Evaluating Your YTD Stats in Your Doula Business
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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. Welcome back to Doula Tips and Tits. So a last episode I talked about how I'm on vacation. So I am recording this in advance, of course, because I'm on vacation.
I'm not recording it and putting it out during vacation because that defeats the purpose of my vacation. And so I want you to think a little bit with me about evaluating your year to date. Now this is gonna be a relatively short episode, but I wanna give you a list of things to look at.
So when you're thinking about your year to date, what I mean is from January 1st until today, which is this episode's coming out on July 5th. And so we're like almost exactly midway through the year.
And I want you to kind of have a second to evaluate where you are in terms of your goals, where you are in terms of your revenue numbers, where you are in terms of your projections, like what is your calendar looking like for the rest of the summer and the fall and the winter.
People are due all the way through the winter. So you could be having clients into December at this point, even farther out than that. So what I want you to look at is where are you in terms of client load?
What was your goal for this year? And where are you in meeting that goal? And then I want you to look at, if you haven't had a goal, what should that be? Realistically, what should that be? And where can you help to grow just the client numbers?
Now, that kind of leads to our second thing, which is revenue. Obviously, revenue comes with clients. And so what are your revenue goals? What were they at the beginning of the year? And where are you with those now?
Now, if you're an established business, you've been doing this for a while, this should be something you're regularly doing. If you're not regularly doing it, I would love to see you start doing it because it gives you some actual data to make strategic plans in your business, which matters.
One of the things I preach all the time is that your business has to have some strategy and intentionality. It cannot just be fly by the seat of your pants sort of scenario, okay? So the first thing you're looking at in terms of your year to date is what is your client load looking like so far?
And also, what is your projection of client load? What are the people who've already signed up for services? How are you looking in terms of being full, et cetera? Is that bringing in enough revenue?
If not, how do you adjust that, okay? The next thing I want you to look at is how did each of your services perform? Now, for me, I have had a number of classes over the years that I stopped running.
I used to run a workshop on writing birth plans. I used to do private comfort measures classes in people's homes. I don't do those things anymore. Why? Because they barely ever sold and it just was a lot for me to try to keep up with them when they actually were not impacting revenue at all and they were making me a little bit stressed.
So those are things that over the years I got rid of because they weren't really helpful for the business. They weren't doing what I wanted them to do in terms of bringing in clients and they also weren't super lucrative.
So the revenue I was getting from them was not really worthwhile, right? On the flip side of that, what things have you been thinking about adding that you could actually add and have a positive impact on your business?
So if you have been waiting to add services out of fear or out of procrastination or imposter syndrome or any of those things, how has that been working for you? Has that been working well or not? And then how do you look kind of with the data from this first half of the year into next year, which is the next episode.
So we will be talking about that, like looking at quarter planning for the third quarter of the business year and what that looks like. The other thing I want you to think about is how have you been a boss to yourself this year so far?
If you've been around for any amount of time, you hear me say that you should be the best boss you've ever worked for. I do not want to see you running yourself into the ground because anything that you would not let someone else do to you or you would not want someone else doing to someone that you love, you should absolutely not be doing to yourself.
But in reality, lots of us who are solo business owners do not treat ourselves well. We kind of throw ourselves under the bus in terms of like what we set ourselves up for, how much commitment we make, services we offer that we shouldn't be offering, that we don't like offering, that maybe are like traumatic for us to offer, right?
So I really want you to look at like, do an evaluation on yourself, like how do I like my boss, right? And your boss being you. How do I like my business? Is this working for me? Is it working for my family?
If not, like what things need to shift, right? And what things need to shift is the next episode. So we'll dive into that, but please take a few minutes to look over your last seven months and see what is going really well and then celebrate the hell out of yourself and see what is not going so well and take a hard look at that and figure out how you're going to shift it.
Now, I do wanna just plant this little bug. If you are looking at things and you're like, damn, things have not been great, but I'm not sure what to shift. I didn't always talk about this, but I offer one -off coaching calls that can be 30 minutes or they can be an hour long.
And I'm gonna put the link to those in the show notes because that is something that you can do if you're kind of like, Kaylee, I'm not really sure where to go next. Like I see this thing, but I don't know how to shift it.
Grab a spot and let's chat about it because I would be more than happy to take a look at your business and then help you make that shift. All right, so listen to the next episode. It's coming out on the 10th, so next week, so that you can hear what I would recommend planning for your next quarter, for quarter three, and then starting July 12th, we are going to be releasing rerun episodes.
So these are episodes that have been some of the most popular episodes over the last two and a half years that we have had this beautiful podcast going. And what we're doing is of course like providing some space for me to be with my kids and to be off a bit.
This is the time of year when I put an email response in my email that says like, hey, thank you so much for emailing me. I'm trying to spend as much time as possible with my children. So I'm checking my email a little bit less frequently.
Give me a little grace. You should expect to hear from me in a maximum of 36 hours, right? Because I want people to have realistic expectations, but also I want to normalize the fact that we should not always be open, right?
Like we don't expect Target to be open every day, all day long, Starbucks, restaurants, any of the other businesses we know, do not run 24 seven except maybe a hospital. And even that, it's only a few things, right?
And so when we're thinking about our own business, we've got to normalize the fact that we have time, that we are not available. And of course for our clients, sure, but not for like random emails or for responding to things or with the expectation that every question has to be answered that same day, okay?
So the next episode, you'll be hearing a brand new episode talking about planning ahead to quarter three, and then we will start the reruns. Don't miss them because they are honestly some pretty powerful episodes, and I've added a little intro to each one.
So you're still hearing something from me for all of them. And then about mid August, we're going to start back into brand spanking new content, okay? All right, I will 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 her rod doula so we can celebrate alongside you. If you've 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.
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It is vital to do regular evaluation of your Doula Business. Do yearly planning, quarterly planning and quarterly and yearly evaluations. That is what today’s episode is all about!
I mention the ability to book coaching calls with me. Those can be found below:
30 Minute Coaching:
https://calendly.com/harroddoula/doula-coaching-30-minutes?preview_source=et_card&month=2024-06
60 Minute Coaching:
https://calendly.com/harroddoula/doula-coaching-one-off?month=2024-06
Quote from the show:
“So when you're thinking about your year to date, what I mean is from January 1st until today, which is this episode's coming out on July 5th. And so we're like almost exactly midway through the year. And I want you to kind of have a second to evaluate where you are in terms of your goals, where you are in terms of your revenue numbers, where you are in terms of your projections, like what is your calendar looking like for the rest of the summer and the fall and the winter. ”
CONNECT with Kaely on TikTok or Instagram
https://www.tiktok.com/@doulacoach
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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
