From Content Creator to Telehealth CEO: How Jessica Jones Built a Digital Nutrition Empire
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Libby: [00:00:00] If you're looking to grow your business as a registered Dietitian, you've come to the right place. If you're not sure what to do or what steps to take next so that you can create flexibility and freedom in your life, then you're gonna learn a lot from tuning into our podcast here at Dietitian Boss.
I'm Libby Rothchild, the founder of Dietitian Boss, a fellow registered Dietitian and business owner, and in our podcast, I share. The highs and the lows, and I talk all about how to grow your business, get it started, and I interview our clients. To date, we've had over 200 interviews from clients who share their journey on our podcast, Dietitian Boss.
Jessica Jones, S-R-D-N-C-D-C-E-S is also the CEO and Co-founder of Diabetes Digital, a telehealth platform offering virtual nutrition counseling for diabetes and pre-diabetes covered by insurance and available in 29 states. A CEO. Jessica leads a team of eight dietitians delivering over six. Thousand counseling sessions annually to hundreds of [00:01:00] patients, a nationally recognized dietitian, diabetes educator, and wellness expert.
She helps individuals achieve healthier lives through personalized weight, inclusive nutrition, and accessible education. Beyond Diabetes Digital. Jessica is a co-founder of Food Heaven, a media company with over 250,000 followers focused on the intersection of wellness and social justice. It creates engaging content like the Food Heaven podcast, which has garnered over 5 million downloads.
Jessica authored the diabetes chapter of Krause Food and the nutrition care process, and has served as the m and t nutrition. Speaker for the Diabetes Education Conference led by Beverly Thomas Cyan, a prolific author. She has co-written the 28 Day Plant Powered Health Reboot and a Diabetes Guide to Enjoying Foods of the World, making Healthy Eating, approachable and Delicious.
A prolific author and contributor to Self Magazine. Her work has been featured with Bon Appetit, Oprah Magazine, HuffPost Women's Health, and [00:02:00] More.
I'm so excited to have you here today, Jessica. Thank you for taking some time to share your story with our community. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here. I wanted to first hit off the today's episode talking about how you started as a content creator and what that meant when you started, what it means now and now you lead a telehealth company, which is no easy task. So what inspired your transition from media and social platforms to founding diabetes Digital? Yeah, so
Jessica: it was a long kind of process of just reflection and therapy and business coaching and all the things to figure out where I was in life and what I wanted for the next chapter of my life, especially as I like hit middle age.
So I, yes, I started A company for fun, honestly called Food Heaven. That was all about just nutrition and media. And we had a [00:03:00] podcast like that. We started in 2015 as so long ago, as well as, I think we started Food Heaven in, I wanna say 2009, maybe 2010, I don't know, but it feels like forever ago.
And we would do a lot of recipe development working with brands, content creation. That was before it was even called content creation I feel like all of that started during the pandemic. Honestly, I think that it was going well. We were making good money. Also during that time, like a lot of people don't know, we worked in clinics too.
So we worked in so many different clinics. And like for me, on the east coast, on the west coast, as a dietitian as well as my business partner, Wendy, and she was working in clinics up until like last year and we still had diabetes digital. Yeah. For many different reasons, which I can get into.
But yeah, pandemic I'll say led us to reflect and realize like we wanted to try something new and also get back to our roots of working directly with patients and supporting patients like in a way that feels like very meaningful and where you [00:04:00] see those tangible changes with their numbers and things like that. So that was the reason. And we're also diabetes educators, and we really saw that there was like a niche and a need for, weight inclusive, diabetes care, culturally inclusive financially accessible. And so we're like, okay, we should totally fill the need and also fulfill ourselves.
Libby: I love that, and I wanna get into some pieces of that story as we continue today's episode. But let me ask you this, Jessica, do you and or Wendy do direct pa patient care now or are you just management as an owner?
Jessica: Yeah, I was actually on a podcast earlier and they were like, what is a typical day?
I want to do patient care directly and I was telling the one of our team members, I just don't have the time in my schedule because a typical day for me will be let's say typical week is like 18 to 25 meetings. And the meetings are with like our internal team. I meet with a lot of providers, so I am sharing our services with [00:05:00] providers like Diabetes, digital, what we do, like building our referral network which has just really been me, and I've had the help of one of our like admin assistants, we reach out to like hundreds of people on LinkedIn a week. And so we built that to 70 referring providers, which in a year, which has been really exciting. So yeah it's a lot of that. It's a lot of figuring stuff out, managing the team, building everything from scratch.
And once I feel things are more stable, I would love to. Not have a full caseload 'cause it wouldn't be realistic, but have some patient caseload. But right now also with mentoring the dietitians and things, it's like I feel like we do case conferences, chart reviews, like shadowing their session, like all that.
So it feels like you get a little of the patient care indirectly.
Libby: And you can help more patients by helping your providers improve their comfortable and interpersonal skills to then serve your audience better. So let me ask you this. I heard you mention a hundred per week, and this is something that our audience, especially my clients from when I coach them, have a really hard time wrapping [00:06:00] their head around outreach and what that looks like.
What do you think about? I say that's a standard a hundred a week. But you're not 250
Jessica: for us. Yeah. Amazing. And
Libby: it depends on your goals, right? So if you're a smaller practice, you obviously are a group practice, you're gonna have different KPIs benchmarks than somebody who's maybe working solo, a lot of listeners or solo practitioners.
So this is gonna depend. Do you think that if you were to have had told yourself 10 or 15 years ago that you would be having sales meetings with providers 15 hours a week, what would you have thought?
Jessica: I would've been like, what? No, they're just, all the patients will come. Yeah. That's the thing. And it's funny because now I meet with other group practice owners and that's who I am like spending a lot of my time with, because when I tell you the amount that you learn.
From other people doing the same thing. And I would recommend that to anyone who's trying to do a private practice or group practice, meet with other people, have a mastermind. We have our own Slack channel as well. And all day, like it's the most valuable info. And it's like you give [00:07:00] as much as you get too, right?
I was meeting with one of them and. We were both saying we're salespeople at this point. And that is, part of what the job is like you have to be able to sell your services.
I feel like it's an easy sell because I like stand behind. I'm sure we all do. Whatever you work on, you, we stand behind it, but it is sales at the end of the day. And do you like that? I do. Yeah. I tell my husband because he works in finance and he has done sales before, and when I talk to him about like his calls versus my calls, I'm like, oh, these are very similar.
Am I in sales? So even when I did a private practice, and like, I had a small group practice before, right? And I did all the discovery calls and that was honestly my favorite part, was like doing the discovery calls, getting to know the patients, like pairing them with a dietitian.
And so now even with diabetes digital, that's another thing I spend a lot of time with every day is like I personally will call patients and like now, because it's the volume is so high, like there's other people who do it too, and honestly who do more than what I [00:08:00] do in terms of those calls. But we call them and we say.
Hey, these are your benefits. Do you have any questions? And then I can have conversations with the patients too and give them a little nugget from me. Is like a warm handoff to their dietitian, which I really
Libby: like. I. Did you always enjoy that aspect of your work? 'cause obviously you wear a lot of hats from content creator to clinician Yeah.
To salesperson, to group practice. Did you always have that mindset, like naturally, or did you grow into enjoying sales?
Jessica: I think I grew into enjoying it and I think where I learned that I was good at talking to patients was when I had my private practice and I was like, oh, like everybody signs up that I talked to.
That's crazy. I thought that it was gonna be like nobody signed up. So I actually worked like at a clinic and I had a goal of I have to get to X amount of patients before I can quit my job. Sure. I thought it was gonna take six months. It was like. Three weeks. Wow, that's incredible. Yeah.
And I was like, oh, sorry guys, I gotta go. But was the [00:09:00] perfect fit though. That's what I'm trying to say is like when you find your target audience, even with my group practice, it was a similar audience as this, it was disordered eating meats like chronic disease management.
We're now like even more niche than that. But when you find that audience, and especially for me, our patients are a lot of people of color. We work with a lot of black women.
Libby: That's it's really nice to hear and not typical from a dietitian to hear that you've been able to embrace sales. So I think that's great to have an open mind.
You had said you didn't think you would enjoy really leaning into this, but you gave it a try and things accelerated faster than you had thought by setting that goal. Yeah. Six months to quit. My job ended up happening in three weeks. And you enjoy that aspect. So I wanted to ask you, food Haven has over 250,000 followers and 5 million podcast downloads, which is really impressive.
What key strategies helped you grow such a strong brand? And especially 'cause you grew it so long ago, right?
Jessica: It took us a long time. Yeah. And we grew it so long ago. Yes. I think what helped us grow is having a very specific niche and like staying [00:10:00] to our values, which are culturally inclusive, weight inclusive, all those things like inclusive, everything. Before it was even like trendy. That was like always who we were, right? Because I feel like during the pandemic it became, and it's when more people are talking about those things, now it's changed, but more people were talking about that.
And it's nice to see more people talking about it. It's always been what we have been passionate about. So that has helped people find us and resonate. But it also, because as dietitians, we all know we have certain values and so that can make it harder. 'cause for us it's if we were to say you'll lose weight if you do these things.
Like just make it more like tangible. Weight loss type goals that I would say influencers seem to like pedal. Do these things and you'll lose weight and you'll look like me. Eat like me, look like me. I feel if we did that, which is totally not aligned with our values, like we would've grown bigger, but we didn't.
And also like even advertisers, 'cause we did have a podcast and we were signed with a network and there were some challenges with some of the ads. There's [00:11:00] so much nuance in what we would feel comfortable with and not, and so I think it's hard when you're not a dietitian to know what that is. And we still did well, but that's with turning down a lot. And so I think, the more values you have, the probably the harder it is to
Libby: grow potentially. Yeah. And aligning with your values helped you make decisions that you feel like you can really speak to, and it ended helped you land where you are now, which is a pivot from That's true what you had done.
So it's all about, yeah. Learning and building from those experiences. Yeah. And this, you're explaining was long before, like you said, long before, a lot of what you represent was more common. Yeah. So you were probably, you mentioned the nuance, it was even more nuanced. A decade ago. It was so much more a
Jessica: decade ago.
Absolutely. Where it was just like, we're having conversations where it's oh, like where people could interpret it. Dang, should they be saying that versus For us it's no, we're saying what we mean what we say. And but I think the other thing is when you do stick to your values, I feel like you gain trust and [00:12:00] that is why I think part of it is why a lot of our audience followed us to diabetes digital, which is amazing. When we look at the stats of who's signing up. It is a lot starting to grow from the providers, but a lot of it is coming from like our network of people or our podcast, honestly, more than any, even though now, like we release it less frequently every other week, but still people will say oh my gosh, I listened to your podcast for years, or I listened to your podcast and I heard that you guys are doing this now and I didn't have pre-diabetes at the time, but I had it in my back pocket. Now that I do, I'm working with you guys. So I think just, yes, sticking with your values will help long term.
Libby: Yeah. And what an amazing story of using your podcast as a referral source and it's
slow build, but it, people are remembering you and you're building that know and trust factor because you're aligned with your values, even if somebody isn't ready to buy immediately.
When they are, they don't forget about you and Wendy. And that's really powerful.
Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. It's been really nice. And like one of the reasons [00:13:00] why we wanted to pivot was we didn't want the business to have to be contingent on us doing everything and being the face of everything.
Sure. And I love being behind the scenes, which I also realized, which we didn't get the opportunity with food heaven. 'cause food Heaven. It's like you work. And that's it. If you don't work, you don't get paid. Like all those things. And, we have a team and they're incredible, we're starting to have dietitians like go into more leadership roles and help with certain things.
So it's making it more manageable for us.
Libby: And congratulations on having dietitians move into leadership roles. That's really, thank you. Impressive. And you probably know that there are so few dietitian group practices, and I'm sure there might be even fewer that are aligned with the work that you do, your values and what you represent.
So you're really leading I. The way, which is Oh,
Jessica: thank you. That's nice.
Libby: With telehealth expanding rapidly which I'm sure you've seen in recent and all of it. With your journey and your businesses, where do you see the biggest opportunities for dietitians and digital health and [00:14:00] virtual care?
Jessica: Yeah, I think definitely taking insurance in 2025 is like a must when I had my private practice. I didn't take insurance and I feel like not a lot of people did. I feel like with the pandemic it became more widespread 'cause like telehealth and all those things. So that was really exciting for me to just learn more about it.
I think it was obviously like super overwhelming at first. It is a nightmare, I'm not gonna lie. But once you get the hang of it, you do get paid from insurance and it's nice. I would say yeah, if you're someone who's looking into taking insurance, like consult with people if you can pay them whatever their rate is, like $200 for an hour or whatever and learn as much as you can.
It's gonna save you so much time in the long run. Just about insurance in general. But I will say, I think it is important for dietitians to start taking insurance. I think that it'll help you get more clients 'cause nowadays. 95% of our clients are insurance, 5% [00:15:00] self-pay. Like people wanna use their benefits.
Challenges are the reimbursement rates. They're horrible where we live. And it's crazy 'cause I'm in California, so really we're trying to figure out how to fight for more higher rates, it's really hard as people who know who are in private practice. So that makes the margins really thin, especially when you do have a team.
So we are really working on, it has to be scale like at this point. And it's not like for us. We're trying to be a venture backed company or anything like that. And not saying there's anything wrong with that, but I do have a issue with a lot of clinician businesses being run by non-clinicians.
'cause I'm just like I don't know, it just rubs me the wrong way. But I do feel like yes, there is a huge future in telehealth for dietitians in particular. So I encourage us to be the ones who are forming the businesses, representing our fields.
Libby: Yeah. And in terms of what you mentioned about the thin profit margins if you're comfortable sharing with your company or maybe just indirect, if [00:16:00] not your own company, what do you do to make those margins less than if the reimbursement rates are low, 95% are insurance pay.
What are your options? Yeah. 'cause in a group practice, you have. You make more money by hiring clinicians.
Jessica: Yeah. Because right now we're like 600 visits a month? I think people would think oh, that's so much money but when we had our two dietitians, our leadership dietitians, when we promoted them, we were like, okay, we're gonna show you guys like just our profit loss projections and all of it, and. Even with our business this year, like being on track to bring in a million dollars, the expenses were a million dollars. So it's oh, a thousand dollars profit. And that's with us just starting to pay ourselves. Not a lot. This year, we didn't pay ourselves last year. We are able to use like our. Savings that we had from our previous business. 'cause I know people are like how can you work without paying yourself?
That's how, and then I'm blessed to be able to have a husband who has health benefits. That's also why when Wendy wasn't married at the time, why she had that job was to get the health benefits. So it's like [00:17:00] there's so many. Different angles to it that you have to piece things together
Libby: And personal situations, right?
Because some of us might not be married, some of us, might not. Yeah. There's all kinds of, or be divorced. There's all kinds of things that can affect what your needs are, where you live, cost of living, et cetera. Yep. So what plans do you have to increase the profit margins? Is it that you need a certain amount of a thousand sessions per month or whatever. Yeah, you have to do all that project management. How many clinicians and what level are you paying them? So is that what you're doing
Jessica: to bring up the margin? That's what we have to do. And I know a lot of group practices, like the owners will see patients and that's like their salary.
But for us, I wanted the business to run without us having to, so for us, our goal, once we get to 20 dietitians, which sounds like a lot, but. That's where the numbers are, where it's like we can pay ourselves like a decent salary and, have like people to pay ourselves back for the initial investment.
'cause we did invest a lot of money business initially. 'cause we don't have any like venture funding or anything like that. We just wanted it [00:18:00] to be grown from the ground up just with us organically. I think yeah, by 2027 it'll be looking a little bit better as long as they don't take away telehealth.
Libby: And would you say between you and Wendy, you guys are the two co-founders, do you have very different roles in terms of she's more operational, you're more sales and marketing. Is that kind of how you Yes,
Jessica: that's exactly the roles. Yeah. You nailed it. Yeah. So she's the COO and I'm the CEO basically in our business before we just take everything and split it down the middle.
And in terms of the responsibilities, but we realized that doesn't really make any sense for this business. Again, we did a lot of thinking. It was like, okay, what are your strengths? So she's really good with operations, and I feel like I am really good the sales, the figuring stuff out.
So it's a nice balance and so she more manages like the day to day the dietitians, the scheduling, the clinical manager. She was like meeting with all the dietitians and now she's doing that less and our clinical manager is doing that and the interview and stuff like that.
Libby: So it's so amazing to be able to have, [00:19:00] for the listeners, if you don't have a co-founder, then you gotta do all that work, right? So whether it's solo or group practice, somebody's gotta run the day to day. Somebody's gotta go over the session count, make sure everybody's happy, all of that, which is more operational.
And then you also. Who can't forget about the sales and marketing, otherwise you won't have business. So
Jessica: yeah, it's like you need the clients and it's like whatever I said, 18 to 25 meetings.
That's all meetings including sales. 'cause I meet with anybody, like if it's somebody wants to do a partnership or all the internal meetings, so they're not just sales meetings, but or providers, we track everything too, in terms of like retention and you end up doing a lot of tracking because for us especially, we think about like how much effort it goes into, like getting these new clients and we have now these senior dietitians, leadership dietitians who are helping with these things as well as like a whole admin team.
So every client we get, we have to try to retain them.
Libby: I don't know how this works 'cause I know you're credentialed in a lot of states. Some states have benefits with only three [00:20:00] visits. So is the retention screwed that depending on the plan, retention is like an algorithm where it's, counts differently for three visits per year?
Jessica: Yes it does. But we have figured out with most plans how to get more visits. 'cause there's a lot of, and that's why I say you have to meet with people who are in the insurance game or amy Plano. I know she, does a lot in this space or we buy her cheat sheets and go to her webinars and stuff, but they'll tell you like, okay, if 9 7, 8 0 2 is exhausted for Cigna, for example, that's one that does three, then you might try I think it's 9 9 4 0 4, like different codes.
And also Cigna. You do preventative versus medical. Usually they have three preventative free and then medical kicks in. 'cause all of our patients have a medical diagnosis too. And then they pay the copay, but they still get the benefit.
Libby: Sure. Yeah, those are great tips. As we conclude today's episode, although I could talk to you all day, Jessica, love what you're doing and what you're representing, and it's just such a good episode for dietitians to know what is possible.
If a dietitian listening today wants to build their brand or explore telehealth, [00:21:00] or maybe even go deeper in their telehealth role, what's the first step that you'd recommend them?
Jessica: I would probably do one at Amy Planos webinars, honestly, just to figure out what's going on. And I would also join the group chat. It's on Facebook. It's called like insurance licensure and credentialing for dietitians or something like that. If you just Google insurance. Credentialing dietitians, it'll come up and everyone all day is giving tips on there going off. That was a great resource for us. So we asked questions and also, like I said, meet with people who've been doing it.
Pay them for their time if you can. If you can't, you might just have to watch free stuff or read books. Learn everything you can from there. And then the last thing is do a mastermind of peers. 'cause Wendy does one too. She just started one with other dietitians, like I said.
So we're people in our masterminds have a group practice of maybe eight providers or 10, 12 providers. And so you can learn from each other. And what about [00:22:00] sales? That's a whole nother thing I would say, but the people in your mastermind are gonna help be able to help you with that. I just feel like I've had such a long career of learning so many different things and skills and a lot of experience like talking to people. I also feel for food heaven, 'cause like I love negotiating, I love reading the contracts, meeting with the brand, so I feel like all of that experience helps. But if I had to point to one thing for sales, I probably just start listening to podcasts like this one.
I think podcasts are the best thing for learning and don't underestimate YouTube. Like I learned so much on YouTube. I knew nothing. Then for building our practice, like operations and, how do you label things and workflows and SOPs. I knew nothing and we found it all on YouTube. So
Libby: YouTube's incredible.
Yeah. YouTube, I know you're, I found you on YouTube. I watched you guys on YouTube. Oh my gosh, that's so cool. Resource and definitely [00:23:00] great tips. On a final note today, is there anything you leave the audience with or tell them to do or encourage them, especially related to your business?
Jessica: Yeah, we don't have any like thing directly for dietitians.
However, if you are a dietitian and you have patients I guess, who have diabetes, pre-diabetes, PCOS, any kind of metabolic concern and they're looking for weight inclusive coach and inclusive care, they can sign [email protected] and we will verify their benefits for them and call them, let them know what's going on.
If you have family members. a lot of our patients come from friends and family of other patients or of healthcare providers. So that too. And check out our podcast, diabetes Digital Podcast presented by Food Heaven. Because I do know a lot of dietitians listen also, even though our audiences and dietitians like we always learn something.
That's where I'm learning a lot of like clinical skills too.
Libby: That's great. It's been an absolute pleasure. I appreciate what you and Wendy are doing. Thank you [00:24:00] for taking your time and sharing. Yes, sharing your gifts with our audience.
Jessica: You're so sweet. Thank you so much and have a great rest of your evening.
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