The business side of private practice our dietetics training left out
Learn how to bring in private pay clients and run your practice so you can keep working for yourself.
Show me why clients aren't booking
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You went out on your own to make more money and work the hours you choose.
But if private practice doesn't work out, the backup plan is a telehealth job seeing twenty clients a week at $50 a session, working for someone else again.
So you work harder. You open evening sessions, panel with insurance to fill your schedule and start looking at another certification.
Yet clients still aren't booking the way you need them to.
Our dietetics training spent years preparing us to care for clients and never covered how to run a private practice as a business.
I tried working harder too.
For a while that meant evenings I didn't want to work, insurance referrals that weren't always a good fit and sliding scale spots to bring clients in.
Eventually I was more exhausted than when I started and wondering whether to keep my practice at all.
But I didn't want to go back to working for someone else. What changed things wasn't working harder.
It was learning the business side of private practice.
And as a result, I went from
$5K months
seeing 15-20 clients a week
to
consistent $10K months
seeing fewer than 12.
I charged $250 a session.
(Yes, really. Go ahead and read that again.)
Every client was private pay.
And I only saw clients 4 days a week from 10am-3pm.
Where a lot of us end up.
When your calendar has open spots, you notice every one of them.
So you keep your rate where your clients can afford it, because the last thing you want is to give someone a reason not to book. At that rate, a full caseload means somewhere around 20 to 25 clients a week.
You start looking at the dietitians who seem to be doing well and borrow what you can. You post the way they post, then check back every hour to see how it's doing. You add another specialty to your website too, just in case.
And every time you sit down to pay bills, you run the numbers again (and again) to see whether your current caseload is enough yet, and it keeps coming up short.
Show me why clients aren't booking
Answer a few quick questions, and your result tells you what to fix.
Free 60-second quizWhat dietetics gets wrong about private practice
Being underpaid and undervalued gets treated like part of the job. It isn't.
A full caseload is whatever you decide you have capacity for, not what the rest of the field calls normal.
We're allowed to talk about money out loud, even in a helping profession. And wanting to make good money doesn't make you greedy.
A dietitian who's stretched thin and exhausted can't give clients present, unrushed care.
Private Practice Starter Kit
Skip the months of piecing it together on your own. Everything you need to start your practice is in one place, step by step.
Free Starter KitPricing masterclass
You can care about your clients and still be a dietitian who's paid well. It starts with how you set your rate.
Free pricing masterclassBefore you try one more thing
Find out what your practice actually needs in a free, 30 minute Private Practice Audit. You'll walk me through where your practice is now and where you want it to be. Then I'll show you what's getting in the way and the one thing to focus on next, so you leave knowing where to put your energy.
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