How To Bill For Concierge Services: For RDs
As a Registered Dietitian, you understand the importance of nutrition coaching—not just for one session, but for a lifetime. As you work with your ideal clients, they’ll come to recognize how incredibly valuable you are in their lives. They’ll see that you’re essential to achieving their health goals and will want to keep you involved long-term. While one-time consultations can be a traditional model, we know that they don’t support true health change and can lead to burnout on the provider’s end.
This is why a concierge business model with package-based services is the optimal way to grow your private nutrition practice! Not only is it profitable from a business perspective, but it also offers your ideal clients the high-touch nutrition services they need to achieve their goals.
However, whenever you add a new service or program, it raises the question: How do you bill for it, and what do you charge?
Let’s dive more into nutrition concierge practices and how they work:
How To Bill For Concierge Services: For RDs
To bill for concierge services, you simply set it up in your client management system. I recommend Practice Better! With this software, you can create packages that include multiple nutrition coaching sessions and either set up payment plans or invoice clients directly. It syncs with your bank account to ensure you get paid easily and on time!
If you don’t yet have a client management system, I recommend looking into one to help your business easily scale & grow!
What Is A Concierge Practice?
A concierge business is a nutrition practice that offers more comprehensive services for its clients. These concierge services allow clients to work with you more frequently and with greater flexibility. The idea is that these clients can reach you faster, more easily, and more often than they would with a traditional outpatient dietitian in an insurance-based practice. This can help you stand out in your marketing by demonstrating that you truly provide a higher level of support for their success.
These luxury packages usually involve in-depth sessions with personalized and expansive care. You might explore supplement recommendations, weekly meal planning, their relationship with food, and more. These are not cookie-cutter, one-time consultations that clients would receive in a hospital setting. Concierge services also tend to have longer durations, both for each session and for the overall number of visits. Typically, concierge packages consist of 30- to 60-minute sessions over a period of 3 to 6 months or more.
How Do Concierge Services Work?
Concierge services can be structured in various ways, and you need to determine what works best for you! First, decide what services you will include in your luxury package. This could encompass a range of offerings, such as personalized meal plans, nutrition coaching sessions, and ongoing messenger support for accountability.
Next, consider the model for your concierge services. Will you offer a membership model with a flat monthly fee that grants clients access to a set number of services? Or would custom plan packages be more suitable, where clients commit to a specific number of one-on-one or group sessions per month for a longer duration? Each model has its advantages, so think about how you want to engage with your clients and provide them with the best support.
After that, you’ll need to consider how you will manage scheduling and communications. Remember, it’s still essential to maintain a good work-life balance, so being available to your clients 24/7 isn’t advisable. However, your concierge clients will expect a higher level of care, so you need to determine how to provide that while setting boundaries for yourself and your personal life. I recommend establishing policies in your contract that specify the days of the week and times you are available to respond to client inquiries outside of sessions.
How To Charge For Concierge Services
Step 1: Determine the details of your concierge service.
As we said, you first need to determine what’s included in your concierge model. For a client to take that leap into luxury services, the value needs to be clear. You could offer more frequent calls, messenger access, food journal reviews, grocery shopping support, cooking demos, custom weekly meal plans, and more! Determine what makes sense for your dietetic niche and your client needs.
Step 2: Research the market.
Next, find other private RDs in your niche and make note of how much they charge. Figure out an average range of rates so you have a good baseline. Make sure you’re looking at RDs that are the same level as you! Don’t look into nutritionists or other lesser qualified individuals that may be advertising similar services.
Step 3: Consider your business expenses.
Luckily, one of the benefits of a private online nutrition business is low overhead costs. However, there are still business expenses! Take into consideration your monthly business costs when setting your rate. If these services are going to be taking up a lot of your time, you need to be getting paid for it to keep your nutrition business thriving!
Step 4: Don’t undervalue your expertise, experience, and education.
I can’t emphasize this enough, but remember how VALUABLE you are! It’s so easy for us as RD’s to think of ourselves as unworthy of getting paid what we really deserve, leading to burnout and struggle. Don’t forget about all your experience, your unmatched expertise, and your years of education. You’ve earned luxury pricing for your luxury business!
Step 5: Decide how you’ll structure your services.
If your concierge services are going to be membership-based, you need to decide what your monthly membership fees or annual fees are going to be for that model. If you’d rather not do ongoing memberships, you can also offer various concierge packages that are billed at once and last for a set duration of time.
Step 6: Be confident in your choice and don’t be too quick to lower your prices.
With all this information, set your price. Clients are aware that concierge services are a luxury, they’re not cheap, and won’t be included in the covered services with their health insurance. Remember, if you offer concierge care, you deserve concierge pricing. Not every potential client will be interested, and that’s okay. Don’t be quick to lower your prices. What you’re offering and your expansive qualifications make your rates totally justified!
If you’re struggling to get dreamy clients to buy into your nutrition coaching, that doesn’t necessarily mean your pricing is off. A lot could be to blame for your struggling nutrition business! However, you don’t need to tackle this alone! I’ve seen it all as a luxury business coach, and I can help you create a successful and thriving private practice. Just apply to work with me and we can find your dreamy clients, set your pricing, master your marketing, and take your nutrition business to the next level.
Setting your prices is one of the hardest parts of having your own business, but never forget how much YOU are worth.
Concierge services are becoming increasingly popular in the nutrition business. That’s because people are becoming intimately aware of how important food is to their body and health goals. They’re also realizing how hard it is to do this thing alone! Because of that, it’s a great time to offer concierge services to your dreamy clients!
I hope this post helped you better understand this model and set your pricing right. For more must-have information on growing your private nutrition practice, head over to my blog! I’ve got plenty of advice for RDs at every stage of the process!