Home Business Idea: Diet coach
Business description
A diet coach works one-on-one with clients to help them modify their diets to be healthier, cope with a disease or condition, train for a sport, or lose weight. Diet coaches provide personalized meal plans for their customers based on dietary needs, restrictions, and goals. A diet coach will also help his or her customers stay away from fad diets, diet pills, or other unhealthy measures to achieve weight loss. Diet coaches also provide motivation and support as they help their customers incorporate a more healthy diet into their lifestyle.
Materials needed
A diet coach does not need a lot of materials or equipment to start up. It's a good idea to have informational packets for your clients, and those will need to be customized for each client. You should also have the standard tools needed to help customers who are coming to you because they want to lose weight. These materials include an accurate body fat tester, scale, and measuring tapes. A good laptop is also necessary, so you can keep your client's files organized and take them with you when you call on your clients.
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Space requirements
After the first initial consultation or two, you will probably spend the majority of your time on the phone with your clients, coaching, motivating, and helping them make healthy diet choices. Depending on your customer, you might want to meet with them once or a week or so to go over the upcoming week's diet and discuss how the diet is going. For that, you will need a home office. However, this isn't always necessary. If you make house calls to your clients, as many diet coaches will, very little work will be done in your home other than preparing meal plans and information for clients. For that, you will need a home computer or filing system, which won't take up more than a corner of a room.
Time Requirements
This will be a time consuming business, since each client will have different needs and goals that require individualized attention. You will need to spend a fair amount of time meeting with each client each week in person to discuss their diet, help educate them on proper food and dietary choices, and make changes to their program as necessary. You will also spend a lot of time on the phone. In addition, it's important that you stay up to date in the constantly-changing world of diet and fitness, so a good amount of time will be spent researching.
Income potential (1-5, 5 being the best)
3. Most diet coaches charge an initial fee for consulting, and then an hourly fee. This can add up if you have a lot of clients or start to develop a name for yourself.
Keys to Success
Offer free seminars about healthy eating to drum up business. You will also need to be seen as an expert in your field, so make sure you have necessary licensing and stay abreast of the latest dietary trends. It will also be helpful to develop a niche to target your services to; for example, a diet coach for people who want to lose weight, or for kids.
Risks
Giving false information or setting up diet plans that are not nutritionally sound can put you at risk for lawsuits. However, this can be eliminated by ensuring you are qualified to provide diet coaching, and by having clients sign waivers.
