Ep.45 Your Business Model

Listen on your favourite podcast app like iTunes or Spotify.

If you’ve been listening to my podcast for a while, you know I’m a big proponent of growing and scaling your business in a way that is effective with your time.

The beginning of the year is a great time to reflect on your current business model in your practice and review how you’re making money, what services you’re offering, and how your business model may need to change this year.

Today, I talk about what needs to happen to your business model and give you options to change it so you can leverage your business AND your time.

Here’s what I covered:

The two ways to grow your business (a tip I learned from my mentor years ago!)
An alternative way to grow your business (how you can increase your availability by increasing your capacity with a team!)
What leveraged offers you can use to grow your health practice (and my experience with each!)

I discuss your business model, things to consider, and how you can change it with different products, programs, and services for 2020, so that you can actually grow, make more money, and make a bigger impact – without more hours of your time.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you may enjoy these 3 other podcast episodes about what leveraged offers you can add to your health practice:

Prefer reading? Here’s the transcript below

Stephanie: This is Stephanie, although I do not sound like myself today. This episode is a little different from my other episodes because, as you can tell, my voice is crazy and I cannot record a solid 30 minute episode for you today. So what I have for you is a class that I just did, a very short training which is about 15 minutes, on your business model.

I think this is a great time of year if you are listening in January…well really any time of the year to consider this, but especially now, about your current business model in your practice. How you’re making money, what services you’re offering, and how your business model may need to change, here in 2020. As we get into this year, as we get started, what needs to happen to your business model?

This little training I did in a Facebook group, the Facebook group that I run for dietitian entrepreneurs. I have had this group since 2016. It was the first Facebook group for dietitians who work for themselves, and I go in there and I do some trainings from time to time.

I think it will be really fun and really interesting, and I think you’ll really benefit from this podcast episode and this training on your business model, things to consider, and how you can change it with different products, programs, and services for 2020. So that you can actually grow, make more money, make a bigger impact without more hours of your time.

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Hello. Welcome to today’s training here in our Dietitian Entrepreneurs Community. I am your host, Stephanie Clairmont, a fellow registered dietitian and founder of the Dietitian Entrepreneurs Community. If we have not met yet, hello, it’s lovely to meet you.

I am a registered dietitian. I live in Ontario, Canada. I live about an hour outside of Toronto. So for those of you in Southern Ontario or the Golden Horseshoe, we’re neighbours. I have been a dietitian for 10 years now. Actually I graduated in 2009 so over 10 years. We’re in 2020. I’ve been running my own practice since 2011, teaching professional in-person training since 2012 and running online digital programs since 2013.

So I’m a big proponent of growing and scaling your business in a way that is effective with your time. I have babies, so I have a four and a half year old and a one and a half year old right now. Since I had that first baby, time just, oh my gosh, kind of hit me differently. So today I wanted to talk about your business model as we head into 2020.

So when we talk about your business model I need to mention someone. She’s a brilliant dietitian entrepreneur who became a dietitian entrepreneur the day she graduated. Her name is Andrea Holwegner and she lives in Calgary and runs a very successful practice as a successful speaker.

For those of you that don’t know her, you can Google Andrea Holwegner at Health Stand Nutrition which is a company in Calgary, Canada. She was my mentor when I started and I was lucky enough to meet her at a conference and chat with her and she let me call her and email her when I had questions and she gave me some guiding principles early on.

2 Ways to Grow Your Health Practice

One of the things that Andrea taught me is in order to grow my business, there was two ways to do it. One, increase my price or two, increase my availability, meaning delegate and hire. So hire other dietitians to work for me and create more people that they can serve. So Andrea had taught me that, increase my prices or increase my availability.

So for you, as you’re thinking about your business model for 2020, if you want to grow and you want to help more people or you don’t have more people, you just want to make more money, whether that includes more people or less people, totally up to you.

If you want to make more money and grow your business, you have two ways to do it. One, increase your prices, which we hear all the time and maybe it is time for you to increase your prices. Or two hire and delegate. Now, this can mean that you hire dietitians if you have a one-to-one practice to work with you so there’s more people that you can sell spots with and make more money.

An Alternative Way To Grow Your Health Practice

I want to give you an alternative to that second one, that hire, that increasing your availability. In that, you can include products or programs that remove some of that one-to-one time to help you grow.

Now, it still does involve hiring and delegating, but it’s not necessarily other dietitians who are going to see one-to-one clients. It could mean other dietitians or other people on your team to help with coaching in a program.

That’s what I do in my digestive program. I have coaches that work with me and don’t see our clients, but respond to emails and do food journal reviews and support our clients internally in our group online program. Or you’re hiring other people on your team, salespeople, a business manager, virtual assistants, all kinds of people to help you increase your availability by increasing your capacity with a team.

So the way to do that is if you want to include some more leveraged products or programs in your health practice, whether that’s a professional program for professionals, a professional education program, which you can teach live in person like I did for all those years or online, which actually can help so many more people because you can reach across the country, across the continent and across the world.

To all of our friends who live in Australia and Europe and South Africa and Asia and everywhere, I’m trying to think of everywhere where people are in this group, but all over the world. So that’s with either a professional program or something clinical for your practice.

Leveraged Offers For Your Health Practice

I’ve written down and I have a resource as well on my sticky note, it’s called 9 Leveraged Offers. So if you want more of a resource to go through a variety of different products and programs that you can create, it’s a nice little overview of nine different offers that you can include in your business model to help grow and scale your business. You can download that 9 Leveraged Offers resource if you want to. I’m going to just briefly go over these different things that you can bring into your business model in 2020.

So the first is something like a book. This could be a printed book, an eBook, a cookbook, a workbook, protocol and meal plan. I’m trying to think of what my clients have created. Any kind of PDF-style of resource, whether it’s printed or it’s downloadable.

If you want to create something like that, I would run the numbers and really figure out how many of those you need to sell in order to make the amount of money you want. Let’s say you want to make an extra $10,000 this year. How many eBooks or meal plans or workbooks at $20 do you need to sell? A lot is the answer to that one. It’s like 200 I think. I didn’t do my math ahead of time. So a lot. Is that something you want to do and how are you going to do that and how much work will it take to do that?

Whereas some of the other things are a little more, I would say efficient. So I published my own book in 2013. I made it an eBook. I’ve done that thing. I made barely any money when I had it on CreateSpace. I made $2 a book and $1 went to taxes. So it’s not a money maker for me. But it did really help with my career and helped leverage me. It was really helpful, an ebook or a kind of a PDF or a low price point offer was getting more people to do higher price point offers with me. So I used my book in a funnel, in a marketing funnel to help me get people into my group program. So it can be positioned really well for that opposed to making you an extra $50K this year.

Something else you can offer is a class or a workshop. So this would be something that’s a one-off training and some of my clients do this. Instead of creating a robust 12 week program or something that feels a bit overwhelming, maybe you don’t have a lot of time. Perhaps you’re working full-time in your business right now and you have a busy schedule with a lot of clients and you want to just create a one-off workshop, one day or half day workshop or class. That’s something that you could probably whip up in a weekend and start to sell. You could offer it digitally online, prerecorded or live and this could help you grow in a more leveraged way.

Let’s say you’ve got 20 people in that class and you charged $100, you just made $2,000 with a 90 minute class. That’s an effective use of 90 minutes and now you have this class and you can run it over and over again every month if you like. So a class or a workshop is something that might feel a little lighter and easy to get you into the online education or online digital space.

You can also build something like a program or a membership. I’m kind of categorizing these together. So membership is more of like a recurring subscription model where someone joins and they get ongoing support by you or content by you on a monthly or annual or quarterly basis. Could be anything from meal plans and PDFs and eBooks and tools to coaching by you, support by you. The ability to just ask the dietitian a question. Could be workouts, could be trainings, could be anything. But it’s in more of a subscription model where someone joins up let’s say for like $30 or $40 a month and then it’s ongoing until they cancel.

Or you can do more of like a one-off program fee where someone signs up and they give you $500, $1,000, $200 whatever you want to charge it at. And it’s a four week, six week, eight week, 12 week program, whatever feels good to you. You’re taking the framework that you do right now with your one-to-one practice and you’re putting it into a protocol that you’re teaching a group.

This is so normal for us as health practitioners. We’ve been teaching groups probably since internship. In our practices, we have to really think about if we can do this. By doing it online, you make it more convenient and accessible for people. I know it can be hard to fill those in-person classes and groups right now because people are so busy, they don’t have time. Making it available online can really, really help create access for that as well.

So creating that program or that membership can help you take the expertise you already have, things you’re already doing and just monetize it in a different way. My business has been online group programs since 2015. 2015 I had my first baby and I had someone who worked for me that was doing one-to-one coaching. At the end of 2016 is when I launched the membership and we did no more one-to-one in the IBS digestive business. We’ve grown that program into a corporate wellness program that’s doing well.

In my other business, this business where I help health practitioners with their business and creating online programming and education, I teach group programs with a small amount of one-to-one. You can create a very good results-oriented, client-driven program that still helps your clients like you do with one-to-one.

Not everybody needs the kind of customization and time and money investment as those one-to-one clients. There’s a large percentage of the world that needs some help and they need you, a credible expert to get out there and make something for them so they can stop learning from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

So creating an eBook or a small program or a class or a workshop or a membership or whatever it is that you feel like is right for your people can make money in your business on an ongoing, sustainable way. You would take what you already know with your expertise, and it can satisfy a real need in the world for people who just aren’t going to come in and see you one-to-one.

Your Business Model for 2020

So I want to give you those options as you think about your business model for 2020. I would recommend taking some time if you haven’t to reflect on 2019, what you really want to accomplish for 2020, how much money do you want to make, how do you want to serve your clients, where is there a gap in the services you’re providing already.

Also where are you, I hate this phrase, but leaving money on the table, or again, where is that gap that there are people that actually do really want to work with you, but not one-to-one. They don’t want to come into your practice. Maybe they want to take an online course or a program from you or maybe they want to take a group program. Maybe they want to experience you in a different way.

I promise you that there is a segment of the market because I’ve done it in my practice and I’ve supported over a hundred clients in creating online programs for their practice as well. So I see it every day happening that only a segment will see us one-to-one and a larger segment will want something different.

For your business, for your growth, for the money in your pocket, to serve the world, so a credible expert like you is actually giving them the right information, I challenge you to think about your business model for 2020.

Are you going to increase prices? Or are you going to increase your availability by hiring other coaches to take one-to-one clients or therapists or dietitians or whoever on your team and grow that way or by increasing your availability and including more products and programs and classes and other kinds of things to leverage what you already know? We will still need to grow our team and delegate to get support as we grow that arm of our business.

If you have any questions about your business model or you want to talk to me about developing online programs or courses or how they fit into your current model, then shoot me a direct message. Shoot me a DM. You can just find me and send me a message on a Facebook. You can find me on Instagram as well. You can send me an email. I’d be happy to chat with you.

We have launched The Leveraged Practice January. I’m so excited, but we will be taking a small group of clients the first week of February as well. So if you’re thinking that this is the year that you want help, let me know. I’m happy to chat with you about your business model and about how an online program might fit into your practice, if now’s the right time, if you’re trying to think through those questions. So please reach out to me and I’ll see you back here next time.