Sarah Almond Bushell is an award-winning Registered Dietitian, ex NHS Consultant child nutritionist of 22 years and founder of The Children’s Nutritionist who is working to reduce the stress around mealtimes for parents of babies and toddlers and is passionate about helping to cut the ties of generational eating habits, fuelled by misinformation and desperation tactics.

What is your business, when did you launch it and what does it offer?

The Children’s Nutritionist  is an online business offering advice to parents on food, feeding and parenting so that parents get the correct advice so they can raise happy healthy eaters. Launched in May 2017 as a blog, Sarah then went on to work with baby food companies as a nutrition consultant before launching her services to parents in Oct 2018.

What did you do before coming up with your business idea and how was it making the transition?

I was an NHS dietitian, working in medical paediatric nutrition, I’d been there for 22 years, the last 5 of which, I was a consultant dietitian, the top position there is in the NHS for a dietitian.

From the very start of my career, I had a side business, as many of the doctors I worked with wanted me to see their private patients, but after having my own children and juggling a high profile, high-pressure full-time job with childcare, I realised that it didn’t afford me the flexibility I needed to be the parent I wanted to be.

It just didn’t really feel right to not be there for them.

The pivotal moment for me came when one dark autumnal afternoon, I had a phone call from my 9 year old daughter to say, “Don’t worry, mummy, we’re fine, our lift hasn’t arrived and so we’re going to walk home.” – My kids go to school in a different town and get off a train at a tiny station in the middle of nowhere, and it’s not an easy walk. No footpaths, no street lighting and it’s a 60mph country road…. and I was five miles away at the hospital with a full clinic full of patients.

I felt dreadful, like a failure, the mum-guilt was overwhelming and so I fled. I ran out of the clinic, shouting my apologies to the families sitting in the waiting room waiting to see me, and I drove like a bat-out-of-hell, across the countryside to go and pick them up safely.

That was the moment when I knew I needed to make a change.

How did you get started setting up your own business?

So what did I do? I asked Google… I was hoping to find a course or a mentor an NHS dietitian who had gone before me, who could guide me on what I needed to do to create a successful ‘working from home’ nutrition business.  What I found was there was nobody in the UK who did this. So I found someone in the USA (they’re a little more business savvy than us in the UK) and I did a ton of courses, some with dietitians some with high profile digital marketing guru’s like Amy Porterfield, Pat Flynn, Marie Forleo, Carrie Green, Stu McLaren, Brandon Lucero and set about implementing what I learned.

A lot of what I implemented didn’t work, after-all you can get access to a dietitian free of charge on the NHS if you are willing to wait long enough, and I was competing against all kinds of non qualified people, some with celebrity status giving advice about nutrition.

I spent a lot of time experimenting in my business, trying new things and finding out what actually sold.

What has worked well about your business?

I love to write and getting my advice out to as many people as possible was important to me, so I created a free blog which has become really popular getting around 45,000 page views per month. I also share a lot on social media.

I could offer 1:1 consultations straight off the bat and people booked them because it meant jumping the waiting list.

As well as this I worked as an advisor to Annabel Karmel so was very up to date on baby nutrition, I launched my first online workshop on baby weaning in 2018.

Those mums came back to be a year or so later and asked if I could help with their toddlers and their fussy eating, so I created and launched the Happy Healthy Eaters Club, a membership to help support parents not only food choices but how to parent around food so that their children grow up to have healthy relationships with food.

Essentially I listened to what my audience wanted and created free and paid content to help them.

How do you fit work in with the family?

For the first three years, I worked just two to four hours a day around my NHS commitments. I used to get up at 5am so I could get a couple of hours in before the children needed me.

When lockdown hit I found I had more time, no school runs, no commuting to work, so I invested in a business coach to provide direction and focus.

I quit the NHS in May and work full time in my business, well I say full time…I do 9.30-3.30pm so that I can still do the school runs and hang out with my children when they get home.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Follow your passions, don’t do a job just because it’s a guaranteed paycheck. What I realise now is that I suffered mental burnout from working in the NHS for so long. Although my career progressed (I am very driven and ambitious), I never felt fulfilled and I was insanely frustrated with all the red tape, the guidelines around who I could and couldn’t help and the lack of flexibility for working mums. I actually left feeling full of resentment, which I now know was frustration and anger from the stifling lack of creativity and freedom.

What impact do you want to make?

I want to help as many families as possible, something I couldn’t do in the NHS as I could only see children with medical conditions.

Raising happy healthy eaters is so much more than just the food. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, much from well-meaning people but actually some of the advice parents get does more harm than good and can affect children’s self esteem, happiness and confidence well into their teen and adult years. In the NHS my job was often to fix this.

My mission is to change generational eating habits that fuel these negative consequences and yet many parents don’t even realise they are passing on.

Parents are their children’s biggest role models, their point of reference when it comes to learning eating habits.  Their actions speak louder than words and children notice these and just absorb them.

Find out more:

• www.childrensnutrition.co.uk
• Instagram @thechildrensnutritionist
• Facebook Group @thechildrensnutritionistscommunity