Building a Dream Team on Your RD Entrepreneurial Journey
If you’re a Registered Dietitian who is considering opening a private practice or you’ve been grinding it out for a while with your nutrition business, you know the entrepreneurial journey is not easy! There are lots of benefits of starting an online private practice, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard. As you’re embarking on your RD entrepreneurial journey, you may find yourself saying you’re going “solo,” and the feeling of being alone can be super overwhelming!
But, here’s the deal. Just because you’re leaving traditional RD positions doesn’t mean you have to go at it alone. Every entrepreneur should build a dream team around them that helps support their growth and success! The right people in your corner can make all the difference when working towards your big business goals as an RD!
So, today, I’m sharing my guide on how to build your dream team!
Building a Dream Team on Your RD Entrepreneurial Journey
As a Registered Dietitian, your expertise is in nutrition, not business. It’s just the facts! You can learn a lot about business, law, accounting, marketing, and more along the way, but you’ll probably never be an expert—after all, your passion and focus should be on nutrition! The right people in your group can help fill gaps and pick up the slack where you fall short to give your nutrition business the best chance of success.
Beyond hiring consultants and professionals in other fields, as your business grows, there’s plenty of busywork that could be delegated to assistants, secretaries, and other employees. All in all, to grow your private practice and maintain work-life balance, building a dream team is an essential part of the business plan.
What Is A Dream Team At Work?
A dream team is just a group of people that work together to accomplish your business’s vision. Each team member contributes their own expertise or support to meet all the business’s needs, whether that be making sales calls and posting on social media or managing the books and handling tech problems. A dream team could be just one or two additional people or a dozen partners, depending on your needs and the size of your practice!
How To Build A Dream Team
Step 1: Consider employees, consultants, advisors, partners, coaches, and other experts!
When you’re ready to build a team, think about all types of support! This isn’t just about hiring an assistant to help with scheduling or a CPA to help with taxes. Consider many potential supporting roles that employees, consultants, advisors, partners, coaches, and more can help fill.
Step 2: Define the roles you need clearly.
Once you have an idea of what’s available to you as an RD, it’s time to determine your needs and budget. Unfortunately, you may not be able to assemble the whole dream team from day one, but taking some time to define beneficial roles will allow you to prioritize your greatest needs. Then, the other roles can be added later as you increase profits and reach your goals.
Step 3: Look for true passion and similar values.
When it comes time to fill these roles, look for team members that will be with you for the long-term. This is a lengthy journey, and you want people who will stick with you through the ups-and-downs. Look for people who have similar values to you and have true passion for nutrition (even if their role doesn’t directly impact that part of your practice). This way you can all work towards goals with the same drive.
Step 4: Implement comprehensive onboarding.
To build an effective team, you need a thorough onboarding process. Of course, this is more related to employees you may hire, but the step is too important not to include! When you have a comprehensive onboarding protocol, your employees fully understand their responsibilities, know how to do all the important tasks, and feel fully integrated into your practice’s culture! You want your team to know exactly how to execute effectively every day and feel supported while doing so, and strong onboarding can do just that!
Step 5: Foster a positive culture.
If you worked in a traditional RD position for any amount of time, you probably know what a negative company culture feels like. Often as RDs, we’re undervalued and underpaid in our roles. Often, other colleagues and healthcare professionals in the clinic or practice don’t see ours role as equal or important compared to theirs, leaving a deep feeling of dissatisfaction—and rightfully so!
When you start building your own company culture, remember this and be mindful of how you’re showing your staff and partners you value them. To foster a positive culture, lead by example, always encourage feedback, regularly check-in with your team, acknowledge their efforts, and provide plenty of opportunities for them to learn and grow.
Step 6: Prioritize good communication.
We all know any relationship breaks down with poor communication, so a great team must communicate well. However, when you have an online practice where you aren’t sitting face-to-face with your dream team every day, it can be difficult to maintain a stream of open and clear communication. It’s one of the biggest challenges when going online! But, to make your dream team as effective as possible, clear this hurdle early on and find ways to establish and maintain stellar communication.
Step 7: Set and collaborate on clear goals.
One of the best things about having a dream team is having a group of people all lifting you and your nutrition business up to reach your goals. To strive for the success for your practice effectively, you should set and collaborate on goals together!
This will give everyone a sense of ownership and alignment when looking ahead at the big picture. Good leaders can rally their team around these objectives and get to them faster with your combined effort and skills. This may sound intimidating, but you do this every day working with your clients! You create goals during your sessions and work towards them together with mutual vision and purpose. Now, just do the same for your dream team!
Step 8: Utilize technology to streamline workflow.
Your business being heavily tech-based can have both downsides (like communication) and upsides! One of the advantages of an online business as an RD is the centralized tech-based nature of the practice allows you to use technology to improve and streamline workflow. Use tools like client management software, nutrition planning programs, communication tools, billing software, marketing platforms, and more to cut out busy work, stay organized, communicate well, and get more done.
Step 9: Support work-life balance for your whole team.
One of the most freeing things about owning your own online practice is your ability to manage work-life balance. In a 9-5 RD position, it’s HARD to have a healthy relationship with work, since many of us end up working lots of required overtime for very low pay. However, with a private practice you can choose when, where, and how you work!
To be a great leader, you should value your team’s work-life balance as well. Not only will it increase their overall job satisfaction and align better with your shared values, but it’ll build trust and loyalty. Your team will know you have their health in mind just as much as your clients!
Step 10: Celebrate and encourage everyone in your team.
Remember that even though this is your practice, everyone on your team plays a significant role in your success. Be sure to celebrate your team’s performance every step of the way and celebrate every business win together. If this is a group effort, the whole group should benefit from the practice’s success!
Key Team Members to Have on Your RD Entrepreneurial Journey
Accountant/CPA
An accountant or CPA will be important to ensure you meet all your tax obligations, you minimize tax liability, and you maintain all necessary financial reports. Plus, they’re great for budgeting and forecasting!
Need someone? I recommend Megan Naaz!
Legal Support
Nutrition and health go hand-in-hand, and I don’t need to tell you how careful you need to be when offering health advice to clients! Of course, therefore, you have the certifications and training you do have, but there are still necessary legal factors you need to think through. Legal support will help you manage regulatory compliance, liability protection, intellectual property, privacy laws, disputes, and more!
Need someone? I recommend Sam Vander Wielen.
Recipe Developer
This may not be relevant for every RD niche, but if what you do requires a lot of recipe testing and development, it’d be a good idea to get some help in this area! They can not only relieve the burden of the necessary meal planning and recipe development needs, but they can also increase client engagement and provide lots of content that can double as marketing material.
Research Assistant
Again, not every type of RD will need a research assistant. However, if your niche is more in the research and data field over working one-on-one with clients, a research assistant could be invaluable. Not only can they help with your content development and research reporting, but they can also assist with grant writing to fund your projects and programs!
Nutrition Assistant
As your client list grows, managing all your dreamy clients can be a lot on any one RD’s plate! A nutrition assistant can help with things like scheduling, operations, record-keeping, billing, paperwork, meal plan development, progress monitoring, and even research. They’re a great partner to help lighten the load!
Graphic Designer
Even though your private practice is online, your online presence can really be minimal. However, regardless of how deep you dive into the online world, you’ll need to do some type of marketing, some type of website building, and/or some type of material preparation as a private RD. You want all of this to be branded and professional to boost your credibility and legitimacy in your niche.
Website Developer
As I mentioned, an online presence and website isn’t essential in the beginning, but if you decide to go that route, a website developer is a must. Setting up your website correctly from the start and then managing it effectively day-to-day will ensure your website is secure, discoverable on search engines, and futureproof to handle your growing business.
Need someone? I recommend Jess Creatives!
IT Support
When your business gets large enough that you’re managing a website, lots of software, and multiple devices, IT support can be helpful. If you encounter tech problems that are over your head or tedious to fix, an IT person can save the day and keep your online business running.
Social Media Manager or Marketing Specialist
Marketing is one of the biggest struggles when owning your own business. It’s hard to know what avenues are best, and it's easy to sink a lot of time into strategies that don’t produce much fruit. This is why a marketing mix is good! However, a good marketing expert on your dream team could help you make the best marketing decisions for your business that will hopefully increase conversions and sales!
Customer Support
Whether it’s answering emails, setting up appointments, addressing small problems, collecting feedback, or something else, customer support is important for any business. We all know how great customer service can make or break a business’s reputation and success.
Sales Manager
Taking an interested party through the whole sales process to convert them into one of your dreamy clients can be a lengthy and difficult process. It takes a while to get good at it! Of course, you can learn to market yourself, but a sales manager can help boost those conversion rates and build your client list!
Mindset Coach
As RDs (and as women), it’s easy to let our minds fill with self-limiting beliefs! From years of being undervalued and underpaid in traditional RD positions, you may think you don’t have the skills, experience, confidence, and persistence to make your business a success. Of course, this is not true at all, and RDs are some of the most PASSIONATE and CAPABLE people out there! A mindset coach can help you overcome self-limiting beliefs and realize your true potential.
Need someone? I recommend Jen Diaz!
Dietitian Business Coach
Do you need someone to fill all the roles on this list to have a true dream team? No way. You can grow your skills in business, marketing, management, and sales if hiring someone isn’t in the cards yet. Don’t forget all the training and studying you did to become an RD! There’s nothing you can’t do!
However, one role I recommend for all RDs is a Dietitian Business Coach. A business coach can help refine your skills in all categories, collaborate with you on wise problem solving, and advise on the best business strategies! And, a Dietitian Business Coach can not only help with all those essentials, but they can coach you through the unique challenges of having a nutrition business. This industry is nuanced and running a private nutrition practice isn’t like running any other business. A Dietitian Business Coach knows all the ins-and-outs of the nutrition industry and can be a key component to your practice growing into your dream business quickly and effectively!
Sound like someone you want to bring onto your team ASAP? I’d love to work with you! You can apply to work with me and learn more about my services here!
There’s no reason your entrepreneurial journey needs to be solo—build your dream team!
Being an entrepreneur can be isolating, but there’s no reason to go at it alone. Build your dream team starting with a Dietitian Business Coach and let’s turn your dreams into a reality! You can find out more about starting your own private nutrition practice on my blog. I can’t wait to meet you and hear all about your goals!