Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in health and wellness but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Nancy Lum, owner of The GI and Bariatric Nutrition Center, located in Frederick, MD, USA.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
The GI and Bariatric Nutrition Center focuses on clients with various gastrointestinal diagnoses and specializes in bariatric surgery nutrition services. Our passion is to educate, empower, and guide clients into healthy lifestyle changes for long-term success with weight loss surgery. Our company works with each client and addresses all areas that lead to obesity from food choices, habits, culture, lack of sleep, dehydration, stress, environmental, family, and emotional aspects. We provide extensive tools and programs to help clients achieve their goals. Knowledge is power. Our belief is that life hurdles will happen over time which is why lifetime services and ongoing support need to be available to these populations.
Tell us about yourself
I started out working at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, MD as an inpatient Dietitian and worked through all the various areas until I was able to go into the gastrointestinal (GI) floor. I was moved into developing the bariatric nutrition program there as it was part of the GI floor. I immediately loved working with these patients as I was able to get to know my clients and work with them over many years. Being a bariatric Dietitian gave me the best of all areas in dietetic work from clinical, sports nutrition, counseling, cooking, and food education all in one career. Being able to be a part of these enormous changes in a person's life is very humbling, amazing, and extremely rewarding. I wake up every day motivated to be part of their change. I had a dream to have a private practice in the field to be able to create more extensive programs for clients.
I knew I would need surgeon referrals to be able to support it. Through some connections that I had at Sinai, I was told a hospital was looking for a private practice Dietitian to replace the one that was retiring. I was invited into the St Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, MD. I started there as The GI and Bariatric Nutrition Center on June 10th, 2010, and never looked back. The company started out with me, myself and I. I saw one person at a time and taught many live classes. I quickly found out how impossible it was to run a business without support staff and extensive technology with the volume of patients we saw. The first two years were extremely tough as we grew into where we are today. I lived at my job, but today as I look back and it was all worth it. People ask me all the time how did you do it? I commonly tell them if I knew then what I know now, I would have never had the guts to try. I am so glad I jumped off the cliff when I did and learned as I went along, as it has been the most rewarding experience of my life. Anything worth having is very hard work and will challenge and stretch you in ways you never thought possible.
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
There were so many accomplishments and challenges we overcame along the way and trying to pick one is difficult. If I had to pick my most significant accomplishment, it would be working with the many thousands of patients who we have been blessed to be a part of their medical process and help change their lives and health outcomes for the better. Watching clients increase their mobility, travel, get married, and have children they thought they never would lose the health conditions and medications that held them back makes me so grateful to be a Dietitian in this field.
What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?
There are enormous responsibilities that fall on the business owner. In small businesses, owners feel responsible for the people who work for them; we have high financial responsibilities to the state and to the daily running of the company. There are lots of rules and changes that occur on an ongoing basis. We have to be on top of it all. The weight of it can be great, but I wouldn't change it for the world. This business has greatly blessed me and helped mold me into the person I am today.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
I would recommend doing the research for your business. Know your target audience and the needs of the community you serve. Make sure you have to start up money for the company to prevent having to take on loans. Hire loyal, trusted people to surround you in the process that supports and projects your company values.
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://nutrition5.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GIBNC/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/GIBNC5/playlists
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GIBNC
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancy-lum-66234829/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.ph/gibnc/_created/
If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solopreneur that you'd like to share, then email community@subkit.com; we'd love to feature your journey on these pages.
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