Ep. 123 - Why I Closed Down my Multi 6-Figure Nutrition Business

Why do online courses fail to get people the results you expect?

Online courses can fail to get results even when the content itself is excellent. Often, the real problem is that people aren’t starting, finishing or implementing the material, which makes the issue one of delivery and accountability rather than the expertise inside the programme.

I discovered this when I looked properly at the data inside my own Fussy Eating Fix programme. Twenty-five per cent of people had never even started it, and one person had logged in 21 times without opening the first lesson.

That changed how I looked at the programme completely.

How can you tell whether your online course has a content problem or a delivery problem?

Look at what happens after someone buys. Check how many people start the programme, how many work through the material, how many reach the end and, most importantly, whether they are implementing what you teach.

If people are buying but not progressing through the content, the problem may not be your knowledge or your offer. They may simply need more structure and support to actually do the work.

This is something I completely missed for a long time.

The answer was sitting there in my Kajabi dashboard. Twenty-five per cent of people had never started the programme. Five people had logged in multiple times without opening the first lesson, and one person had logged in 21 times.

When you see that, it becomes much harder to conclude that the content itself is the problem.

Why did I start questioning whether my programme actually worked?

I allowed my personal experience with my daughter to make me question evidence that was already in front of me.

My daughter has always been a fussy eater, but things became significantly more difficult around the age of 11 or 12. Following COVID, she struggled with secondary school and eventually moved to home education with private tutors and an online private school. She was later diagnosed with Autism and ADHD, and her eating became much more restrictive. She had ARFID.

Because I was living that experience every day, I started wondering whether I could really help other families with similar challenges.

I even brought in another SOS-trained dietitian, Lucy, to run weekly group coaching calls for a year. She did a brilliant job and the families loved her.

But I was still looking at my own daughter and thinking, "If I can't help my own child, how can I be confident that this is going to work for somebody else?"

Looking back, I can see that I was allowing one very personal experience to overshadow the evidence from the people who had actually gone through my programme.

That's an easy trap to fall into when you're the expert behind an offer. One person doesn't get the result you hoped for and suddenly you're questioning everything.

How do you know whether your online course is actually helping people?

You need to look beyond sales and into behaviour.

Sales tell you that someone wanted the outcome badly enough to buy. They don't tell you whether that person is actually consuming the material or implementing what you've taught. I now think you need to ask questions such as:

• How many people have started?

• How many are progressing?

• Where are people dropping off?

• How many have reached the end?

• Are they implementing what you're teaching?

• Where are they getting stuck?
  
  

Those answers can tell you far more about your programme than your own assumptions can.

In my case, the data showed that people weren't necessarily rejecting the content. A significant proportion weren't getting far enough through it to discover whether it could help them.

How can you improve online course completion?

You can improve online course completion by giving people structure, accountability and opportunities to get support rather than simply giving them access to a large library of content.

That might mean creating a fixed start and end date, releasing content weekly, providing implementation tasks, creating progress threads and regular check-ins, and using live calls for troubleshooting and personalised support.

The important thing is to design the programme around implementation rather than information consumption.

I'd fallen into the trap of thinking that a scalable offer needed to be completely self-study. But there is a middle ground between high-touch one-to-one delivery and giving someone a login and hoping they get on with it.

What is a hybrid online course model?

A hybrid model combines self-study content with structured accountability and support delivered to a group.

Instead of giving everyone access to everything from day one and leaving them to work through it whenever they have time, you create a journey that helps them move through the programme and take action. For example, you could:

• Give the programme a clear start and finish date

• Release lessons gradually rather than all at once

• Provide practical implementation tools

• Create places for people to share their progress

• Have regular community check-ins

• Use live calls for troubleshooting and personalised questions
  
  

This gives people more of the support that helps them implement without requiring you to sit beside every person throughout the programme.

That's exactly the approach I've used in my business coaching. I don't do one-to-one coaching. My coaching is delivered through groups, but that doesn't mean it's a watered-down version of one-to-one support.

It's about being intentional about which parts of the support actually help people move forward.

Why did I close down The Children's Nutritionist if it was making multiple six figures?

I closed The Children's Nutritionist because I'd gradually stopped enjoying building it, even though it was still a successful business.

The business had been part of my life for nearly 20 years. I started building it properly in 2007 while I was on maternity leave with my son, and it eventually became a multiple six-figure business.

It was also the business that showed me what was possible beyond the NHS. I discovered that I could make money without having to be present for every single sale, and I became fascinated by passive income.

But over time, my energy shifted towards my business coaching work.

I stopped enjoying the marketing. I wasn't excited about creating new content. Instead, I was recycling old high-performing social media posts.

Then, on Wednesday 1 April 2026 at 12.26pm, an Asana notification reminded me that I needed to create the Children's Nutritionist social media posts for the month ahead.

My immediate thought was simply, "No, I don't want to do that."

That wasn't the moment the decision came from nowhere. I'd already been slowing down for around 18 months. But that notification made me realise just how much I'd been ignoring the fact that I no longer wanted to keep building that business.

When should you consider closing an online business?

You don't need to love every single task in your business, but you do need to enjoy what you're building overall.

There will always be boring jobs. There will be admin you would happily hand over to someone else. There will be days when you'd rather be doing almost anything other than work.

But if you are consistently thinking, "I just don't enjoy this business anymore", it's worth paying attention.

For me, closing the business eventually felt surprisingly straightforward. I emailed my accountant, started taking things offline, removed my lead magnets so I wouldn't attract new subscribers, and deleted my email list of around 20,000 people.

Bit by bit, I closed it down.

And strangely, it didn't feel like a huge emotional decision anymore. It mostly felt like admin.

That was how I knew I'd made the right decision.

What can closing one business teach you about building another?

A successful business isn't necessarily the business you should keep building forever.

The Children's Nutritionist had a strong audience, offers that were consistently selling through automation and a multiple six-figure revenue history. On paper, there was no obvious reason to walk away.

But running two very different businesses created a significant mental load, and I had already found a model of delivery that I loved more in my coaching business.

I could see how I might have improved the Children's Nutritionist programme. I could see that changing the delivery model could have helped people get better results.

But I didn't want to spend the time, energy or headspace rebuilding it.

And that's important too.

Sometimes the strategic answer and the personal answer aren't the same thing.

How can I create a digital product that people actually implement?

Build the implementation journey alongside the content.

Don't just ask, "What does my client need to know?"

Ask, "What does my client need to do, and what will help them actually do it?"

That might mean breaking the material into weekly builds, giving people practical tasks, creating accountability, offering regular opportunities to ask questions and adding live support where it makes the biggest difference.

That's the thinking behind my Idea to Income 90 Day Sprint.

The aim is to take one idea for a digital product and turn it into a passive income stream, including the product, a simple sales funnel, emails and automations.

The Sprint itself follows the principles I've talked about here. There's a fixed start and end date, weekly builds rather than a mountain of content, implementation tasks, accountability, daily check-ins and weekly live calls.

You won't simply finish with another course sitting in your member area. The goal is to finish with something you've actually built and a process that helps people discover, buy and use it.

The next Sprint starts on Monday 21 September 2026.

If you've already sold something in your business and you're clear on your ideal client and market, you can find out more here: Idea to Income 90 Day Sprint

The Master Plan:

Helping you build the business of your dreams. Get your 22 point step-by step workbook here: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/master-plan

Connect with me:

Website: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/

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Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/beyondtheclinicbusiness

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheClinicPodcast

Episode transcription:

Sarah (00:45)

Welcome along. So, this is a bit of a different podcast episode today, but I think you're really going to enjoy this one and take a lot from it too, because I'm going to take you properly behind the scenes of my multi-six-figure nutrition business, 'The Children's Nutritionist' and tell you the reason why I decided to close it down. For those of you who don't know, as well as this business coaching business where I help dietitians like you build successful private practices and get more clients,

I also had another business for many, many years too. It was actually the first business that helped me leave the NHS and it was called 'The Children's Nutritionist', and I started building it properly way back in 2007 while I was on maternity leave with my son. So, I had that business for nearly 20 years.

That feels crazy to say out loud, gosh! What started as a little idea eventually became a really successful online business. At its peak, I was making multiple six figures in a year, so you can probably imagine that closing that business down wasn't something that I took lightly at all. From the outside, there was no obvious reason for me to close it. It had a really good audience size, lots of interest in my offers. And you know what, those offers were consistently selling by automation. So, you're probably thinking, 'Well, Sarah, why on earth would you close down a business that was so successful?'. Well, there wasn't one single reason, to be honest. Over time, a few things happened behind the scenes that eventually led me to making that decision, which I'm going to tell you all about today. But this episode isn't just about me closing down my business. There's some really important lessons in the story that I think could make you look at your own business very differently.

There's an especially important lesson in this if you've ever created an offer that isn't performing how you'd hoped, or I should say, isn't getting your clients the kind of results that you'd expect it would. Let's get into it, shall we?

The day I officially decided to close down my multiple six-figure nutrition business was Wednesday, the 1st of April, 2026. Yes, April Fool's Day, except this was no joke. I even remember the exact time to the exact minute. It was 12.26 PM, if we're going to be super precise. And I remember that day and time so well because, well, it's not every day you decide to close down a business that you've spent nearly 20 years building.

I was sitting at my desk in my home office here, which is actually our converted garage that we turned into my office about 10 years ago or so. I'd just finished a Zoom call with my business coaching clients and I was actually feeling really good. I absolutely love those calls. I love helping other brilliant dietitians work through their businesses, whether that's looking at their offers, their marketing, their sales, their systems, you know, all of that good stuff.

I think I love it so much because I know what it's like to be in the NHS wondering if you could actually build a successful business of your own. And I did it. So, now it feels like my mission to help other dietitians get there too and just see what's possible. I came off that call that day feeling really good, really energised and then an Asana notification popped up on my computer.

And if you don't know what Asana is, it's basically a project management tool that I use to keep track on everything that I need to do in the business. That notification was to remind me to create the social media posts for the 'Children's Nutritionist' for that month ahead. And I just thought, 'No, I don't want to do that'. Although that wasn't the first moment I decided I was going to close the business down; I'd actually been slowing down, deciding probably for about 18 months or so.

If I'm being honest, I'd stopped enjoying the marketing and I wasn't excited about creating the content for it anymore. I was recycling old high-performing social media posts rather than sitting down and thinking and creating anything new.

Now don't get me wrong, this wasn't something I'd fallen out of love with overnight. For years, I absolutely adored working in the 'Children's Nutritionist'.

It was the business that showed me what was possible beyond working in the NHS. And it was the business that introduced me to the possibility of making money without having to be there for every single sale. At the time, I felt like I discovered some kind of secret. It almost felt like I was cheating. I absolutely fell in love with the idea of passive income. But slowly, but surely, without really noticing it, I was putting less energy and less effort into the 'Children's Nutritionist' and more and more of my energy into this coaching business. The 'Children's Nutritionist' started to feel like something I had to keep going.

And that one Asana notification made me really stop and realise, 'I just don't want to be doing this anymore'. I emailed my accountant, I started taking things offline, I removed the lead magnets to prevent me from getting new subscribers, and I even deleted my email list of around 20,000 people. Bit by bit, I just started to close the business down.

But the strange thing was, at that point, it didn't feel like a huge decision anymore. All of it just felt like admin work. That's how I knew I was making the right decision. And actually there's a little lesson in here already: You don't have to love every single day in your business, but you do need to enjoy what you're building. Yes, there will be boring jobs, things that you have to do, and there'll be days when you'd rather not be at work. But when you get to the point where you're consistently thinking, 'I just don't enjoy this business anymore', it's probably worth paying attention to that. And I think that's something that I had been ignoring for quite a long time. But there's an even bigger lesson in what happened next, and this is where I think there's something really useful for you to take on board and into your own business because closing the business is only part of what I wanted to talk to you about today. I also want to let you in on the moment that I realised why my main offer wasn't performing in the way that I wanted it to do.

Let's now dive into exactly that.

Now this is a really big lesson if you've ever created a program or even a course that isn't doing as well as you hoped it would, especially if people are buying it, but they're not messaging you, celebrating the results that you know that they should be getting from it. When this happens, it's very easy to assume, 'Maybe I'm the problem. Maybe I'm just not very good at business. Maybe my knowledge just doesn't translate to online work. Or maybe the offer itself is just a dud'.

And that's where a lot of people go wrong because before you just decide that your offer isn't working, you need to understand what's actually happening once someone buys your offer. Are they even starting it? Are they working through the material? Are they finishing it? And most importantly, are they actually implementing what it is that you're teaching them? Because if people buy your course or your program, but they're not getting the results, there's a good chance they're not actually getting far enough through the material to put what you're teaching into practice. So maybe they start it, but they're not finishing it, or maybe they're barely even starting it at all. And that means the problem isn't anything to do with what you're teaching inside the offer, it's actually much more likely to be a delivery problem. And yes, you guessed it, this was something that was happening inside my 'Fussy Eating Fix' program. It was largely the people who were there in the self-study version

but it was something that I just completely missed at the time. The funny thing was, though, I'd actually had the answer sitting right there in front of me in my Kajabi dashboard the whole time. The data showed that 25% of people had never even started the program. And five of those people had actually logged in multiple times. In fact, one person had logged in a grand total of 21 times without even opening the first lesson. Can you believe that?

Well, it's true, completely baffling, but true. So, someone had paid for the program, cared enough to keep coming back, logged in 21 times, but they still hadn't started any of it. This just goes to show that sometimes the problem isn't the thing that you're teaching, it's what happens between someone buying it and actually doing the work. And I know this because the content that's inside the 'Fussy Eating Fix' program wasn't different to what I'd successfully delivered one-to-one.

When my team of dietitians and I worked with parents one-to-one over six weeks, the material was taught live directly to families and our families were supported daily on WhatsApp. It was really hard work, but we could see what they were doing. We could see where they were getting stuck. We could keep the momentum going and the parents were getting really amazing results. But when I took that same expertise and put it into a course-style program, lots of people just weren't working through the material.

And that brings me to my daughter, because rather than looking at what my data in Kajabi told me, I was actually letting my own experiences with my daughter make me question whether the program worked at all. My daughter's always been a fussy eater, but around the age of 11 or 12, things became much more difficult. Post-COVID, she started struggling with secondary school, so we eventually moved to home education with private tutors and an online private school.

And she was later diagnosed with Autism and ADHD and her eating became significantly more restrictive. She had ARFID. And because I was living that experience at home every single day, I started to lose confidence in my ability to help other families with very similar problems. I even ended up bringing in another SOS trained dietitian for a year to run weekly group coaching calls. Lucy did a really good job and the families absolutely loved her.

But despite spending years building my expertise in this area and despite the amazing results I'd seen my work have on lots of families, I was looking at my own daughter thinking, 'Well, if I can't help my own child, how can I be confident that this is going to work for somebody else?'. But looking back now, I can see that I was letting one very personal experience make me question something so much bigger without actually looking at the evidence that I already had there, in front of me; the data on that Kajabi dashboard.

I was judging the whole program based on what was happening with me personally, rather than looking at what was happening for the people who were actually going through it. And the fact that a lot of them weren't even going through the materials in the first place. And that's a really easy trap to fall into when you're the expert behind the offer. One person doesn't get the results you hoped for and suddenly you start questioning everything. And I'm sure that many of you listening will be able to relate to that.

So, I think there are actually two really important lessons for you here. The first is: if something isn't performing how you hoped with your offer, don't let your personal experiences or assumptions cloud what could actually be happening. Always look at the evidence and the data on your dashboard and see what it's actually telling you. And the second lesson is about how you're delivering what you're teaching.

Because yes, we want to move away from having to deliver everything one-to-one and we want more self-study offers to make our expertise more scalable, but we still need to think carefully about what people need from us to actually implement what we're teaching in their lives. More on how you can do that in just a second. But first, let this be your sign to just go and have a nosy around the data in your dashboard. Have a look at how many people start your program, how many people are actually working through it and how many people have made it to the end. Because you might just discover, like I did, that 25% or more people have paid you, logged in and then poof! Just disappeared without even opening module one.

So, the question becomes, 'How do we make sure that people actually work through the programme, implement what we're teaching them and get the results we know they're capable of getting without us having to deliver everything one-to-one?'. Because I think this is where we can get really stuck and we tend to think the choice is either go back to high touch one-to-one support, which of course really isn't the goal, or create a self-study programme, and hope people actually work through.

But actually, those aren't our only options. There is a middle ground, a third option. And actually I've been doing this for many, many years inside my business coaching program. And that is hybrid of sorts. It's structured accountability delivered one-to-many. So, rather than everyone having access to everything from day one and being left to work through it whenever they have the time, you create a structure that helps people actually move through the program and do the work.

Here's a few examples of how you could do that in your business.

Firstly, you could have a fixed start date and end date so everyone knows when they're beginning and where they're aiming to get to, while still building in some flexibility for those weeks when real life inevitably gets in the way. You could also release the content weekly rather than giving people, say, 12 weeks of material all at once. This can really help avoid overwhelm. You can give them implementation tools so they're not just consuming information, but they actually have a way to use it.

You can also have progress threads and accountability, so there's somewhere for people to share what they've done and ask questions that they might have. You can have regular check-ins inside a community so people know there's an expectation that they'll actually take action. And then you can use weekly live calls for the things that are much harder to get from a recording. So, things like troubleshooting or face-to-face back and forth questions or personalised advice.

And none of that requires you to sit beside every single person and hold their hand through the entire program. It's just about working out which parts of your support actually help people get the results and then building those into a format that allows you to support lots of people at once. That's exactly how I run my business coaching. I don't do one-to-one coaching. It's all delivered through groups.

And that doesn't mean a watered-down version of one-to-one. It means having a super intentional way of helping people implement what you teach. So, the next time you're designing an offer, remember: don't just build the program that contains everything someone needs to know. Build the program that actually helps them move forward and implement. And you know what? Looking back, this is something I could have easily fixed in the 'Children's Nutritionist' business. I could see that the delivery model needed changing.

I was building exactly that kind of structured accountability in this coaching business, but like I said earlier, I'd just fallen out of love with the business and running two businesses is really hard. The mental load of thinking about two very different businesses is taxing. And you know what? My family life can sometimes be quite complex so even though I could see a way to improve it, I just didn't want to spend the time and energy or headspace rebuilding it.

And hey, I suppose that's good news for all of you dietitians in business listening because it means that you guys are getting all of my time and attention now.

And so this now brings me full circle to something I wanted to share with you before I go. Everything I've talked about in this episode is exactly why I've built my 'Idea to income' 90 Day Sprint. The goal is really simple. In 90 days, you'll take one idea for a digital product and I'll help you turn it into a passive income stream for your business. I'll help you with every single step from creating the product, right through to building a simple sales funnel.

Writing the emails and setting up the automations that help you sell it passively every single day, so you're not finishing the 90 days with another idea or a course or another list of things that you should do. You're finishing with something you've actually built: a digital product you can sell, a process that takes people from discovering you to buying from you. Emails that do the selling and automations that sell your offer passively behind the scenes.

Essentially, you'll have a whole new income stream sitting inside your business. We start Monday, the 21st of September so, if you're listening to this before then, you've still got time to join. And you won't be left to figure this all out on your own. I've deliberately built the sprint around things that I know help people to actually do the work. It's full of tools to help you take action, not just learning. You'll have a fixed start and end date.

You'll have weekly builds rather than a mountain of content to wade through. You'll have implementation tasks, accountability, daily check-ins and weekly live calls where you can ask questions and get help whenever you're stuck. Just a heads up, the Sprint is designed for dietitians who've already sold something in their business and are really clear on who their ideal client and their market is because we're not doing any of that foundational groundwork. So, if that's you, the doors close in one week, so if you don't miss out, head to the show notes of this episode where you can sign up today or you can message me on Instagram with the word 'Sprint' and I'll send you more details. Bye for now.