How Long Does it Actually Take to Build a Dietetic Business?

How long does it take to build a dietitian business?

If you can give your business around 15 hours a week and spend the first three to four months doing the foundational work properly, you're giving yourself a fantastic chance of building a really successful dietitian business. Over the following months, those foundations are what turns into clients, sales and eventually a really good income. This is an estimate, it might happen faster or it might take longer, depending on what you're starting with and whether you manage those 15 hours every week.

Its disheartening, that social media makes it look much faster. And actually disillusional that someone has hit six figures in a year and someone else quit their job three months in. You have no idea what their starting point was: a huge audience, a network of contacts who hapilly referred, money for a large team, or a massive budget for advertising.

I went online in late 2017 and hit six figures in my previous business, The Children's Nutritionist (which I've since closed), in 2020. So it took me just over two years. But I wasn't starting from zero. I'd been running a private practice for about 15 years, I was a consultant paediatric dietitian, and I'd been writing and consulting for well-known baby and family brands. I already had a decent-sized audience (tens of thousands), and it's important to be transparent about that.

How many hours a week do you need to build a dietitian business?

In my experience I'd say a minimum of 15 hours a week if you want your business to become a significant source of income. That's roughly two full working days, or three shorter days if you're working around school aged children. And I ay this based on my experience of working with over 100 HCPC registered dietitians over the last 7 years.

I know 15 hours can sound like a lot when you're also keeping all the plates spinning. But I don't think it's helpful to tell you that you can build a substantial business in the two spare hours you get every fortnight because your NHS Trust owes you time in lieu.

Building a business asks a lot: understanding your market, working out what you're selling (the outcome, not just the consultation), showing up every week without a break, bringing in clients and then of course delivering your service. With half a day a week, you just can't do all of that at the same pace as someone with 15 or 20 hours.

And that's okay. Your timeline will just look different, and being honest about your available hours means you can plan around your real life rather than an imaginary timeline from Instagram.

Can you build a dietitian business alongside an NHS job?

Yes, you can build a dietitian business alongside an NHS job, but you'll need to create the time for it. If you're working full time, that might mean a handful of early mornings, some evenings and part of your weekend.

That's how I started. Alongside the NHS, there was a stretch where I got up at 5am Monday to Friday to work on my business, plus half a day or so at the weekend. I'm not going to lie, those 5am starts weren't always easy. There were plenty of mornings when the alarm went off, it was pitch black outside and I just wanted to stay in my warm, cosy bed...

But it paid off, and I'd happily do those early starts again for the return it gave me. I don't think you should work every spare minute, but if building a business is something you genuinely want, there's a period where you have to put in the effort and create the time for it before the business creates the time for you.

How long does it take a private practice dietitian to get paying clients?

You can get your first few clients relatively quickly, and you don't need to spend a year building an audience before anyone will pay you. 

Directories, private healthcare platforms, consultant referrals and private medical insurance can all bring in clients fast, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But those clients come from someone else, rather than from a business you've built. Getting self referrng clients directly through your business - one you've built yourself - takes longer, because there's foundational work to do first.

A client who finds your business, decides you can help them and pays you needs a few things in place first.

You need a niche that's actually profitable, a real understanding of your market, and a strategy to attract clients and build their trust. With around 15 hours a week, I'd ideally spend at least the first four months solely on these stages: researching, testing, creating and connecting. I know that feels frustrating when you want clients now, but these are the steps that make the clients come later.

Why do dietitians with big followings still struggle to get clients?

A big social media following isn't the same as an audience that buys from you. The thing that makes the biggest difference to how quickly dietitians get consistent clients is an email list, because the people on it are warm leads (significantly warmer than a social media audience), who have chosen to hear from you.

As a dietitian business coach, I see this all the time: dietitians with 10,000, 20,000, even 50,000 Instagram followers making very little money from their businesses. One client came to me with around 20,000 followers on Instagram. From the outside they looked like they were doing brilliantly (other dietitians knew them well), but they had no clients except for consultant referrals and directories. One of the first things we did was build an email marketing strategy. Eighteen months later they have a steady predictable stream of clients coming through the business. They're not fully booked yet, but they're absolutely heading in the right direction.

Another client had around 23,000 followers on TikTok and 15,000 on Instagram and had set up email marketing with another business coach, with around 500 people on her email list. She was selling a group programme through live launches, getting around 100 people registering each time, but despite all this, over three years of hard slog she'd sold only 32 places. We set up a really simple funnel to move her social media followers onto her email list, dramatically increasing her subscriber numbers, and in her first seven-day email campaign she sold another 30 places. Her social audience was much bigger, but it was freezing cold.

A third dietitian started with no social media, website or email list. Twelve months after we began with her market research and messaging, she's selling to her email list every week, and that's where most of her sales come from.

What should you do if your dietitian business feels like it's taking too long?

Before you decide you're no good at business, look honestly at what you're working with: how many hours you have each week, what else is filling your life, and whether you're starting with a network or literally from scratch. Most of the time, for most of my clients their business just hasn't had enough time to do the foundational work and become a business yet.

A lot of dietitians give up too soon. They compare how much they've done with how little money is coming in and think, "This is taking too long. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this." Some go back to the NHS, convinced it won't work.

When your business doesn't grow at the speed a clever business coach promised, it's easy to assume you're the problem. But those expectations were never based on your reality, with your main job, a young family, your furry friend who needs walking or simply an active social life. I'd much rather you understood the real journey to building a business than spent six months expecting a fully functioning, profitable business - and then deciding you've failed.

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Episode transcription:

Sarah Almond Bushell: One of the most common questions I get asked by dietitians starting and building online businesses is, "Sarah, how long is it actually gonna take before I start getting paying clients?" Or "how long until I'm making decent money from this?" And I'm guessing this is a question you've also asked yourself at some point. And I'm sure you've also wondered "how much time do I need to be giving to my business every week?" Well, today I'm gonna answer those questions honestly for you because we know it takes time to build a business, but how much time? Are we just talking about a couple of hours a week? 10 hours? 20? More? Do you need to be working on your business every evening after the kids are in bed? Do you need to give up your weekends? Can you realistically build something alongside an NHS job? Or are you kidding yourself if you think that you can build a successful business in the few spare hours that you have? Today, I want to talk honestly about how much time you actually need to give your business and what you can realistically expect that time to produce. Because there's so much advice about what you should be doing to build a business, what to post, how to grow an audience, how to get clients. But hardly anyone talks about the real practical question of how much of my actual life is this going to take? And you know what? That really matters. Because you might be at the very beginning.

You might be still working in the NHS and wondering how on earth you're supposed to build a business with the few hours that you have left. Or maybe you've dropped your NHS hours, but you're still trying to build your business around a part-time job and school runs and family life and everything else that fills your week. Or maybe you've taken the leap and gone full-time into your business, but it's actually starting to take up more and more of your headspace and you're wondering when you're actually going to see enough return to make all that time feel worth it. Whatever boat you're currently in, in this episode, I want to give you some real honest answers. That way you can come away with a much better sense of what's realistic and whether the way you're currently approaching your business is actually setting you up for the results that you want. So I'm gonna be talking about the minimum amount of time I think you realistically need to give your business if you want to build something successful.

And what that can actually look like when you're fitting it around a job or a family, as someone who has been there and done it. So let's get into it. Now, first off, I just want to say the online business world has created a really unhelpful and unrealistic picture of what building a successful business actually looks like and how long it takes to get there. On social media, you're constantly being shown businesses that have grown really, really quickly. Everywhere you look, there's someone telling you how quickly they hit six figures in a year. There's someone else who was able to quit their job three months after starting their business. And all of that can make you look at your own business and think, well, why is this taking me so long? Seeing everyone else's quick wins can make you feel like you're falling behind.

But it's really important to remember that you have no idea how long their businesses took to get to the point that you're seeing. You have absolutely no idea what they were starting with. Maybe they already had a huge audience prior to launching their business. Maybe before leaving their job, they already had built a network of potential clients or contacts. Maybe they had a lot of money to invest into a team. Maybe they were working on their business 50 hours a week. The point is, you can't look at someone else's timeline and automatically make it your timeline. I'm a perfect example of this. I went online in late 2017 and I hit six figures in my Children's Nutritionist business in 2020. So it took me just over two years to hit that figure, but I wasn't starting from zero. I'd already been running a private practice for about 15 years. I was a consultant paediatric dietitian and I'd been writing and consulting to Annabel Karmel and Tommee Tippee and loads of other brands. So I already had a decent size audience before I went all in on my nutrition business. And I think it's really important to be transparent about that. Now a big reason people give up on their businesses is because they've had expectations set by a clever marketer telling them their way is the fastest way to grow. But that advice often doesn't account for the reality of building a business with just a couple of days a week, alongside a part-time job maybe and a young family. So when your business doesn't grow at the speed that you were promised, you assume that you're the problem, but you know what? That's not the case. Actually, the expectations were never based on your reality in the first place. So before you decide you're behind, I want you to look at what you're actually working with.

How many hours do you realistically have each week? Are you building this alongside a job? Do you have four young children? Do you have elderly parents? Do you have a furry friend and other commitments taking up your time? Are you starting with a bit of a network already or are you starting from zero? Because all of those things affect how quickly you can build.

And that's why in this episode, I don't want to give you some arbitrary promise that your business will be successful in six months or less. I want to give you a much more realistic timeline. And by the way, I'm not saying that building a successful business has to take forever. Many of my clients inside Accelerate make progress really quite quickly. But you do need to understand what you're working with. So how much time you actually have, what you're starting with and what you're trying to build. Because once you understand that, you can have a much better idea of what's realistic for you rather than constantly comparing your progress to somebody else's. And that's what I want to get into now. So let's start with a question. How much time do you need to give your business for it to be successful? I'm going to give you a proper answer here, not an annoyingly generic answer. If you asked me, what I think you realistically need if you want to build a business that becomes a significant source of income, I would say a minimum of 15 hours a week. So that's roughly two full working days or three shorter days if you have school runs and things. Now, if you're working full time, it might mean a couple of early mornings, it might mean some evenings, it might mean part of your weekend. And actually that's how I started.

When I was building my business alongside working in the NHS, there was a period of time where I was getting up at 5 a.m. Monday to Friday and working on my business. Plus I'd do half a day or so at the weekend. Now I'm not going to lie, at the time those 5 a.m. starts, they weren't always easy. There was definitely mornings when my alarm went off, it was pitch black outside and I just wanted to stay in my warm and cosy bed, but I didn't.

And hey, it paid off. If I had to start from scratch tomorrow, I'd happily do those 5am starts again. Not because I think you should be working every spare minute of your life, but because if building a business is something you genuinely want to do, there is a period where you have to create the time for it before the business creates the time for you. Now, I know 15 hours a week can sound like a lot, especially if you're already working in the NHS, especially if you're looking after a family, especially if you're running a house and generally trying to keep all the plates spinning.

And I want to be honest about this because I don't think it's helpful to tell you that you can build a substantial business in the two spare hours you have every fortnight.

Yes, you might be able to make some progress, build a bit of an audience maybe, but there's a big difference between making some progress and having enough momentum to build a business that consistently brings in the income that you want. And I think this is why you need to be really honest with yourself. If you only have half a day a week to give to your business, that's okay.

But you need to understand that your timeline is probably going to look very different from someone who has 15 or 20 hours available every single week. Because building a business requires you to do a lot of different things.

You need to do the work to understand your market first. You need to work out what it is that you're selling. And I don't just mean your consultations, what the outcome is of those. You need to be posting and showing up every single week. You need a strategy to be bringing in clients. And of course you need to actually deliver your service. Now, if you only have a tiny amount of time available, like half a day a week, you can't do all of that at the same pace as someone who has a lot more hours in the week to work on their business. I actually think there's something quite freeing about being honest about how much time you have, because then you can make a decision based on your actual life, rather than trying to force your business into some imaginary timeline from Instagram. Now, the next question I'm sure a lot of you early on in business will want to know the answer to is...

How soon can I realistically start getting paying clients through my business? And I want to be really specific about what I mean by that. I'm not talking about a client who comes through a consultant that you already know, or someone you've worked with in the NHS who decides to come and see you privately, or a client who finds you through private medical insurance. What I mean is someone who's found your business and decided that you can help them and then pays you.

Now, yes, you could get your first few clients relatively quickly. You don't need to spend a year building an audience before anyone will pay you. But it is important to remember that when you're starting out, you can't just skip straight to client acquisition. Yes, you could put yourself in a few directories. You could join a private healthcare platform. You could definitely pick up a client quite quickly that way. There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing those things, but they're not necessarily building a business. They're getting clients from someone else. Getting clients directly from an actual business that you've built... now that's going to take a bit longer.

Because there are things that you need to do first before you even think about signing clients, like making sure you're choosing a niche that's actually profitable, like doing the work to actually understand the market, like building a strategy to attract clients and build trust with them. So let's say you have around 15 hours to work on your business a week. Ideally, you should be spending at least the first four months solely on these stages where you're researching, testing, creating, connecting, essentially you're learning. And I know that can feel really frustrating when you want clients now, but it's crucial to make sure that what you're building is actually profitable and going to work. And these are the steps that create the foundations for the clients to come later. Now, before we wrap up, there's one other thing that I want you to understand because it can massively speed up how quickly you can start getting your first clients and more importantly, how quickly you can get to the point where you're getting clients on a consistent basis. So we've talked about the importance of giving your business a minimum of 15 hours a week if you want to make progress. We've also talked about the importance of spending those first few months getting the foundations in place before you start trying to get clients through your business.

But there's one other thing that can make a huge difference to how quickly you can build a successful business. And that is email. I see dietitians all the time with 10,000, 20,000, even 50,000 followers on Instagram, but they're making very little money from their businesses. And I've seen this play out with my own clients. One of my clients came with around 20,000 followers on Instagram. They'd worked with an Instagram coach and from the outside, you would assume they were doing really well, but they had no clients. Now, one of the first things I got them to do was build an email list and an email marketing strategy. And now 18 months later, they're growing an email list and they actually have clients coming through the business. Now, they're not fully booked yet, but they are absolutely heading in the right direction to get there.

A similar thing happened with another client.

She came to me with around 23,000 followers on TikTok and another 15,000 on Instagram, but only around 500 people on her email list. She was already selling a group program, but she was relying on live launches to do it. So she'd get around 100 people registering for each launch. And over a three year period, she'd only sold 32 places on her course.

So she had this huge social media following, but the audience that she was able to sell to was relatively small. And when she started working with me, we set up a really simple funnel to start moving those social media followers onto her email list. Then she launched a program to her email list. And in the first seven day email campaign, she sold another 30 places. And you know what? That's the difference. Those people on her email list were warm leads.

Her social media audience, yes, it was much bigger, but they were freezing cold. And that's why I keep saying don't confuse a big following with a valuable business audience. Then another dietitian I've been working with, she was actually starting from scratch when she met me. She had zero social media, no email list, didn't even know what one was, no website, nothing.

So we started with the basics, doing her market research, getting really clear on her messaging and bringing people onto her email list. 12 months later, she's selling to her email list every single week. That email list is where the majority of her sales come from. Now, all of these dietitians were starting from very different places. Some had already built a big social media audience. Others were starting from scratch, but they all had one thing in common.

They were struggling to get consistent clients. amount of time it took them to get to a point where clients were coming in consistently wasn't about how many followers they had or how many hours they were working either. It was actually about what they were building and more specifically, whether they were building an email audience. Email can have such a big impact on how quickly you can build a successful business.

So I guess if there's one thing I want you to take away from this episode, it's this. Building a business takes time. And I don't mean that to sound discouraging, quite the opposite, because I think a lot of the overwhelm that dietitians experience when starting a business comes from expecting it to happen much faster than it realistically can. And I think this is one of the reasons that people give up too soon. They look at how much they've done and they look at how little money is coming in and they think, "this is taking too long. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this." And sometimes they end up going back into the NHS because they've convinced themselves that if it hasn't worked by now, it probably isn't going to. But 99% of the time, it's just that you haven't given your business enough time to actually become a business yet. And that's why I wanted to give you some actual numbers in this episode. If you can realistically give your business around 15 hours a week, and you're prepared to spend those first three to four months doing the foundational work properly, you're giving yourself a fantastic chance of building a really successful business. And then over the following months, you can start nurturing those foundations and turning those people into clients, into sales, and eventually a really amazing income. It might happen faster, it might take longer, but I'd much rather you understand the reality of that journey rather than spend six weeks expecting to have a fully functioning business and then decide that you failed when that's not the case. Now, before you go, I've actually created a free guide where I break down all the steps that you need to know to build a health business that consistently brings in clients. And more importantly, the order that I'd recommend doing them in. I've called it the Dietitian Business Master Plan. It's a 22 step roadmap.

that takes you through the key stages of building your business in the right order. You can grab it for free using the link in the show notes. Bye for now.