How to Build Multiple Streams of Income with Katie Dodd – The Nourished CEO Episode 67

What happens when you realize the career you trained for, spent years and real money on, was only ever showing you one narrow path out of a hundred?

This week I’m talking with Katie Dodd, a registered dietitian who stumbled into entrepreneurship by sitting next to the right person on a plane. 

That one conversation led to a contract, a contract led to freelance work, and freelance work eventually became three brands and a stack of income streams that pay her whether she’s working or not. 

We get into what a side hustle actually is, why it doesn’t have to be a bridge out of your job, and the difference between active and passive income that most people misunderstand.

Katie also walks through how she built all of it one thing at a time, refusing to start the next brand until the first one hit a real revenue goal. 

She’s honest about the part that doesn’t sell well: it took eighteen months of building before the money got good, with about $67 in the first six months. 

If you’ve ever felt boxed in by your credentials, or you’re holding an idea you keep deciding is too out there, this conversation will widen what feels possible.

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Most of us learn how to build multiple streams of income the hard way, if we learn it at all. The training we get points us down a single path, and the idea that one set of credentials could support several different businesses rarely comes up. 

Katie Dodd is a registered dietitian who found that out by accident, and what she built from that accident is worth studying.

She’d been a dietitian since 2008, working in home care at the VA, a job she loved. 

Then kids arrived, the bills got bigger, and the question that starts a lot of these stories showed up: How do I make more money?

The answer found her on a plane.

 

How One Plane Ride Changed Everything

Katie was flying home from a nutrition conference when she sat next to a dietitian who happened to live near her, and who happened to have built and sold a continuing education company. 

Katie did what she does, which is ask questions and offer to help, and a week later that connection turned into a contract to update a continuing education article.

The detail she remembers most is the contract itself, the part with terms of payment. She’d volunteered in her field for so long that the idea of being paid for her expertise outside her job caught her completely off guard. That was the crack in the door. 

From there, the question shifted from “how do I make more money” to “who else could pay me.”

 

What Counts as a Side Hustle

It’s worth being clear about what Katie means by a side hustle, because the word gets used loosely. To her, it’s simply something done outside of traditional employment, and the purpose is yours to define.

For some people, it’s a passion project that has nothing to do with why they got into their field. Others are straightforwardly focused on making more money, which she’s quick to say there’s nothing wrong with. Then there are those using it as a deliberate bridge out of a job they intend to leave.

And for plenty of people it’s none of those, just a thing they do on the side with no ambition to go full-time, because not everyone is built for the ups and downs of entrepreneurship.

The freedom in that definition matters. A side hustle doesn’t have to justify itself by becoming your whole income. It can just be what you want it to be.

 

How to Build Multiple Streams of Income Without Burning Out

The line that lit Katie up came from a conference: the people with the most streams of income tend to make the most money. She thinks about it like a lake. If a single stream feeds it and that stream dries up, the lake empties. Several streams, and the lake holds even when one runs low.

That’s the security argument, and it’s the heart of how to build multiple streams of income that can actually weather a bad month. 

Katie’s lake is fed by coaching, a blog earning ad revenue, courses, e-books, digital products, live and on-demand webinars, brand work, and affiliate income. Some of it is active, some of it passive, and the mix is the point.

 

Active Versus Passive Income

This is the distinction people get wrong most often. Active income is trading time for money, the hourly-pay-for-hourly-work model. Passive income is creating something once, building the systems that drive people to it, and then earning from it without showing up every day.

Katie is careful not to oversell the word passive. It isn’t free money. It takes real work and intention to build both the asset and the traffic behind it. 

What it gives you, once it’s built, is income that isn’t chained to your calendar. She talks about checking her phone, seeing a sale for a course she recorded in 2021, and knowing it served someone without her lifting a finger that day.

 

Why She Built One Thing at a Time

Katie is a self-described big goal setter with a one, two, five, and ten-year plan she updates every year. She also knows her own tendency to chase everything at once, so she built a rule around it. 

When a new idea strikes, she gets it out of her head and onto paper, which frees her to stay focused on the thing in front of her.

She started with laser focus on a single brand, The Geriatric Dietitian. She wanted to start her food blog almost immediately, but she made herself wait until the first blog hit a specific ad-revenue goal before opening the second brand. 

One thing at a time, each new stream earning its place before the next one began.

Want help deciding which income stream to build first? Explore coaching programs built for who you are.

 

Build the Traffic Before the Products

The sequence Katie insists on is traffic first, products second. You can make something excellent, but if nobody sees it, the launch flops and you walk away feeling like a failure when the real problem was simply that no one was there to buy.

Blogging solved that for her. She learned search engine optimization and built multiple traffic streams into her site through Google, Pinterest, and YouTube. Most visitors read and leave, and that’s fine. A portion stay, join the email list, and find the products threaded through her articles. 

Once the traffic existed, the products she built were mostly hands-off: someone clicks a link, enters their card, and receives the thing automatically. She’s hired staff over the years and now barely touches the original blog, and it still earns.

 

Letting Go of Who You Thought You Had to Be

An underlying thread in this conversation, and maybe the most useful one, is about identity. 

Katie spent years assuming that being a dietitian meant working with patients one-on-one, because that’s the path she was shown. Admitting she didn’t want that work felt almost like a betrayal of her own credential.

She makes a point worth sitting with. We pick our careers at eighteen, nineteen, twenty, before our brains are fully developed, then spend money and years earning the credential. When we land in the field and realize parts of it don’t fit, the sunk cost makes us feel stuck.

What freed her was discovering she could keep the parts of nutrition she loved and build everything else around the parts of herself that had nothing to do with patient care.

 

How Long It Actually Takes to Make Money

Here’s the number most marketing won’t tell you. Katie made about $67 in her first six months, roughly $700 in the next six, and then it climbed into the thousands. Around eighteen months in, the blog was making good money.

She’s honest that 18 months is a long time to invest in work that isn’t paying yet. She bridged it with what she calls now money and later money, taking contract gigs to earn in the present while building the brand that would earn later. 

The mindset wobbled in the meantime. She doubted it would work even while watching other people prove it could. The thing that carried her through was being in the right rooms with people who believed in her when she didn’t.

 

Final Thoughts

There’s a saying Katie comes back to. If you get started, it’s possible. If you keep going and don’t give up, it’s probable.

That’s the honest version of how to build multiple streams of income, and it’s a useful corrective to a coaching world that keeps promising 6 figures in 6 months. The work compounds the way a retirement account does. 

Not much at the start, then more than you’d expect once it’s had time, except you don’t have to wait until you retire to use it.

Pick one thing. Build the traffic before the product. Let each stream earn its place before you add the next. 

And give it longer than the internet says it should take, because the slow stretch is where the foundation gets built.

Ready to build a business that fits how you’re actually wired to lead?

Take the “What’s Your CEO Type?” Quiz to identify your natural leadership style so you can build income streams that actually fit you.

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