Writing a nutrition business plan is crucial to empowering your career and supporting you to become your own boss. To help you, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to writing an effective business plan, covering everything you need to include and providing expert tips to get you started.
Table of Contents:
- Why You Need A Nutritionist Business Plan
- Step 1 – Start With A Summary
- Step 2 – Include A Company Overview
- Step 3 – Describe Your Products Or Services
- Step 4 – Outline Your Pricing Structure
- Step 5 – Define Your Marketing Strategies
- Step 6 – Carry Out A SWOT Analysis
- Step 7 – Conduct A Competitor Analysis
- Step 8 – Include Your Financial Plans & Projections
- Step 9 – Write A Conclusion
- Before You Go!
Why You Need A Nutritionist Business Plan
Before we explore the steps you need to follow to write a top-quality nutritionist business plan, let’s look at why writing one is critical to the success of your business. A business plan helps you to:
- Create a step-by-step plan. This enables you to set short- and long-term goals that will help you attract investors. They will be able to see you have a clear strategy to generate revenue.
- Plan your capital requirements. This makes clear how much investment your business will need to stay operational, deliver services, and (most importantly) turn a profit.
- Identify risks. A business plan helps you to outline any potential problems you might face in advance – and develop strategies to tackle them.
In summary, a nutritionist business plan can help you understand how to create a unique brand for your business and find strategies for it to succeed in the fitness industry.
Now that you understand the importance of a nutritionist business plan, let’s get started with writing one.
Step 1 – Start With A Summary
An executive summary is a great way to begin your nutritionist business plan. It provides an overview of what will be discussed in the document and helps to engage your readers from the outset. It usually contains:
- Mission statement. This is where you describe your business’s purpose and what unique selling points it can offer consumers.
- Description of your company. Here you can inform readers of your business formation, its locations, the products it offers and a list of your team.
- Overview of your products and services. This explains how your products and services will operate in the market and what gives them a competitive edge.
- Financial plans and projections. Discuss what funds your business requires to start up or any additional funding required should your business be operational.
If you need inspiration for how to present this information, Forbes has a brilliant example of how to make your summary look professional:
When you’re writing your mission statement, company description, products list and financial information, it’s important to avoid using cliched language. This will help you focus on language that represents your business capabilities rather than offering promises that can’t be delivered.
It’s also preferable to write this section of your business plan after the main content has been completed. This will allow you to provide the correct information in this section.
Step 2 – Include A Company Overview
The next step in your nutritionist business plan must include a business overview. You’ll have briefly touched on some of these talking points in your executive summary. Here, you have the opportunity to provide further information to the reader including:
- The status of your business. Are you a start-up or currently operational?
- Company structure. Who owns the business, who is in your team and what are their qualifications and experience?
Providing a company summary can help investors understand the level of investment you require based on the status of your business.
When discussing your company structure, this is a good opportunity to introduce yourself and the team you’ll be working with. You can list their position, responsibilities, qualifications and experience, as demonstrated by this template on Visme:
When you provide investors with this type of information about your company structure, you demonstrate that their investment is in professional hands. This is because you’ll be able to list your team’s qualifications, and expertise and based on these factors, what their responsibilities within the business will include.
Step 3 – Describe Your Products Or Services
Your nutritionist business plan must list and describe the services and products you plan to offer to your customers.
This is an opportunity to demonstrate you have unique services and products that are viable for your scale of business. It’s also important to detail any costs associated with delivering these items, from the capital required to create them to the prices you plan to charge.
This list should cover everything you offer currently and also products that you plan to launch in the future. This will help reassure investors that, in the event your business is not generating enough revenue, other services can be optimised to generate income.
Since you’re specialising in nutrition, the revenue streams that might feature in this section of your nutrition business plan could include:
- Nutrition consultations
- Nutrition packages
- Recipes
- E-books
- Diet plans
- Event speaking
Step 4 – Outline Your Pricing Structure
It’s essential that you have a clear pricing structure for all the services you outline in your business plan. This will help you set sales targets and demonstrate how you’re planning to achieve your financial goals.
Below, we outline some of the key considerations you’ll want to take into account when you’re setting up your pricing structure.
Review Your Competitors’ Rates
When you’re first starting out, you should ensure your prices are similar to or lower than your competitors’. After all, a client is less likely to pay higher prices for a newly developed sports nutrition business if a more established one is advertising its services for cheaper.
Bark states the average price for a nutritionist and dietitian is £100:
Once you begin establishing a client base and attracting new clients, you can raise your prices. Initially, however, try to stay close to the average price. You may also consider coming in at a lower price to get some traction in the market – as long as this is affordable for your business.
Be Clear About Your Outgoings
When determining a pricing structure, you should ensure this accounts for the cost of your outgoings too:
- Office space. If you’re renting a space to operate your sports nutrition business, you should consider this cost.
- Equipment and software. Any equipment you regularly pay for such as your laptop or nutrition software programmes you have to pay for monthly.
- Outsourcing. Expenses such as hiring an accountant need to be considered too.
Consider Your Location
Depending on where your sports nutrition business is located, this can have a major impact on your prices. For example, if living in a busy city such as London, you’ll need to take this into account. The cost of living in London is much higher than elsewhere in the UK, meaning you need to adjust prices if operating from a location such as this.
Step 5 – Define Your Marketing Strategies
Marketing strategies are a crucial part of your nutritional business plan. These will help you implement techniques to attract clients and boost your revenue.
There are several ways you can gather market research to develop effective marketing plans. Let’s take a further look at them.
Identify Your Target Market
When you’re trying to identify your target market, it’s important to gather information on key factors like the age, gender and location of the people likely to purchase your services and products.
For instance, based on data gathered by the UK Parliament, 75% of people aged between 45-74 in England are likely to be obese or overweight:
This type of broad population data provides an initial orientation for who you should be targeting. From there, you can carry out online surveys on your social media page to further refine your audience. You can also use tools like SurveyMonkey to assist you.
In this survey, you should ask questions related to:
- Age range
- Sex
- Occupation
- Health issues
- Any long or short-term nutrition goals
- Whether people prefer online or in-person business
For example, you may find the majority of people in your area are in their thirties working full-time 9 to 5 office jobs and want to improve their lifestyle. This means you can tailor your marketing efforts to reach this specific audience.
Detail Your Marketing Methods
Once you’ve identified your target audience, you need to outline the specific marketing methods you’ll use to promote your nutritionist business. This includes:
- Setting up a Google My Business profile. This enables your business to appear on Google Maps and local listings. It also allows you to gather customer feedback on your services through reviews and provides analytics to understand who is searching for your services.
- Using Google Ads to generate leads. Google Ads appear at the top of the search results page for a particular search term. In your business plan, you can outline how you will use Google Ads to target terms relevant to your business and attract new customers.
- Using Facebook ads to broaden your reach. In your business plan, you can list what type of Facebook ads you will create to increase your exposure. This can include image ads, video ads and carousel ads. You can use the Facebook Ads library for inspiration.
These details will help you provide relevant information to investors when you outline your marketing strategy. Identifying specific marketing channels and clarifying your approach can help build confidence in your overall strategy.
Show The Impact Of Your Marketing Strategies
If you’ve already published social media ads, you can use them as evidence to showcase their performance and how you marketed them:
If you’re hoping to secure capital from investors, you should include data that demonstrates the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
This should include details about the reach and engagement of your adverts to show how well they performed on the multiple social media platforms they appeared on.
Below, we’ve included an example of how this information could be presented in your business plan, illustrating the leads that were generated over 4 weeks using Facebook ads:
You can also include a chart to show the costs associated with generating each lead. This can help investors understand how much funding you may require to generate more leads:
If you’ve not run a marketing campaign already, you can simply include projections including the estimated expenditures and the number of leads you expect to generate.
Step 6 – Carry Out A SWOT Analysis
Once you’ve identified the services and products your business will be selling to the public, it’s important to carry out a SWOT analysis.
A SWOT analysis is a form of strategic planning that assesses your business across the following categories:
- Strengths. These are features of your business that will give you a competitive edge in the marketplace such as qualifications, experiences and passions.
- Weaknesses. This should include areas of your business that need to be improved to become profitable, such as poor marketing strategies and lack of skills.
- Opportunities. These are ways to tackle the weaknesses you’ve identified and avenues for increasing your business revenue, such as new services or marketing strategies.
- Threats. In this section, include any risks that could stop you from turning your opportunities into revenue, such as your competition and costs.
If you need help completing a SWOT analysis, our post on the pros and cons of being a nutritionist can help you identify some common challenges and key opportunities.
Step 7 – Conduct A Competitor Analysis
As well as identifying what services you’ll offer and how you’ll market them, you also need to be clear about which businesses you’ll be competing against – and how you can succeed in doing so.
You can find competing sports nutrition businesses in your area by typing ‘sports nutritionist business near me’ into Google, such as in the example below:
You can then analyse their business strategy by finding their website and identifying their marketing techniques. You can incorporate some of these strategies into your own business, as well as spot ways to make your own business stand out.
You should also examine what your competitors aren’t doing so well by reading reviews or looking at their social media comments. Then, you can identify ways to avoid making these same mistakes. For example, if these businesses don’t offer package deals you can do this yourself and stand out from the competition.
Step 8 – Include Your Financial Plans & Projections
Including financial projections in your nutritionist business plan is important, particularly if you’re looking to secure investments and loans. You should also include financial reports if you’ve already been operating for several years.
To make sure your financial projections are as accurate as possible, it’s important to include the following information in your nutritionist business plan:
- Balance sheet
- Income statement
- Cash-flow sheet
Let’s look at these sections in more detail and explain how they can benefit your nutritionist business plan.
Balance Sheet
A balance sheet consists of two columns that help you understand your assets, what you owe, and your business’ equity.
The column on the left lists your assets. These indicate how you can deliver and fund services whilst also increasing growth. Assets can range from equipment to your nutritionist business plan that helps you deliver your services.
Business assets can fall into one of two categories, these are:
- Current assets such as stock or cash holdings you could use to pay for future expenses.
- Non-current assets such as property and equipment that are expected to be used by your business for more than 12 months.
The column on the right indicates your liabilities. These are financial obligations you owe to third parties such as payments to suppliers or bills you have to pay. If your place of business is rented or requires you to pay a mortgage, this would be included in the liabilities section.
Apple Inc. provides an example of how a professional balance sheet should look:
If you’re able to show a positive cash flow along with assets that generate income, you’ll be able to establish yourself as a reputable business, indicating to investors you’re able to repay any money that is loaned to you.
Income Statement
A business income statement is a critical part of your nutritionist business plan as it shows the profit you’ve made following the deduction of taxes from your income. It generally details your revenue, expenses and net income, allowing you to determine whether a profit can be generated by adjusting costs or reducing losses.
As a result, your income statement can provide useful information to investors who are looking to offer you capital as they can see how profitable your business is.
The Washington Bankers Association provides an example of what an income statement would look like:
Your income statement can help you identify financial strengths and weaknesses that can also form part of your SWOT analysis.
We recommend that you produce an income statement every month if you’ve just launched your business. This will help you keep track of your finances and adjust your spending accordingly. Once you’ve established your business you can then move to create quarterly and annual statements.
Cash Flow Statement
Finally, your nutritionist business plan should have a cash flow statement. This helps indicate the amount of cash that is entering and leaving your business.
A successful business will always generate more income compared to its outgoings, which means it has a positive flow of cash.
Investopedia has created a useful cash flow statement to illustrate what information should be included in the statement such as net earnings and subtractions:
This information can be used to identify business strengths and weaknesses to help maximise revenue. For instance, you might try to increase revenue by offering more features in your online consultations after identifying this as a weak spot on your cash flow sheet.
A cash flow sheet should also indicate which areas of your business are generating a low income so you can allocate portions of your profits to make these areas more profitable.
Step 9 – Write A Conclusion
Finally, it’s important to make sure you summarise the points you’ve raised in your nutritionist business plan with a conclusion. The statement doesn’t require much information and can be kept short.
This is a great opportunity to reiterate the potential your business has, highlight important sections of your plan and mention where you plan to take your business.
Here’s how our closing statement for our hypothetical business Better Life Nutritionist Liverpool might look:
CONCLUSION
Better Life Nutritionist Liverpool is a health and fitness company that aims to improve the lives of its clients. We aim to compete with other nutritionists in the market by offering specialised services that are designed from the research we’ve conducted. We’re confident that investors will receive returns on their investments when they collaborate with us on this business venture.
Our marketing strategies will continue to evolve as the business continues to grow and attracts new clients. We are expecting our client base to grow by 50% in the next 10 years and see a 90% increase in revenues during this period.
It’s also important to include data in this section if you’re looking to secure funds from investors. This will indicate to investors how the business will grow and generate revenue as well as, crucially, how they can receive returns on the investments they make.
If you require a nutrition business plan sample pdf to help complete your business plan, The King’s Trust has downloadable templates to help you create your own.
Before You Go!
After reading this article, we hope you have all the information you need to create your nutritionist business plan.
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