Grow One Business Offering At A Time!
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Transcript
Welcome to doula tips and tips. This podcast is a place where we answer one question about doula work, both to support you and to help you support your clients. I'm Kaylee Harrod. I've been supporting families in this perinatal space since my oldest was born, 12, nearly 13 years ago.
I am a birth and postpartum doula childbirth educator, La Leche League leader, and a doula coach. I love guiding and supporting doulas as they work out their doula business. It is a tremendous joy to be trusted in this way.
Thank you for joining us on this journey. Have you ever been to a restaurant and had someone offer you six plates at once? Like you walk in and they're like, would you like this or this or this or this or this?
And you're like, I am officially overwhelmed. That is what we sometimes do in our businesses. Welcome back to doula tips and tips. I am Kaylee Harrod, your doula coach and host of this beautiful podcast.
And I want to talk to you a little bit about growing one piece of your business at a time. Now, always, like you know, because you've been here, I have caveats to this, right? So grow one piece at a time with an asterisk.
And that asterisk says, obviously, you can offer more than one service at once. What I don't mean is only offer one service at a time ever, right? You don't need to compartmentalize. So you don't like at this point in my business, I have passive childbirth classes.
So like self paced childbirth classes, I have self paced postpartum classes, I have in person birth support, I have birth planning support. So like birth support for like writing a birth plan and things like that, but not attending the birth.
I have daytime postpartum support, I have overnight postpartum support done by my beautiful, wonderful team members. And I teach in person classes contracted through the breastfeeding center. So those are all parts of my doula business, right?
Where I'm where I'm like, kind of towards the families towards the pregnant folks. So I'm not saying that I should only do births for six months or only do postpartum care for six months or only do in person childbirth classes for six months.
That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is when there is a focus on growth, focus on one piece. Because if you are trying to grow, there is an experimentation with that that is mentally exhausting.
This kind of ties into our last episode where we're talking about rest and the need for rest. The reality is that that there are endless strategies you could try for marketing and growth, right? And as doulas, we are often not marketers or business strategists.
And so therefore, it takes us a little bit extra work, I would say, to do the work of figuring out how to market and grow your stuff. So when you're thinking about marketing and growing, I want you to think about what you need or want to grow the most.
So I'm going to give an example for my actual life. So the springtime of 2024, when I'm recording this, and my team, I've had a whole team. I've had the team that I have right now for about like two months.
So in that two month time, I've had four people do postpartum care. I've had three people get hired for birth work. And I've had a couple birth planning sessions get hired from one doula, and then a newborn care class.
And like so that that's the team that the work the team is doing, right? At the same time, I've been hired as a birth doula a handful of times. And I'm not taking as many clients this year. So I am sending most the inquiries that come in to the rest of the team.
But I have had a couple people that have hired me for the fall, and also for the for June. And so When we're thinking about growth, right? I like to think about what is something that currently needs more volume in the business.
So what I would like to do in my business is start to do some more marketing because the team that I have now means that we have a greater capacity to serve clients, right? We can have a higher volume of clients with the team that we have.
And the reality is that that takes a certain amount of finances, correct? Like if I want, for instance, to go to some of the doctor's offices or the chiropractic offices, like these are things I teach people to do.
But I don't currently do them because I have plenty of people coming into my business. So I don't go out and network and things like that locally at the moment on a very regular basis. So that's one of the things I'm hoping to start doing.
However, in order to do that well, I want to have some new printed materials so that I have information about our packages, information about our team, information about what kinds of things you could you could hire us for and maybe like a coupon code for people.
Like, you know, I want some materials to take to folks and I want to be able to bring like donuts or something like be able to say, hey, like we are so appreciative of your work in the community. And I wanted to share with you that I have a whole team now and I wanted to introduce myself and just take some time to get to know you a bit.
And so because I want to do that, I need to be able to really, well, like to print out really good materials to be able to take with me. So before I do that, my growth that I'm focusing on is the childbirth class because the self -paced childbirth class can grow in a way that the in -person classes cannot, right?
Like I have to have a volume maximum in the in -person stuff, in birth, in postpartum, in childbirth ed, etc. But for the self -paced class, there doesn't there is no maximum to how many people I could have in there.
And so if I'm able to grow that, that provides the funds to grow the next thing, right? So what I mean when I say grow one offering at a time is that you put intentionality and strategy behind one thing at a time.
Now in business, there are times when something else explodes and you don't have any control over that. So like for me, I brought people onto the team saying to them like, you know, I have an influx in inquiries right now, but like I don't have any guarantee of what my inquiry rate will be like for the future.
Oh, excuse me. I am always tired. I'm a doula. I mean that's that's what we that's what we do right and so so I didn't promise them a certain volume of birth for instance right or a certain volume of postpartum I can't promise them that because I am new to having a team right like this is something that I just added on to my business this year and so as I added people to the team honestly that the number of inquiries we got significantly increased so I've been able to send people like to have consultations and things like that almost every week I've been able to send a client to one of the doulas like it really has been very very common to be able to say like hey we have someone interested in services and this is what they're looking for now do those people all hire us no they don't of course not because not all of them find it a good fit some of them decide to not have a doula some of them are like oh gosh I can't afford your prices and I you know all of that's fine but I did not do much work all I did was share with some people I know I posted online a few times started us a new Instagram account like I did some work but I didn't I haven't like gone out marketing that I have a team right and so that's on the roster of things I'm going to do my hope is to do that and then to increase the amount of inquiries that we get however in the meantime there is growth happening which is amazing and I'm not stopping that but I'm also not focused on it until I have the funds to be able to purchase better and new marketing materials and then to be able to go out and do some networking so there is kind of an order to what I'm doing and a strategy to what I'm doing even though there's growth in other parts at the same time okay so I want you to take some time to think about that what part of your business could you be working on growing and how can you focus on it for a bit like even if it's just a month at a time how can you be a bit more kind of honed in on that service rather than kind of sporadically trying to grow every single part of your business at once okay if you have not yet downloaded our package guide it is called the kick -ass doula package guide because you know why not this is doula tips and tits after all the link to that is in the show notes we really really really love helping doulas put together packages that serve them and serve their clients so this guide I wrote and included things like how much should you charge how do you figure out what to charge what should be included in the package how to know what to include in the package and how to include things that feel really good to you and your client so that your clients feel like they're getting an amazing deal and you feel really good about serving them and so there there's all sorts of things in that guy that can be incredibly helpful whether you're revamping packages or you are starting from scratch building your packages for the first time again that's free so go ahead and download it that also put you on our newsletter so you'll get that every other week and you'll hear when new episodes are coming out when there are classes coming up and you won't miss anything in the future all right I'll see you in the next episode thanks for joining us for this episode of the doula tips and tits podcast if you learned something today or had an aha moment we'd love for you to share that on Instagram and tag us at hara doula so we can celebrate alongside you if you found this podcast helpful we would so appreciate you taking a second to leave a rating and a review on your favorite podcast app that helps other doulas find us as we do this work together this podcast is intended as educational and entertainment it is not medical advice or business advice please consult your own medical or legal team for your own needs around your health and your business we'll see you again soon
Today we are discussing growing your doula offerings and keeping yourself sane by only trying to grow one at a time! Please do not try to strategize and grow everything at once. It won’t work and you’ll maybe lose your mind. Doula business growth has to be something we’re patient and strategic with and not something we rush into.
Quote from the show:
“I want to talk to you a little bit about growing one piece of your business at a time. Now, always, like you know, because you've been here, I have caveats to this, right? So grow one piece at a time with an asterisk. And that asterisk says, obviously, you can offer more than one service at once. What I don't mean is only offer one service at a time, right? You don't need to compartmentalize. At this point in my business, I have passive childbirth classes. So like self paced childbirth classes, I have self paced postpartum classes, I have in-person birth support, I have birth planning support. I have daytime postpartum support, I have overnight postpartum support done by my beautiful, wonderful team members. And I teach in person classes contracted through the breastfeeding center.”
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Kaely Daily is produced by Kaely Harrod of Harrod Doula Services
It is sponsored by The Birth Prep Blueprint Childbirth Class
Music by Madirfan: Hidden Place on Pixabay
