It's difficult to run a nutrition and/or fitness business without providing services. Here is a rundown of many of the types of services you can make available for your clients. The actual mix of services you end up providing for your clients will depend largely on the customers you attract. An athlete has different nutrition and fitness goals from that person who needs to lose 50 pounds to save their life. Here are a few of the types of services you can target.

Bodybuilders. Many of these athletes compete in weight classes - they are inspired to be as strong and light as possible. They need your help. Contact school athletic departments, health clubs, and other training facilities and offer free 30-minute presentation of nutrition for strength and body weight control. These athletes are very serious about nutrition. Be prepared to handle the questions you can predict will be asked. Don't attempt to provide details... give the big picture and stress the importance of getting professional counseling tailored to the athlete's specific needs.

Catering Services, Company Cafeterias, Restaurants. Analyze recipes and meals. Create menus with nutrition information printed on it to help catering clients make selections. Help these companies improve their recipes or create a "Light Line" for their customers by providing composition analyses for their existing recipes. Suggest substitutions and other modifications. If you're capable of producing a sample week's meal plan in color with graphics, do it. :Let the client imagine a similar meal plan she can use in her catering service or cafeteria.

Cyclists. Reach cyclists through cycling clubs, bicycle stores, and cycling events. Offer each cycling club a free 30-minutelecture on nutrition for endurance at their regular meeting. Make friends, offer your services, hand out your cards, pass out flyers, build your business. Consider making a flyer with cycling graphics and bullets for aspects of their sport that you can have a positive impact on.

Outdoor Sports. Contact outdoors clubs and provide free 30-mintues lecture then offer your services, hand out information, network. Create a special handout using graphics representing the major interests of the group you're addressing. Include pertinent "big picture" nutrition and fitness information - enough to persuade prospects that you can help them with their specialized dietary and fitness needs.

Health Clubs. Meet the owner and offer a free six-page Initial Assessment Reports and an Exercise Calorie Expenditure Reports to every new member. This gives the health club owner a professional eight-page evaluation report delivered with a free consult by a dietary professional - and it cost her or him nothing. It gives you the opportunity to get acquainted with each and every club member. You can offer customized weight loss, endurance, and body building meal plans and counseling. Do body fat analyses. Hanging around the health club (or better yet, giving a free presentation to the personnel) give you the chance to meet the personal trainers, massage therapists, and other employees. This type of PR helps to make you the person that all of these people will refer nutrition related questions to. Be available. Be willing to provide trainers with your Client Questionnaires and/or Intake Diaries (your software should be able to print both of these for you). Then collect them, generate the reports, and deliver them back to the trainers. (Some trainers prefer to maintain control and share the fee with you.) This may be okay, since you can then focus on preparing the report and not worry about making a presentation to the client. Besides, if you're doing this for 20 trainers, chances are you'll be happy with the situation.

Health Food Stores. Create recipes and meal plans that incorporate the store's sale items. Provide them in exchange for access to customers. Conduct a tour of the store's shelves for customers. Set up an information booth. Create and distribute pamphlets or flyers that supply information about the owner's products and compare them, perhaps to more commonly eaten foods. Take credit on the flyers and include contact information. Promote your practice. Network with these health food store owners - they know a lot of people you'd probably like to meet.

Hospitals. Your skills can bring you part time or even full time work with hospitals. Services include health education for patients and staff. Support cardiac and diabetes rehabilitation work. Develop recipes and meal plans for patients and the food service department. Use your nutrition software to generate meal plans for a wide variety of special needs. Generate handouts on enteral and parenteral products (should be able to get this from your nutrition software). In addition to providing general guidelines, you can hand them a sample meal plan for someone with their condition.

Long-Term Care Facilities. Reach clients by contacting long-term care residences or through programs that deliver such as Meals on Wheels. (If you're only developing one meal a day for particular clients, make sure your software can compare your meal to 1/3 RDA, 1/3 DRI, or 1/3 RNI.) Provide nutritional analysis, meal plans, and counseling. Give free presentation to get in the door. In your talk, stress the importance of matters of importance to your audience. Pass out a flyer you created especially for this audience. Make sure your name and contact information is printed on the flyer: "Got a nutrition question? Call List at..." Presenting yourself as an expert on the facility's nutrition and fitness problems puts you at the top of the list when it comes time to enlist the services of a nutrition professional.

Publishing. Write (or start) the food column for your local newspapers to generate publicity and to build your reputation. Small newspapers are always looking for features to include in their publication. A recipe of the week section is another opportunity to market yourself. Include your picture if you can. Work with magazines and provide services for their food, cuisine, food production, lifestyle, travel, and family sections. Create recipes and meal plans for special needs (diabetics, the elderly, weight-loss, renal). Do sidebars on specific nutrition topics. Generate food lists (foods rich in potassium, low in sodium, etc.) Write and submit articles... if published, put reprints on your office walls and on your web site to add to your credibility.

Recipe Development. Provide recipes for food manufacturer's product packages, restaurants, resorts, or for recipe booklet offers. Include the nutrient analysis of the recipe. Do recipe makeovers. Use your software to generate two recipe reports: before and after. Your nutrition software should be able to "compose" your recipe - that is, it should be able to perform a composition analysis of your recipe. For instance, if you wanted to know where all that fat in the recipe was coming from, you should be able to open the recipe, select "Fat" from a listing of all your recipes, then rank all your ingredients from high-to-low (or low-to-high, if you wish) and list them in a report. This report should list the highest fat content ingredient first, the second highest second, etc. It should also show how much fat (in grams) is contained in each ingredient, and it should show the percentage contribution to the entire fat content in the recipe for each ingredient. Having this capability lets you see where all that fat, cholesterol, or sodium is coming from. Your recipe makeover will often show remarkable improvement over the original recipe.

Runners. Locate runners through their running clubs or athletic teams, through runners' publications, at 5K's and 10K's, fun runs, clinics, and camps, or through stores that specialize in running equipment. Offer each cycling club a free 30-minutelecture at their regular meeting. Make friends, offer your services, hand out your cards, pass out flyers, build your business.

Swimmers. Reach swimmers at facilities that field club teams, such as the YMCA or municipal pools. Offer lectures, offer to train the trainers, offer one-on-one counseling services for individual athletes.

Substantiate claims. Offer nutrient analysis services to advertisers and restaurants. Your help can help them substantiate their food and health claims.

Report and services are vital to your business. And nutrition software is vital to your ability to provide reports and services to your clients in a time-efficient manner. The next topic discusses nutrition and fitness software that is critical to your success.