Avoid These 5 HUGE Mistakes When Starting Your Doula Business
In 2023, the birth industry is shifting, and your doula practice needs to shift with it. Are you ready to embrace the change?
If you’ve been wondering what you need to do to serve your doula clients on the next level, then get out a pen and paper, this episode is for you.
Things you’ll learn in this episode:
How to avoid the most common ego trip that some experienced doulas fall into…
Why you need to level up and serve clients beyond the “status quo” doula standards…
What you need to do to serve women beyond the birth room…
… and a whole lot more!
#1: Let go of the idea that everybody needs a doula.
If you believe that everybody needs a doula, that inherently creates a power imbalance that puts the pregnant woman in need. She's lacking. She needs something in order to have a good experience. She needs something outside of herself to even give birth. “Everybody needs a doula” sounds good in theory, and I'm sure I spouted that crap when I first started, but now that I've been in the community for several years now, when I hear people say it, I just know that it’s not true. I didn't have a doula. I didn't need a doula.
I am a doula, but nobody needs me. Nobody needs my help to give birth. And plus, not everybody wants a doula, so why would we tell someone that she needs something when she doesn't even want it? Talk about a freaking ego trip, thinking you know what's best for other people. That sounds super shady, doesn't it? So start thinking about it that way. Nobody needs a doula. And the sooner that you can embody that and see that as a fact, you'll actually be a better doula. And you know what? I bet you'll actually find more clients if you stop saying that everybody needs a doula.
#2: Avoid making your doula packages without any thought of the transformation that the mother is going to go through.
So in most “status quo” doula training programs, they teach you exactly how to package your services. It’s usually three prenatals, plus birth support, plus one postpartum visit for X price. It's very cookie cutter. I want you to forget what your doula training program taught you and ask yourself, what do I want to do? What do I want to do as a doula? What transformation do I want to take people through? Then consider what you need to offer women to actually help them through that transformation.
Newsflash: A lot of times it won’t look anything like the “status quo” birth package that your doula training program taught you. If you're actually putting thought into making your packages and considering the transformation you want your clients to go through, your doula packages will be months and months and months long. You will work with that person on a one-to-one basis, often. You will help guide them through a very specific transformation, either through one-on-one coaching, or maybe giving them access to a prerecorded childbirth education or mindset based course. Whatever you choose, it'll include way more value and depth than just a couple of simple prenatal appointments.
So when you're making your packages, I really want you to avoid ignoring the transformation that you want to help your clients through. And again, this is the future of birth work. The future of doula work is that people have way more options when they're choosing who they want as their doula. If they have to choose between a doula who offers 2-3 prenatals, birth support and one postpartum visit, or a doula who offers 12 months of continuing support with monthly one-on-one coaching calls, access to several prerecorded online courses, and maybe a virtual mothers circle where you can meet the other clients/students, which doula are you going to choose?
If you vibe with both of them and everything else is the same besides that package, you are *probably* going to go for the one who has that transformational-based package. For a lot of people, that transformation looks like releasing or overcoming your fear of birth, letting go of all the anxiety around your upcoming birth, feeling confident to say, "F you" to people are trying to coerce you into making decisions based on what they want, and understanding, the flaws of the maternity care system. All of that can go into the transformation. It doesn't have to be as basic as just talking about interventions you want to avoid. There's so much more behind that. So we need to make our packages with that transformation in mind.
#3: Avoid being a doula who tries to serve everybody.
A lot of new doulas start their businesses and try to just serve everyone. They say, I'm an abortion doula, and a preconception doula, and I'm going to lead fertility classes for teenagers, and I'm going to do fertility awareness method with moms, and I'm also going to attend birth, and I'm going to do postpartum stuff, and also I'm going to teach newborn care, and cloth diapering, and baby wearing, and host mother circles, etc. I'm going to serve everyone. First of all, that sounds like a lot. That was hard to even just say that. I have very few offers in my business, and man, I am tired. I do not have time for a lot of the things that I would love to have time for.
Let’s stop with this idea that doulas need to serve everyone. We're constantly told that everyone needs a doula, which sometimes our brain processes as: If everyone needs a doula, that means I have to serve everyone, right? Sometimes it's just so exciting to start a new business that you get all these different ideas but you don't yet have the strategy to understand which ideas are useful for your clients or even worth the time investment. So that discernment can be hard as a new doula. I totally understand that, but we still do not need to be serving everyone.
What should it look like instead? This is something I walk my students through inside Birthworker Academy, my doula training program. It's a step-by-step process to get very clear on who is your exact perfect client. Ask yourself, if you could work with anybody in the world, who would you work with? If you could work with your perfect client, what would that person look like? What would that relationship look like? What would the services you offer them look like?
Then guess what… Go do that instead. Change your messaging and marketing to speak to that specific person, and you will find them and they will find you. You can literally curate your dream business where you are only serving the perfect people. When it comes down to it, if you're trying to serve everyone, then it's not a really convincing argument for people to hire you.
I just found out I'm pregnant, I don't know, yesterday or something. So me, Kyleigh Banks, pregnant, when I'm looking for support for me, do I want to go to the doula who serves everyone? F no. There's nothing I want less. That sounds horrible. I don't want to go to the doula who supports hundreds of hospital births per year. No, I'm planning a free birth in Costa Rica. I want to hire the doula who works with people who free birth in Costa Rica. And if that person exists, please reach out to me, because that would be cool as hell. If that person doesn't exist, I don't blame them because that is a really small niche. But I'm just saying if that person existed, that would be my perfect doula.
I don't want to hire the person who's good at everything, I want to hire the person who's very, very specific to the kind of support I want. And that's what a lot of moms are like. Let's say you have a super rare heart condition, are you just going to go to the general practitioner at the little local clinic down the road? Or are you going to search for the person who knows all about your one very specific rare condition? Aren’t you going to do everything to go find them because you know that they can actually help you? Duh, it is a no-brainer. Like why even ask that question? It is very obvious. So that's what I want you to do. I want every single person listening to this to get extremely freaking clear about who it is you want to serve and how you want to serve them, and then build your business around that. Build all of your packages, your messaging, your website, your Instagram, your social, all around that, and speak directly to that one person.
#4: Avoid forgetting to work on yourself.
I see so many doulas, especially new doulas, trying to learn more and take more certification programs about birth, postpartum, sleep, or breastfeeding, or whatever. But I very rarely, potentially never, see them actually investing in themselves and working on themselves. Things like courses, coaching, or therapy to deal with their own triggers and release some of the baggage that they're carrying. To be able to show up to a room with a woman giving birth and not project your crap onto her. Because that's really hard. That's not something that you can just do without a conscious effort to actually make that happen.
It's like exercise. You have to keep working on it. You have to keep working on your self-awareness, and your ability to sit with your triggers and not be reactive, and your ability to have conversations with people who disagree with you, but still uphold respect for them. All of that comes really hard for most people.
I'm a millennial, and I feel like I was raised with “me-me-me, my feelings matter more than anyone else's, and how dare you disrespect me, and I'm really important, and I need a trophy.” You probably know exactly what I'm talking about. So for us millenials, and honestly even for the younger generations, we really, really need to do some work here. Because if we're not careful and if we're just surrounding ourselves with the average group of our friends, there are going to be some people who are extremely triggered, extremely reactive, and we're going to soak up a lot of that by spending time with them.
#5: Stop thinking that the only way you can serve women is if you're actually in the room when they give birth.
If most doula training programs said, “Hey, by the way, you don't have to actually attend someone's birth to impact their lives,” instead of “Everybody needs a doula, there should be a doula at every single person's birth,” there would be a massive revolution in the way that we support women through the perinatal period. Remember, not everyone even wants a doula at their birth.
I see new doulas doing this all over the place, not a lot of the ones that come to me, because I think they already understand what I'm about to tell you. I think that's why they choose my programs and my offers, I just put so much emphasis on how a doulas and birthworkers can change a woman's life through every single stage in the tiniest little ways. You don't have to be at someone's birth to change their life.
It could look like a conversation in the DMs on social media that just blows her world open and changes her life. Just a free conversation, just strangers chatting in the DMs. It could look like a paid workshop online. Maybe it's coaching. Maybe you want to make an eBook. Maybe people come to you all the time with questions, but they say, “I don't actually want a doula. I have all these friends and family and I feel good, but I still want help releasing my birth fears.” If people come to you like that, awesome, make a resource for them. You don't have to say, “Oh, I understand that you really want help integrating your birth fears, but I only offer in-person support, so unless I can actually be in the room when you push a baby out, I'm not able to help you.” Doesn't that sound really ridiculous? Yes.
How about instead, anybody in the world could come to you and you might have an offer for them. What happened in my business and where my world completely changed, not just financially, but in terms of impact too, is where I was growing this audience online and people would come to me asking questions, and I kept saying, “No, I'm in Florida. I only do in person birth support in Florida. So sorry, I can't help you.” I stopped doing that and I started thinking to myself, “Hey, I actually don't have to attend their birth to impact their lives. So why don't I actually create some offers that are for people who either don't want a doula or already have a doula, but still love the way I educate they want to come learn from me. And for the last two years now, those people have come to me and I have offers for them. I no longer turn them away and say, “I only do in-person support.” That's so ridiculous.
And especially me. I didn't want a doula. I didn't have a doula. I took all the courses, I read all the books, I did all the audio affirmations and meditations. I had a great experience. And so that's also my bias, is that people can have amazing births without a doula, but also that doesn't mean that they have to do it completely on their own.
I want you to start thinking, what are the infinite ways that you could actually impact someone's life to help them have an empowered, amazing, autonomous birth experience without you actually being in the room when they give birth to the baby? There are so many options. A lot of times when I tell doulas this, they would come to me and say, “I have this dream of educating women and teaching women beyond supporting them in person.” Or “I have a dream where all my in-person clients get access to this comprehensive resource with all these pre-recorded videos, or eBooks, or audio meditations.” But what happens is a lot of women look at that and they feel like they're standing at the bottom of Mount Everest looking up, and they're like, oh, no, I do not have time to put together a curriculum. How the hell am I supposed to script out videos, and film videos, and make slide decks, and then promote this thing, and make sales pages? And a lot of people look at that and just say, that is not what I want to sign up for. The process is too much.
They dream so hard about having this semi-passive type of online program, but when they look at the steps that it takes to get there, they’re paralyzed and just don't move forward. Or they are like I was, where they take notes and take notes, fill all these notebooks, but then nothing actually happens because you're just running in circles trying to learn everything. You're just so excited, but you don't know the framework to put it into practice and actually make something. So when realized my students were saying that over and over and over, I knew that the next thing I had to do was create a childbirth educator program. Not a childbirth educator program to qualify people to be childbirth educators, but really a program that someone can come into with no prior experience setting up a curriculum.
Here's where our childbirth educator program is different: We are including not only the foundational education that you need to learn in order to be a childbirth educator, and not only are we including how to run your childbirth educator business, (how to choose what what deliverables you want to offer, how to name your courses, price everything, and build your funnel) but you're actually getting our entire proven childbirth education curriculum that you can take, you can put your logo right on it, sell like it's yours, and teach it like it's yours.
You will be able to print out word-for-word scripts, slides on Canva, and PDF handouts too for your clients. You can literally print those scripts off and host a workshop the following weekend. You can read our scripts word-for-word if you want to. Our childbirth education is 10 modules long, and you don't have to teach it in any particular order. You can pick and choose. You can take what you want, you can leave what you don't like. You can add your spice to it.
That’s what I would really love to see, is you taking our curriculum, see where it falls short for your liking, and add some of your spice to it. The curriculum is rooted in autonomy and mindset, so it covers everything from prenatals, to fear, to mindset, to building your autonomy, to understanding your options, writing your birth plan, figuring out your support team, postpartum, nutrition, literally all of it. But here's the thing, the curriculum's rooted in autonomy and mindset. Let's just say you're a VBAC coach. If you come in, you could easily spend one week, add a VBAC twist to the entire curriculum, put your logo on it, and teach it as your own.
That opportunity does not exist anywhere else in the childbirth education space right now– an entire program with a curriculum and a comprehensive business education. So once you make your offer, you will actually know how to sell it. How to actually earn money very quickly, as fast as possible, I'm willing to say, because I'm giving you step-by-step, what to do to actually get this into your client's hands.
I'm super excited about it, if you can’t tell. Our childbirth education program is going to be, I think, the thing that actually impacts the most lives worldwide. I have taught and sold it as my own childbirth education curriculum for the past two years. My impact is going from impacting a thousand lives per year to now potentially impacting hundreds of thousands of lives in 2023. So to say I'm excited is the biggest understatement of the year.
Our program is going to open for pre-sale on February 6th for five days only. It's going to be 50% off. Then after that pre-sale, I'm going to get busy putting the final touches on the program, and it is going to be available for you guys in its entirety in April. So if you already know that you want to offer some form of childbirth education this year or in the next five years, I'm going to help you and give you the curriculum to make an eBook, workshop, group coaching program, a prerecorded course or a mini-course. It can look so many different ways.
So put February 6th on your calendar, that's when we are starting. If your dream is to make any sort of online or virtual offering in the next couple of years, you need to jump on this childbirth educator training program, and especially on February 6th, when it is literally half price.
Everything that you're getting took me over 800 hours to put together. And that is not an exaggeration. That is probably an underestimate, if I'm completely honest, especially now that my whole team is working on perfecting everything and getting all of these PDFs and slides and scripts ready for you. So not only is it 800 hours of my work that went into this, but it's also probably hundreds of my team's hours going into this too.
I cannot wait to show you what's inside. And if you want to actually get a sneak peek of all of the different lessons and modules that are going to be in the Childbirth Educator program, just go to birthworker.com/waitlist. And if you're reading months from now, this is not going to be there anymore because the program is going to be live and you can just go get it.
If you are not a member in any of our programs yet, I think you are going to have your mind just absolutely blown, and I have a feeling that you'll be staying in our communities for a while after you join this program.
thank you for listening
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Meet your host, Kyleigh Banks, a side-gig doula turned CEO of a multi-six-figure birth-focused business. Her passion? Teaching birth nerds, like you, how to build an incredibly successful doula business that allows you to quit your day job, stay home with your kids, and most importantly, make a lasting impact on the world.