or kept putting off), time you wish you had but don’t have, and so on..
The idea is to plan for a larger client load, so you’ll want to plan something that’s sustainable.
Next, look at your your earning potential. How much will your income grow if you add more services and specialisations? In most cases, you’d then take your number and divide it by 3 to reach a realistic number.
With a multi-service practice, you should expect to move your earning potential from 5 figures to 6 figures, generally speaking. Or about 3 times the size with what you’re currently doing if you only offer one or two services.
Your target audience and your potential
As part of planning the growth of your nutrition business, it’s standard to evaluate your (new) target audience. This is called a target market analysis.
A target market analysis will help you evaluate your target audience and your earning potential.
What helps with this analysis is your initial business plan.
Here are some pointers that you can ask yourself:
- Do I have enough clients or hot leads to justify growing the scope of my business?
- Can I handle a larger volume?
- Which parts of my business can be automated or duplicated?
- How much will it cost me to acquire new customers for my new services? And is that cost justified by my forecast growth?
- What can I do to expand my client-base and earning potential?
These trigger questions should help you get started.
Once you’ve got a clear idea of your growth plan, it’s time to develop a list of what needs to be done to make it happen!
Investing in your skills to grow your capabilities
The fastest way to grow your client revenues and target market is to grow your skill set as a nutrition professional!
This is where we start touching on the benefits of building a multi-service practice.
There are two kinds of multi-service growth options you can consider for your business:
- Expanding your client numbers
- Offering more and higher-end services to the same clientele
Expanding client numbers is a matter of being able to cast a bigger net to find more fish. These are clients that will come and go once they’ve gone through your program.
Whereas offering more services to the same clients means that you work longer with them, their families, their employees and would establish a long-term relationship.
Both require an investment in your professional growth. The more you expand your expertise, the more people you can help.
It’s no surprise that the most successful graduates are those that keep coming back to us to get certified for more specialisations.
More specialisations means more different packages you can offer – either to the same clients or to different ones – and this will result in additional revenues.
That’s what scaling up means.
Explore your limitations and solutions.
There’s a very good chance that you won’t go from a couple of private clients to working with multi-national corporations overnight!
It’s therefore equally important to recognise any limitations (whether financial or otherwise) that could impact your ability to grow and scale your business.
If you wan to work with more clients, you’ll either need to come up with ways to automate as much of your job as possible or you’re looking at hiring staff.
We have created the Clinic Toolkit™ with exactly that in mind – improving your workflow allows you to take on more clients.
Whatever your limitations, make sure to write them down.
Why? Because each limitation has a solution. Sometimes you don’t realise it until you write it down.
Speed, not haste!
Move fast, but not so fast that things start falling apart.
When it comes to your nutrition business…
Always look before you leap!
Business growth can be exciting but trying to move too quickly can result in a potential downfall.
Therefore, take your time to plan and evaluate your options:
- Where have you come from? It’s more than likely that you’ll have started with nothing so take a moment to reflect to put you in the right mindset.
- Where are you today? Describe what you love but also don’t like so much about your business.
- Where do you want to go? Visualise your dream set-up.
- What do you need? How can you make that shift from where you are today to continuing that journey to your future?
It’s a project, your future. And you’re the project manager. You’ll need time, money and resources to make it happen.
Our most successful nutrition professionals grow their capabilities before leaping into a multi-service practice.
What makes a multi-service practice right for YOU?
Without diversifying your services, it’s going to be very challenging to grow or scale your business for financial sustainability.
We often talk with our graduates about combining your certifications to make a multi-service nutrition practice, but did you know that it’s during times of business growth that this REALLY comes in handy?
Having specialised nutrition certifications in multiple areas allows you to charge a premium for your services, and help you access a more diverse group of prospects.
Versatility is everything when it comes to scalability, and that’s just what a multi-service practice offers!
Are you considering growing your nutrition business? Then it’s a good idea to investigate the advantages of a multi-service practice!
