If you’re a solo practitioner, you know the feeling.

You’re booked out weeks in advance. You’re seeing client after client, handling admin work late into the evening, and turning away new people because your calendar simply has no more room.

You want to help more people and grow your income, but you’re already at capacity. Working more hours isn’t really an option anymore.

That’s the exact turning point where scaling to a group practice starts to look less like an option and more like the only way forward. But making that leap brings a whole new set of questions. 

How do you find the right hires without taking on massive risk? 

How do you keep referrals coming in for an entire team, not just you? 

And how do you do all of this without working yourself into the ground?

I recently sat down with Julia Werth, founder of Werth Your While Nutrition, to talk through exactly that. 

Julia has grown her practice from launching it with a single podcast in 2019 to leading a team of four dietitians (soon to be five), all while raising four kids and homeschooling along the way.

Her story is full of practical, real-world lessons on group practice marketing, referral networks, hiring, and the mindset shifts that come with stepping into a CEO role. 

Let’s get into it!

Meet Julia Werth: The Dietitian Behind Werth Your While Nutrition

Julia started her career working with kids and teens in boarding schools, helping students navigate everything from allergies to eating disorders.

She loved the work but wanted more, so she started building a private practice on the side. And she started it in an unusual way: not by seeing patients first, but by launching a podcast called Life with ED.

Her very first episode was her own recovery story. 

Julia has been open from the start about her personal history with disordered eating, and she made the choice early on to put that story right on her website.

That decision has paid off again and again.

“I get dozens and dozens of parents who call and they’re like, I saw your story. That’s exactly where my daughter is. I need her to see you,” Julia shared. 

Being open about her own journey builds trust before a family ever steps into a session with her.

Today, Werth Your While Nutrition is a group practice in Connecticut focused on helping whole families recover from disordered eating, along with GI conditions and other nutrition concerns. 

But it didn’t start that way. It grew, one relationship at a time.

Referral Relationships Are Built, Not Stumbled Into

One of the biggest takeaways from Julia’s story is this: business referrals don’t just happen, you have to build them intentionally. 

This is really the heart of good group practice marketing: showing up consistently for the people who send you clients, not just the clients themselves.

Find an underserved niche.
Julia focused on children, teens, and young adults, a population many dietitians overlook in favor of adult clients. In her state, very few other practitioners were credentialed or willing to see patients under 16, which made her an easy, obvious referral for local providers.

Get credentialed with insurance.
Julia made a strategic decision early on to get credentialed with insurance companies, starting with two and eventually expanding to nearly every major provider in her state. For families managing something like a long-term eating disorder, weekly out-of-pocket sessions add up fast, so accepting insurance removed a major barrier for both clients and the providers referring them.

Network with intent.
For Julia, her podcast became the tool that made real relationships possible. Interviewing therapists, pediatricians, and other providers gave her a natural reason to build trust with people, long before she needed them to send her clients.

“When you spend an hour talking with someone on a podcast, they feel like they know you,” Julia explained. That kind of familiarity is very different from a cold email or a DM. It’s the difference between a stranger’s name in an inbox and someone a provider actually feels comfortable recommending.

She also offered a piece of advice that’s easy to overlook: when you’re marketing to referral sources rather than clients directly, you have to think about their problem, not just yours.

“You need to figure out what the problem is that these referring physicians have, and then what can you be saying to them to help them solve that problem,” Julia said. A physician deciding whether to refer a patient to a dietitian is thinking about outcomes for their patient, not about filling your calendar. Speaking to that concern, rather than just asking for referrals, is what actually moves the needle.

And once referrals started coming in, Julia made sure they kept coming. 

Her rule: Never tell an insurance company or a referral source that you’re full.

“If you say to insurance you’re full, that’s a game changer. So I have just made it a policy that I never say I’m full. I can always hire more,” she said. 

Once a referral source hears that a practice is full, they stop sending people, and they may not start again even after space opens back up.

The Hiring Mindset Shift That Made Scaling Possible

Growing a referral network is one part of the puzzle. Turning that demand into an actual team is another.

For Julia, that turning point arrived in a very specific way. 

Right before the pandemic, she found out she was expecting her first child. She handed her existing clients off to other private practice owners, but kept her website’s intro call scheduling open the entire time she was out. 

During her seven-week leave, she was booking calls between feedings, and by the time she returned, she had a full caseload of 24 clients waiting for her, on top of the referrals still pouring in from nearly two years of relationship-building.

“I thought, I can’t do this. I can’t see all of these people,” Julia said. That moment of being completely overwhelmed is what pushed her to bring on her very first dietitian, someone she knew from the field who was looking to leave a treatment center job.

Julia’s approach to hiring since then has stayed refreshingly simple. Every single dietitian she brings on starts part time, at just eight hours a week.

“I highly, highly recommend anyone who wants to hire someone bring them on eight hours a week. Anyone can work eight hours in the evening and have a full time other job,” she explained. That low-commitment starting point gives both Julia and the new hire a real chance to see if the fit works, without either party overcommitting too soon.

From there, it’s genuinely up to each person. Some dietitians on her team have grown into full-time roles over time. Others have stayed at that original eight hours a week for years, simply because it fits their life. 

One team member has kept her evening-only schedule since 2022, alongside a separate full-time job, purely because she enjoys that slice of client work. Both paths are treated as a win.

It’s also a legal safeguard. Julia was careful to point out that in her state, ongoing clinical work like seeing patients weekly doesn’t qualify someone as an independent contractor. It requires a W2 employee relationship, even at just a few hours a week. It’s a detail many growing practices overlook, and one worth checking on with an employment attorney in your own state before you bring on help.

Hiring also comes with an emotional shift that Julia was honest about. Not every hire works out, and it can take a long time to find the right fit. For one role, she interviewed roughly 20 people before finding the right person.

“I would spend so much time making sure that it is the right hire before you commit, because it’s hard to fire someone,” she said. Rather than treating early mismatches as failures, Julia treats the search itself as part of the process.

There’s also a deeper mindset shift many solo practitioners have to work through: letting go of the belief that you have to be the one doing everything.

For Julia, that meant learning to talk about her team the same way she’d talk about herself, rather than positioning herself as the one true expert clients had to wait for.

“I think if you really do a great job of showcasing how great your other practitioners are in the business, then that can go a long way of making people feel like, okay, I want to work with that person,” Julia said. 

Framed the right way, being matched with another team member feels like a win for the client, not a consolation prize. And these days, Julia said with a laugh, she often hopes new callers choose someone else on her team since her own schedule is the most full.

Lean Into What You’re Good At (Even If It’s Not What Everyone Else Is Doing)

A lot of practice-growth advice pushes practitioners toward the same playbook: build a course, post daily on social media, chase passive income.

Julia tried some of that early on and found it just wasn’t her strength.

“I am really great at talking to people. I’m really good at networking. I’m good at seeing clients,” she said. “I tried so hard to be like, everyone’s doing this, let me try to go the digital route, and it just never was super successful for me.”

Instead, she doubled down on what actually worked for her: referrals, insurance credentialing, and relationship building. She doesn’t run a regular content calendar or maintain an active social media presence, and she’s made peace with that.

This same philosophy shows up in how Julia thinks about growth overall. Business isn’t required to look like constant, visible hustle.

“There are so many businesses out there that are sustaining. They’re either growing or just sustaining, and they’re not posting all sorts of things on social media. They’re just quietly doing their jobs,” she said. 

For a practitioner adding a fourth baby to the mix while running a growing group practice, that permission to grow steadily, rather than chase every trend, has made all the difference.

Why Her Website Became Part of the Team

For years, Julia managed her own website, piecing it together herself. It looked fine, but something wasn’t working.

“I felt like somehow people didn’t know where the intro call button was,” she said. Visitors would land on her site and simply never book. Some would track down her phone number instead, which only created more back and forth for Julia to manage.

Eventually, she invested in a professional overhaul of her website with Whitney Bateson Digital Strategy. We built a site that combined strategy with design so that as her team grew, her site could grow right along with it.

A few things made the biggest difference:

A clear, unmistakable way to book.
A prominent call to action for scheduling an intro call, front and center, so visitors never have to go looking for a phone number instead.

Transparent care details.
Which insurance providers she accepts, that the practice is fully virtual, and which age groups and conditions the team treats, all visible right on the homepage.

A dedicated bio for every practitioner.
Prospective clients can read through and get a feel for who might be the best fit before ever picking up the phone, which takes a huge amount of pressure off that first call.

“Sometimes I’m like, who should I put them with, and if they have done the reading and figured it out themselves, that’s so much better,” Julia said.

Testimonials spread across the whole team, not just the founder.
One of the biggest fears solo owners have about hiring is that clients will refuse to see anyone but them. Julia gets ahead of that by featuring testimonials for her other dietitians prominently, since people tend to assume a referral to Julia herself is already trustworthy.

Just as importantly, her site is built so that she and her team can update it themselves as the practice keeps evolving. New practitioners get added. Services and descriptions get refreshed. Nothing about the site is frozen in time from when Julia was still working solo.

That’s the real value of a website that’s built to scale with a group practice. It isn’t just a nicer version of a solo practitioner’s homepage. It’s structured from the ground up to introduce multiple providers, route the right client to the right person, and keep working as the team keeps growing.

Scaling Doesn’t Mean Sacrificing Your Life

Perhaps the most encouraging part of Julia’s story is how she’s approached growth alongside a busy, full family life.

That maternity leave surge wasn’t a one-time thing. Julia has built her entire business around the rhythm of a growing family, and she’s candid that a new baby has coincided with nearly every major hire she’s made.

Now, with three kids and a fourth on the way, she’s structured her business so the CEO-level work like hiring and planning happens during naps, bedtimes, or evenings, while the hands-on client work she loves stays protected and focused.

“It’s easier for me to do the CEO type work at nap time or bedtime at night than it is to see clients, because that has to be really blocked off,” she said.

She’s also candid that growth wasn’t instant. It took an entire year after setting up her practice email before she got her very first inquiry.

“It’s not going to happen overnight,” she said. “The version of success we see out there does not show the 20 failed attempts or the painful things that didn’t work out.”

That patience, paired with a clear system for referrals and hiring, is what allowed Julia to build something sustainable rather than something that burned her out.

Ready to Build a Website That Can Grow With You?

Julia’s path from a single podcast to a team of five wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t a straight line. 

It took years of relationship building, a pandemic and pregnancies to push her forward, and a lot of patience, and somewhere along the way, her website had to grow up too, from a solo practitioner’s site into one built to introduce a whole team, route the right client to the right person, and make booking effortless. 

If your own website still looks and functions like it’s just you, even though your practice has already grown past that, you don’t have to figure out that upgrade on your own – my team and I are here to help.

Reach out and let’s talk about upgrading your website so it’s ready for the team you have now, or the one you’re about to build. 

As Julia put it best, you don’t need it to be perfect. You just need to want it enough to take the next step!