My Doula Business Timeline So Far
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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 tips. So today we are diving into my doula business so far. Now I want to do this to give you like a general sense of timeline in the evolution of my business, in part because I think it's really easy to get the message that like you should be able to snap your fingers and click your heels together and have a six -figure business, right?
Honestly, when I started out doing this work, I didn't even have a business and then I could never have imagined bringing in over six figures. That was just not a number I even could fathom. So, so I want you to have a sense of the time frame that it took, not saying that it needs to take the same amount of time for you, but so that you know and I can normalize that this did not just happen overnight, right?
Like I didn't become the doula that I am today or the business owner that I am today just from like happenstance, right? Like it's been a lot of hard work for many years and that I think needs to be normalized.
I, if I could have, if I see one more ad on Facebook that's like, oh get, you know, six -figure launch the next time you launch, I could puke. Like it really irritates me because I am like, how about we add some contacts?
Like how much money did you have to invest in a team and how much money did you have to invest in ads and all of that and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, it makes me angry because I think it gives the false sense of like, you could have a thriving business that's making six figures today and I'm like, if you're a doula today, you're not going to make six figures and if you're charging less than you should be charging, you're never going to make six figures.
Like that's something that has to be addressed in the layers, okay? So when we're thinking about my doula business, I count as far back as my oldest kid was born because I feel like I started doing postpartum care with people immediately after having him.
Like I had a lot of friends who were due having babies around the same time or having babies shortly after us and I feel like the instinct in me to be like, let me help you in the midst of this because it's really hard to have a baby was very strong from the beginning and so that's something that I had been doing for a while.
Then in the springtime of 2014, I became a La Leche League leader which is like peer -to -peer lactation support. So I had my own, I had three kids at that point. They were all pretty little, two toddlers and a baby and I was, you know, a parent with three under three.
So they were real close together and I accepted that accreditation with my baby literally breastfeeding at my chest. Like I was standing on stage with her in the carrier breastfeeding and so I started supporting people through lactation probably the fall of 2023, like after she was born and then into the spring of 2023, 2013 into the spring of 2014 when she was like, you know, six months or so old, like five, that's how that kind of got started, right, in terms of the earliest times.
We moved to the DC area at the end of 2015. So it was on Halloween, moved to this area originally because my husband got a new job here. He's a journalist and so he got a job at a newspaper here. He's also from just outside the city, like about an hour away from the city and so it's an area that we've always loved, an area that we've always wanted to live in and so he moved here and I was home with the kids primarily because, you know, the cost of living here is a small fortune so it didn't make sense to put them in daycare.
They were all still really little, etc. So in, let me see, what year was it? So we moved in in a Halloween of 2015 and then in 2015... 2017. Is that right? Yes, 2017. I attended my first birth in the springtime of 2017.
That was a dear friend of mine and it's funny because she and I were in a bible study together and then I was like, she was telling, you know, she was pregnant, we were very excited about that and then she was gonna maybe have a doula and I like had really studied natural birth and wanted unmedicated labor and I'm not going to go into my birth stories on this episode but I've had three c -sections but lots of labor and so that's just because I have a weird uterus but that's another story for another day and so she knew I had like kind of done the same research, I had done the same childbirth class she had done and so she was like, you know, have you ever considered like would you consider being my doula and I was like, oh my gosh I was gonna offer but I was like maybe that's weird, like maybe she doesn't want me at her birth and honestly to this day I can't tell you exactly what it was but when she was like, I don't know if we can afford a doula, some part of me was just like, I could do that, like I know I could be so good at that and turns out I was right and she was right but I don't know what that was, like that like spark of like, oh I think I could do that was so strong so I like basically just googled what sorts of things do doulas do, what do doulas help with at birth and what should I know, etc and she had like the easiest ever labor which was such a gift because then I was like, oh amazing, like I would be awesome at being a doula and it's no big deal at all because she had like, you know, the smoothest, fastest birth ever and so after her birth she was really like, Kaylee this is a job, like you need to do this, this needs to be your thing, you know and still it took me a little time to actually be trained because I was like, I don't know, it's kind of scary, like what maybe I can't handle owning my own business, you know and then once I did get trained I was terrified of owning a business and was just like, I don't know how to do this, I don't know how to run a business, I've never wanted to own a business, there's no reason for me to own a business, right and I heard about agencies and I was like, score, I can do that and not own a business and that sounds amazing and it just makes me less anxious, right and so I joined two agencies at the very end of 2018 and then I started working with a third and fourth agency like around the same time a little bit later and then I got three private clients so it was really like all at once it kind of came together and it was honestly just nothing that I did, like my brother and sister -in -law got pregnant, they were one of my clients and then a dear friend was pregnant and then a friend that was in class with me was pregnant and a friend of a friend was pregnant and so I had a mix of people coming in through the agencies and kind of having the marketing and the work that the agency owners were doing get helping me get clients and then I had people in my own circles helping me get clients and kind of bringing in like doing some marketing work for me, right so fast forward a couple months pretty quickly I was full like I had I had doula clients every single month and I had three people do a month I went to some backup births and got kind of thrown in that way but I really quickly had a good volume of clients from the agencies that I was working with I pretty quickly supported some births in Spanish because I am a Spanish speaker I'm not native Spanish speaking but I'm fluent in Spanish and I loved that and then I started teaching childbirth ed pretty quickly after that.
Now prior to having children I was a professor of English as a second language and also of Spanish and so teaching was something I already loved I was already really good at it I already really enjoyed it and so teaching childbirth ed felt like like an obvious thing to me you know because I why would I not do that when teaching is already something I love.
So that kind of continued on then the pandemic happened and I completely freaked out I made my childbirth class my online childbirth class right at the beginning of the pandemic I started working on that and then I officially stopped working with the agencies at the end of 2020 I believe and the beginning of 2021 I was like working for myself and officially like only taking private clients and starting to grow that piece.
So that is where the growth has happened from there so that's kind of the trajectory of my doula work. Now obviously I'm not getting into the nitty -gritty of like how much revenue did I make those years and how did that play out in terms of statistics and what but what I do want you to hear is that like my business did not start out where I am right now and it took me a long time and lots of work but also layers of anxiety and things like that to get to where I am.
So I hope that's encouraging for you I would love to hear about your journey connect with me on instagram at haraa doula and share with me where you are in your journey and how it got started. It fascinates me to hear doulas talk about their own journey into this work and what that looks like for them.
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 haraa 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 I’m walking you through the timeline of my business. Because I’m tired of the get-rich-quick schemes and language that are going around. I want you to have context for realistic growth. I’m NOT saying you have to grow like I did, because you could do it a bunch better/faster! But I am saying I want you to have the context of what it took for me to get here to this beautiful 6-figure business place.
Quote from the show:
“Honestly, when I started out doing this work, I didn't even have a business and then I could never have imagined bringing in over six figures. That was just not a number I even could fathom. So, I want you to have a sense of the time frame that it took, not saying that it needs to take the same amount of time for you, but so that you know and I can normalize that this did not just happen overnight, right? ”
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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
