What Should I Do in My Dietetic Business Before Year End?

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What should I do in my dietetic business before year end?

Before you decide what to launch, sell or create before Christmas, review what has actually worked in your business this year. Look at your revenue, clients, marketing, time and results, then use that evidence to choose no more than three priorities for the rest of the year.

In other words, look backwards before you look forwards.

 

It’s very tempting to arrive at Q4 with a head full of ideas.

Perhaps you’re wondering whether you should create a new offer. Maybe you’re thinking about Black Friday, planning something for January or wondering whether you should finally ditch an offer that simply isn’t selling.

Before you add another thing to your list, I want you to do something our clinical brains are actually rather good at.

Assess the evidence.

Think about how you work with a patient. You gather their history, ask questions, look at the relevant information and work out what’s actually going on before deciding what happens next.

Your business deserves the same treatment.

Consider this your business health check.

How do I do a year end business review?

A year end business review starts by looking at what your business has actually produced, rather than relying on how you feel the year has gone. Review your progress, challenges, use of time, revenue, client sources and marketing data, then look for patterns across all of them.

Start by asking yourself these nine questions:

1. Is my business growing, static or going backwards?

2. What have I actually done that led to that?

3. What are three things I’ve achieved this year?

4. What have been my biggest challenges?

5. What did I actually spend my time doing?

6. How much money did my business make?

7. Where did my clients and enquiries come from?

8. What are my marketing numbers telling me?

9. What patterns can I see across all of this?

The important bit is to answer using evidence wherever you can.

It’s easy to describe a year as stressful, exhausting, busy or disappointing. Those feelings matter, of course they do. I certainly don’t want you building a business that makes you miserable. But feeling is a terrible business metric.

If the year felt disappointing but your revenue grew, your email list increased and you created an offer that is beginning to gain traction, that tells you something.

Equally, you might have been absolutely flat out all year but discover that very little of what filled your days contributed to income or meaningful progress.

You need to know the difference.

How can I tell whether my dietitian business is actually growing?

Look at measurable changes in revenue, clients, enquiries, audience and sales rather than judging growth by how busy you have been. Then identify the specific activities that contributed to those results.

For example, have you been consistently marketing your services?

Did you carry out detailed market research and get much clearer on who you help? Did you launch a new course? Or have you spent three months tweaking your website while doing very little to bring new people into your world?

(No judgement here. A website can become a very convincing place to hide.)

I’d also encourage you to identify three things you’ve achieved this year.

They don’t all need to involve money.

Perhaps you achieved a brilliant result for a client, grew your audience, created something new or took a step towards the business you ultimately want.

Those things count too.

How should I review the way I spend my time in my business?

Go back through your diary and identify the activities that repeatedly took up your working hours. For each one, ask whether it contributed to income, meaningful progress or the business you are trying to build.

This is probably the part of your year end business review that I want you to pay the most attention to.

Your calendar can be wonderfully revealing.

Something might appear week after week because it feels important, without actually producing much of a result.

I call these activities flattering distractions.

They feel productive. They make us feel terribly busy and important. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re moving the business forward.

Once you spot one, you have three choices.

Keep it, delegate it or ditch it.

And please don’t interpret finding these activities as evidence that you’ve been lazy. Quite the opposite. You might have been working incredibly hard.

The question is whether you’ve been working hard on the things that matter most.

What financial numbers should I review before the end of the year?

Start with your total revenue for the year so far and your revenue for the most recent quarter. Then look at which offers generated that income so you can see where the strongest financial results are actually coming from.

If you don’t currently know those numbers, that’s useful information in itself.

Please don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s surprisingly common. What matters is that you now know this is something you need to measure. I’d also look beyond total revenue.

Which offer is bringing in the most money?

Which is most profitable?

Which takes an enormous amount of your time?

Which months were strongest?

You’re trying to understand what’s happening underneath that overall revenue figure, because that information will help you decide where to put your energy next.

How do I find out which marketing channels are bringing me clients?

Ask every new client or enquiry how they originally found you, rather than assuming the platform they used to contact you was the source. Compare those answers to identify which marketing channels repeatedly lead to clients.

Someone might send you a DM on Instagram, for example, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Instagram brought them to you.

Perhaps they discovered you through Google six months ago, listened to your podcast, saw somebody recommend you and eventually decided to message you on Instagram.

If you don't ask, you don't know. And this information matters.

If your best clients consistently discover you through Google, referrals, networking, podcasts or a particular social platform, you want to know that before deciding where to invest your time next year.

 

Which marketing metrics should I review in my business?

Review your email list growth, website traffic, traffic sources, social media performance and sales conversions. Focus on numbers that help you understand whether your marketing is attracting the right people and moving them towards becoming clients.

For your email marketing, look at how many subscribers you’ve gained this year.

If your list has more than 500 people, you can also start paying attention to open rates and click-through rates. If you have fewer than 500 subscribers, I wouldn't torture yourself over that data just yet.

For your website, look at how many people visit each month and where those visitors come from.

Are they finding you through organic search, social media, AI, email or press?

On social media, look at which posts achieved the best reach and engagement. Which topics got people talking? Which formats landed best?

And, where you have the data, look at conversion.

How many discovery calls are being booked? How many people are buying? Which sales pages convert best? Which emails actually lead to sales?

If the thought of opening all those dashboards makes you want to put the kettle on and pretend you never read this section, I understand.

But the information is worth having.

How do I know what to focus on in my business next?

Look for the small number of offers, marketing activities or projects responsible for a large proportion of your results. Prioritise those and reconsider activities that consume significant time without producing income or meaningful progress.

This is where the patterns become really useful.

You may discover that one or two offers or activities have generated most of your results while lots of other things have occupied an enormous amount of time without producing very much.

It’s the Pareto principle in action.

Roughly speaking, around 20% of what you do can produce around 80% of the impact.

I see this in my own business all the time.

There are things I can spend hours doing that feel incredibly productive but make almost no difference. Then there are other activities that make a huge difference to moving the business forward.

Your job is to work out which is which.

What should I do if my business is too new for a year end review?

If you don’t have enough historical data to complete a full year end business review, decide what you would like to know about your business three months from now and start tracking it today.

You don't need nine months of figures for this exercise to be useful.

Ask yourself: What would I want to know about my business three months from now that I don’t know today?

Maybe it’s where your enquiries come from.

Perhaps it’s how many people visit your website.

It could be which marketing activity leads to discovery calls or which offers people are most interested in.

Whatever your answer is, start measuring it now.

How should I approach Q4 business planning as a dietitian?

Your Q4 business planning should reflect the number of working weeks you actually have available, not simply the number of weeks on the calendar. Choose a maximum of three meaningful priorities and consider using Q4 to test, build or prepare for January rather than trying to squeeze in another major sales push.

From the end of September to the end of December, you might have roughly 14 weeks on paper. But are they really 14 working weeks?

If you’re part-time in your business, have children or still work clinically, probably not.

There’s October half-term. Christmas. School finishing. Nativity plays. Christmas fairs. Santa visits. Presents to buy. And that peculiar bit of December when nobody seems entirely sure what day it is.

Suddenly your 14-week quarter might contain only nine or 10 proper working weeks.

That matters.

If you create a 14-week plan when you actually have 10 weeks available, it’s very easy to arrive at Christmas wondering why you’re so bad at finishing things.

You’re not.

You simply planned for time you never really had.

Should I run a Black Friday offer in my dietetic business?

You don’t automatically need to create a Black Friday promotion. For many healthcare businesses, Q4 may be better used to build your pipeline, test future offers and prepare for January rather than discounting services simply because other businesses are doing it.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday can change buying behaviour, but they are heavily geared towards products and discounts.

That’s not necessarily how your health business operates.

Then Christmas arrives, when people may be less focused on changing their health behaviours.

And after that? January. A significant demand period for our industry.

So Q4 can have a different job.

Instead of forcing yourself to sell, sell, sell, you might use this time to prepare for what comes next.

Can I test a new offer before I create it?

Yes. Pre-selling or offering early access can help you assess demand before investing significant time creating a new programme. The results can then help you decide whether the idea is worth developing further.

I learned this in my own nutrition business.

I knew I wasn’t going back to one-to-one work and had an idea for a programme called Fussy Eating Fixed.

Rather than spending months creating it and crossing my fingers that somebody would buy it, I tested the idea first.

I pre-sold the programme at 50% off and gave myself a target of 20 places.

I sold 18.

That brought in just under £12,000.

That was enough evidence for me to decide there was demand, so I spent November and December creating the course and marketing materials ready for a proper January launch.

One of my clients, Rosie, The Vegan Dietitian, used a similar approach. She pre-sold her vegan weight management programme before creating a single slide and signed 12 clients.

There is an important caveat here.

Buying behaviour has changed considerably over the last couple of years and people who are new to you generally take much longer to convert now.

So please don't take my old results and decide that if you don't sell 18 places, your idea has failed.

That's not the lesson.

The lesson is that you can gather evidence before committing months of your time to creating something.

How many business goals should I set for Q4?

Choose no more than three priorities between now and Christmas, and choose fewer if you only work part-time in your business. Also identify at least one project or idea you are deliberately postponing until January.

I don't want you to finish your business review and immediately reward yourself with another enormous to-do list.

The point of gathering all this information is to help you do less of what doesn't matter and more of what does.

Recently, I was offered a brand opportunity that looked brilliant on paper.

It was good money, it was a brand I liked and it would have been useful for raising my profile.

But when I looked at the bigger picture, I could see it would pull me away from the work I needed to do to grow my own business.

So I turned it down and referred the opportunity to a colleague instead.

It wasn't a bad opportunity. It simply wasn't the right opportunity for the business I'm building now.

That's the power of having the evidence in front of you.

Instead of being swept along by every shiny idea or exciting opportunity, you can ask: Does this actually make sense for the business I'm trying to build?

How do I finish my year end business review?

Set aside time to review your diary, revenue, client sources and marketing data, then identify what is working, what is consuming too much time and what deserves your attention for the rest of the year.

Take this as your line in the sand.

You don't need a beautiful spreadsheet or a colour-coded planning system. You need enough information to make better decisions.

Look at the first nine months of your year. Find the numbers. Look for the patterns.

Work out what brought in the best money, what brought you the right clients and what took far more time than it deserved.

Then choose what genuinely matters between now and Christmas.

Because good Q4 business planning isn't about seeing how much more you can squeeze into your calendar.

It's about making sure the time you do have is being spent on the things that actually matter.

 

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

 

 

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

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

 

Episode transcription:

Sarah (00:45)

 

And that means the final quarter of the year starts this Thursday. The end of the year really is just around the corner. A lot of you are probably starting to think about what you want to do between now and Christmas and also, what you want 2027 to look like. You might be thinking about potential new offers you could create, which offers you want to keep selling, which offers you might be thinking about scrapping altogether, and what you want to do for Black Friday.

 

Maybe even brands that you'd love to work with. There might be a whole list of things that you need to figure out before the year is over, but before you start adding more things to that list, I want you to stop for a moment, because before you decide what you should do next, you need to know what's actually worked so far this year. If I asked you: 'What did your business actually produce in the first nine months of 2026?', could you tell me?

 

Could you tell me exactly where your income came from? Which offer brought in the most profit? What actually moved the business forward? What was worth your time and what wasn't? If you can't answer those questions fairly quickly, don't start planning the rest of the year yet because you can't make good decisions about where you're going next if you don't know what's already working or not working. So, in today's episode, we're gonna look backwards before we look forwards.

 

I'm going to help you do a simple order of the first nine months of your year, including your time, your money, your clients, your marketing and your actual results so you can see what's really been happening in your business. By the end of the episode, you'll have a much clearer idea of what worked, what didn't, what's worth continuing and what you might be better off leaving behind for the rest of the year and going into 2027.

 

And the point of doing this isn't just to have a nice little review of the year, it's to stop you going into 2027 doing more of the things that make you feel busy, but aren't actually bringing in the money or clients or meaningful progress. If you think about it, our clinical brains love this kind of thing. We're evidence-based practitioners. We love a good clinical assessment, right? We look at someone's history. We ask questions. We gather the relevant information: bloods, medications, lifestyle factors. We look at the evidence.

 

And we work out what's actually going on before deciding what needs to happen next. It's what we do best when we're working with our clients. Well, that's exactly how I want you to think about your business so, consider this episode a bit of a business health check. The first mistake lots of us make is deciding how the year's gone based on feelings. I'm sure if I asked you how this year has felt, you could tell me immediately. Maybe you'd say, 'Stressful', 'Exhausting',

 

'Bit up and down', 'So busy' or 'A little bit disappointing'. But if I asked you how much revenue your business generated in the first six months of the year, would you know? What about where that money came from? Which offers brought it in? Which months were your strongest? What brought in your best clients? You might also be about to decide on what you're going to do between now and Christmas based on what you feel like your business needs.

 

But feeling is terrible business metric.

 

Yes, how your business makes you feel absolutely matters. If you're constantly stressed or exhausted, that's important information too, but we need to separate feelings from what the business is actually producing in order to make a good decision about what happens next. Now I'm going to help you do an audit of the last nine months of your business and you don't need to get your notebook out and frantically write everything down. You can always listen back to this afterwards.

 

The important thing is that you actually look at the evidence rather than relying on what you remember. I'm going to give you nine questions about the first nine months of the year, and I want you to answer them honestly. So, question one: over the last three months, if you had to describe your business in one word, would you say it's growing, static or going backwards?

 

Now I know that sounds ridiculously simple, but actually making yourself choose just one is really useful because most of us sit somewhere in the middle thinking, 'Well, sort of, it depends'. But I really want you to just pick one. Second question: what have you actually done that led to that? So what have you been doing or not doing that's contributed to where the business is at now? And the key here is to be really specific in your answer.

 

So make a list of things you've been working on. Maybe you've been consistently posting online and talking about your services regularly. Maybe you did some more detailed market research to better understand your ideal client. Maybe you launched a brand new course. Or maybe you've been tweaking your website for the last three months and haven't actually done much of what brings people into the business. Again, honesty here is the key.

 

Question three: what are the three things that you've achieved this year? So even if you felt like the year hasn't gone particularly well, I still want you to answer this question. It could be something that you've made more money from. It could be a client result that you're really proud of. It could be something that didn't directly make you money, but moved you towards the business that you want to actually have. Question four: what have been your biggest challenges? So think about what specific things you found genuinely difficult this year and then ask yourself, 'Is that still a problem?'. Because there's a big difference between something that was difficult six months ago and something that's still actively holding your business back now. And if it is still a problem, get a bit more specific. What exactly would allow you to solve this problem? Do you need to learn a new skill? Do you need to get support from someone who knows what they're doing?

 

Question five: what did you actually spend your time doing? Now this one, is the one I want you to pay the most attention to. Go back through your diary and look at the last few months. What did you actually spend your time doing? What kept appearing in your diary week after week? You might discover that the biggest block of time in your week has been going towards something that actually isn't generating income or moving you towards the business you actually want. And that doesn't mean you've been lazy. You might have been completely flat out.

 

Your time might not have necessarily been used on the things that mattered the most, and no one's going to tell you that as clearly as your calendar will. Whatever activities you find reoccurring in your diary, ask yourself, 'Was this actually a good use of my time? Did it relate directly to income or meaningful progress?' And, 'Was this moving me towards the business I want, or was it just a flattering distraction?'. And I really like that phrase, a flattering distraction because some things feel productive, don't they? They make you feel like you're doing something really important, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're moving the business forward. And once you've identified those things, you've got three choices. You can either keep them, delegate them, or ditch them.

 

Question six: how much money did the business actually make? First, go and find out your total revenue for the year so far, and then find out what your revenue was for the last quarter. And if you genuinely don't know your numbers, please don't feel bad about that. It's surprisingly common. Question seven: Where did your clients and inquiries come from? Was it Instagram, Google, word of mouth, networking, a podcast you were interviewed on? And do you actually ask your clients how they find you?

 

Most business owners don't. Maybe someone DMs you on Instagram so you just assume, 'Oh, they must have found me on Instagram!'. Well, maybe they did, but actually, maybe they found you on Google six months ago. They listened to your podcast. They saw you recommended by someone else and then they finally decided to message you on Instagram to book. If you don't ask, you don't know. This is important information because if you discover that your best clients are consistently coming from one particular place, that is something you need to pay attention to.

 

Question eight: What are the numbers telling you? Now, please don't run away as I say that. This one is really, really important. I want you to look at the marketing side of things. So first off, how many email subscribers have you gained this year? Next, look at what's happening with your email open and click-through rates. Only do this if you've got a list of over 500 people. If you've got a small list of under 500, don't torture yourself over this kind of data. Then move on to your website: How many people are visiting your website every month? And actually, where are they coming from? Is it organic search, is it social media, is it AI, is it email, is it press?

 

And what about your social media? Which posts got the highest reach? Which posts got the best engagement? Which topics seem to get people talking? What formats landed the best? And last but not least, where you have the data, have a look at your conversion rates. How many people were booking discovery calls each month? How many people were buying each month? Which sales pages have converted the best? Which emails that you've sent out have actually led to sales? Now you might be listening and thinking, 'God, Sarah, I can't think of anything worse than looking at all of that'. But you know what? Trust me, it will be well worth your time. And if you don't know any of these numbers, don't worry. That's the finding here. You've just found something that you really do need to start measuring if you want your business to grow. And then question nine? It's about looking for patterns. What is the pattern? Take a step back.

 

Instead of looking at those eight answers as eight separate things, see if you can find the pattern because you might find that one or two certain offers or activities have produced the majority of results this year and that a whole load of other things have taken up an enormous amount of your time without producing very much at all. This is the Pareto principle in action.

 

Roughly speaking, around 20% of what you do, can produce around 80% of the impact. I see this in my own business all the time. There are things that I can spend hours doing that feel incredibly productive and make almost no difference. And then there are things that make a massive difference to moving everything forward. So, the goal for you is to work out which is which.

 

And if you're brand new to business and you don't have nine months of data yet, you can still do this exercise. Just ask yourself: What would I want to know about my business three months from now that I don't know today? That is your starting point. Now, once you've done that audit, we can start thinking about the final few months of the year. So it's worth mentioning Q4 is a bit of a weird one, especially for us as healthcare professionals.

 

You've got Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which can completely change buying behaviour because people hold off on purchases and they're really geared up to people who sell products and offer discounts. That's not us. Then you've got Christmas when most people aren't exactly thinking, 'This is the perfect time to change what I eat'. And then suddenly January arrives and January is a huge demand period for this industry.

 

So Q4 isn't necessarily the quarter where you need to force yourself to sell, sell, sell. It can actually be really useful period of time to prepare and fill the pipeline ready for January. And there's another thing I want you to think about. On paper, from the end of September till the end of December, you've got roughly 14 weeks and that sounds like loads of time, but if you're a part-time clinician in your business, you might have children, you've got October half-term, you've got Christmas, you've got that period in December when school is finishing, there's Nativity Plays, there's Christmas Fairs, Santa visits, everyone's buying presents and nobody really knows what day it is anymore. So your 14-week quarter might realistically contain only 9 or 10 proper working weeks. And that's really important because lots of people sit down in September thinking they've got more time than they truly do.

 

With a 14-week plan, but only 10 weeks of work. And then they think, 'Why am I so bad at finishing things?'. You're not: you just planned for more time than you actually had. So, when you're thinking about what you want to achieve before Christmas, do the maths first. And this is why I also think Q4 can be a really good time to test ideas for the following year. You don't necessarily have to have anything built before you know whether people will want it.

 

This is something I learned from doing it in my own business a long time ago. When I was still running my nutrition business a few years ago, I knew that I wasn't going to go back to one-to-one work, instead of spending months creating something and then hoping people would buy it, I decided to test the idea first. I pre-sold a program that didn't exist yet, 'Fussy Eating Fixed'. I sold it for 50% off and I gave myself a target of 20 places. I actually sold 18.

 

But that brought in just under £12,000, so I knew there was enough demand to justify building it. And then I spent November and December creating the course and the marketing materials ready to launch properly in January. Now, I want to add a big caveat to this. Buying behaviour has changed quite considerably over the last couple of years. And people who are new to you generally take much longer to convert now than they did back then. So I wouldn't want you to hear that and think,

 

'Right, I'll do that in November and if I don't get 18 sales, something's wrong'. That's not the point. The point is that Q4 can have a very, very different job. It can be the quarter where you test, you can build, you can prepare for what's coming next. You can offer early access to something that you're going to launch in the new year. And I've seen this work with my clients too. Rosie, the vegan dietitian, she did something similar. She's pre-sold her vegan weight management program before she'd created a single slide, and signed 12 clients. Now this brings us to the final part of this episode: What are you actually gonna do with all of this? Now I'm deliberately not gonna give you a huge Q4 goal-setting exercise here. You've just spent all this time looking backwards so don't undo all of that by immediately creating another massive to-do list. Instead, I want you to choose no more than three things that genuinely matter between now and Christmas.

 

If you're not working full-time in your business, it's going to be fewer than three. And then I want you to identify what's one thing that you're consciously not going to do until January, because you've decided that, based on the evidence that you've just looked at, it's not the best use of your time right now. Typically, Q4 is the time of year when everyone tells you to add more, another offer, something for Black Friday, another project, another strategy.

 

But instead of trying to prove to yourself how much you can squeeze in before Christmas, simply make sure the time you do have is being spent on the things that actually matter. And yes, I do this audit every quarter myself. I sit down and look at my numbers, where the money came from, what brought clients in, what I've spent my time doing and what actually moved the business forward. I love geeking out on this stuff actually. Sometimes the answers are really obvious. Something that I thought had worked well did and the data tells me that I should be doing more of it.

 

But then I noticed something that's taken up loads of my time and produced very little. This actually happened just a week ago with a brand opportunity. I've been offered work that looked really attractive on paper, great money, brand I liked, something that would have been really great for raising my profile. But when I looked at the bigger picture, I could see that taking it on would have pulled me away from the work that actually needed to be done in order to grow my own business.

 

And so I've decided to turn it down and I've actually referred them to a colleague, not because it wasn't a great opportunity, it truly was, but because it wasn't the right opportunity for the business that I'm trying to build at this point in time. Having the numbers and the evidence in front of me definitely makes those kinds of decisions so much easier because it means that whenever I have a shiny new idea or an exciting opportunity that arises, I can take a step back and ask myself: 'Does this actually make sense for the business I'm trying to build?'.

 

And that's what I really love about doing this stuff. It lets the evidence do the thinking for you. When I'm talking about business planning, I'm always reminded of my lovely client, Fiona. Shout out to you, Fiona, if you're listening. She did some quarterly planning with me in her business, probably about this time last year. I forget exactly.

 

And after getting really clear on what she needed to focus on, she went on to have her highest-earning month since starting her business. How amazing is that? Well done, Fiona. Now, if you've listened to this episode whilst walking the dog or making the dinner or doing the school run, you don't need to do anything right now, but do come back to this episode when you're in front of your computer. Take today as a line in the sand.

 

Look at your first nine months of the year. Look at your diary, your revenue, your marketing numbers, everything we've covered today. Dig out the numbers and honestly ask yourself, 'What is actually working? What's not working? What's taking up way too much of my time? What's bringing in the best money and what's the pattern?' And hey, who knows? You might even end up like me geeking out over your revenue breakdowns. Bye for now.