Recently graduated from Nutritional studies and feel excited about your new career ahead - but still a little lost as to how to really "start"?

You're not alone. Here at Meal Garden, we work with a wide array of nutritional practitioners at various stages in their wellness business.

We've noticed a commonality among all of them - from holistic nutritionists to registered dietitians to health coaches to naturopathic doctors and everything in-between: they all think they lack "business-savviness".

"I'm good at 'X', but I need help with all the 'marketing', 'social media', 'financial', and/or 'tech' stuff."

Often times, they give themselves less credit then they deserve, and dare we say: their fear or insecurity about not being "savvy-enough" actually prevents them really garnering up the confidence to just going for it - what it takes to really build a business and a brand for yourself from the ground up.

In a few special cases, though, we are taken-aback by how quickly and effortlessly some recent nutrition grads seem to do it. While we've picked up on a thing or two watching fellow wellness influencers market and create a successful name for themselves - we think it's best if we let them explain in their own words...

That's why we’re excited to have Ivana Locke, from her name branded Nutrition + Wellness business, share her insights...

"When starting out owning your own practice as a nutritional practitioner, there are a lot of things that can distract you as you are trying different ways to get clients.  But the desire to help people and wanting to see them succeed is the key ingredient of a great practitioner and a solid foundation for your new business. This will help to build a successful referral-based business.

From Day 1 of starting my business, I came in with the mentality and mindset of:

• How can I help my clients to the best of my ability.
• How can I help them achieve their goals and make them successful.

By continuing to focus on one client at a time and helping them get results and guide them through to their success, I was able to work with more clients and build my business through word of mouth and referrals.  It just takes a little patience and time.

When your clients know, like and trust you, the rapport and referral base is easy to build. A good marker for me to know how well I am doing is if I am continually getting referrals.

Having a large online presence is not something that I really focus on.

I basically use the online social media platform to build an audience to try to show potential clients what I am about and what kind of knowledge I have to offer.  If it resonates with them, then I am just pre-educating them and already building that rapport for when we work together."

I had the pleasure of connecting with Ivana as she was one of our first Meal Garden Professionals, and she quickly navigated the tool to suit her coaching needs with clients (both in-person and one-on-one as well as through online group programs).

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"Meal Garden acts as a host where I can house recipes and meal plans to assist my clients in my nutrition business. I like to share a lot of the fantastic recipes that already exist on there and I also like to add/modify a few of my own. Therefore, its a great platform for organizing my recipe collections that I like to share with my clients.

My clients can easily utilize Meal Garden to help them organize their meals for the week and even generates a grocery shopping list with the nutritional analysis of the recipes. It’s a real time-saver for them."

It's rewarding to see successful and entrepreneurial nutrition practitioners take advantage of the resources out there to advance and optimize what they already do so well - help people eat and live better!

We look forward to watching Ivana's business continue to thrive and will stay tuned for many more positive testimonials and referrals in her future...

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