Winging It Is Not An Actual Growth Plan
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Transcript
Welcome to Dula Tips and Tits, the podcast where we cut through the noise and get real about what it takes to build a sustainable doula business. I'm Kaylee Harrod. I've been a doula informally for 14 years and full time for seven.
Around here, we don't sugarcoat stuff. We talk autonomy, owning your worth, creating a business that works for you. No fluff, no burnout, just the honest truth on how to be your own best boss. Let's get into today's episode.
Hello and welcome back to Dula Tips and Tits. I am your trusty host, Kaylee Harrod, and today we're talking about how winging it is not an actual growth plan. Now, if you listen to the beginning of this episode, you heard that I have a free masterclass.
That masterclass is happening on February 21st at 10 a.m. Eastern time. I'm in D.C. on the East Coast. It is called the Dula Business Growth Framework Masterclass. We will talk through three different big pieces that I think you should consider if you're feeling like your business needs to pivot.
So expanding is one of them, pivoting is one of them, and scaling is one of them. Now, sometimes you need all of those. Sometimes you need just one of those three. But those are the three strategies we are going to talk through.
Also, can I just share something personal with you? Why do I start yawning every time I start recording these episodes? I'm not sure what it is, but it's not that I'm bored with you all, I promise. So if you have not yet signed up for that class, please go do so right now.
Just go ahead and pause me. I won't be offended. Come back after you've signed up. In the show notes is the link to sign up. Or also, you can sign up on Instagram, or also, you're welcome to shoot me an email.
If you have not yet signed up, please go ahead and sign up. If you have my email, if you're already on my newsletter, if you're not, maybe sign up for that too because you need to be on the newsletter as well.
So today we're talking about winging it. Now I realized that when you become a doula, you do it for purpose. You do it for passion, right? You do it out of the heart of assisting people in this time of life, in this season of building a family.
I also realized that you often start out without a growth strategy because you're not really a business person, right? And I'm not saying that as an insult. I'm saying lots of personalities that are drawn to doula work are not the same personalities that are drawn to entrepreneurship.
And so we kind of become entrepreneurs in order to do the thing we're passionate about, which is doula work. But in the meantime, we also have to be business owners. We also have to grow our business.
We have to have strategy around that. And you just get in a cycle of winging it if you don't have that strategy. So what I see frequently is someone will come to me and say like, and I mean, to be quite honest with you, this was me a couple of years ago.
They'll say, okay, I am now full for birth all year. Do I really know how I got there? Not necessarily. And I mean, sometimes when you look back, it's very clear like, oh yeah, you built a relationship with this particular provider or that particular doula and then you get tons of referrals from that person, right?
But lots of us have a wide range of reasons. So like I very rarely get someone from Google, but I frequently get someone from a listserv like in this DC area, parenting listservs are hot. And I don't know who is on the Alexandria listserv in Virginia that shares my name with every single pregnant person that ever asked for a doula, but that person needs to be on my payroll because so many people have come to me saying,
I heard about you in the Alexandria parenting group. So whoever you are out there, thank you. I appreciate you. There's also of course, referrals from friends, referrals from providers, referrals from other doulas.
But at some point in my business, I remember thinking, I even said this to the first coach that I was working with. I said, you know, I'm not really sure how I got here. Like I now make, I think at the time I was making 78,000 a year.
And I was like, I now make like 70,000 and I don't know how. And she was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like you have done some very specific things to get yourself to this place. Did you do them with...
strategy? Did you do them with a plan? No, but you still did them. It is still you who did the things. When you think about this, if you're listening to this episode and you're like, yeah, I resonate with that.
I have a fairly thriving business. I grew a big clientele and I feel like I don't know how I did it and therefore I don't know what to do to grow it more. That is what I'm talking about. You not only do in fact no more than you think about growing your business, but you also are then going to feel like you're just running around blind trying to decide what to do now to change or shift your business because you're not quite sure what you did in the first place to get yourself where you are.
What that ends up doing is like, let's say someone has a goal. Thank you. Thank you. And I've used this example because this is a goal that I have, so I'm putting that out there personally. I have a goal of being able to do handstands, right?
And my work towards this goal has been very sporadic, in part because I broke my ankle last year. And so it's been almost one year ago. It'll be next week because next week is my birthday and my birthday first thing in the morning is when it happened.
So so one of my goals is to be able to do handstands. Part of what I am doing to be able to do handstands is like working on my upper body strength and my core strength and my wrist flexibility and all kinds of stuff like that.
I could potentially just start working out in general, just working out with no particular rhyme or reason, right? And then get to the end of the year and be like, oh my gosh, I didn't even realize I can do a handstand now.
And that's kind of how my business growth went to be honest with you. I was in a small cohort in a coaching program that was the first like business coaching that I did. And I remember having the goal of making a ten thousand dollar month.
And then I was like, oh just kidding. That happened in September. And this coaching group started in like January. And so I was like, oh, I didn't even realize that happened because I had like a main account that most of the money was going into that was coming in the business.
But then I got paid occasionally in this other account and I hadn't accounted for that in my monthly totals. And so part of what I was doing was being like, oh my gosh, I have this goal that I have actually already met.
Now my goal is to do it more consistently, right? But in that space, I also have to kind of be like, okay, but I didn't even know I got to the goal because I was not. not paying attention to the right metrics, right?
So like in my handstand example, if I don't even try to do a handstand for a whole year, I don't know if I can do it yet, right? And so part of that is a lack of strategy that leads to a little bit of chaos, honestly, and a little bit of disorganization.
And also a lot oftentimes, especially with business owners, a lot of wasted money and wasted time, because you did not take the time to invest in an actual coaching program or ability to grow in some specific way.
So then you're just throwing money at random stuff, right? For me, I remember I was like, okay, I'm going to buy this one small like marketing class, and then I'm going to buy this one small email systems class.
And then I'm going to buy the one small copywriting class. And then I'm going to buy the one small workshop class, like masterclass kind of class, right? and then I'm going to work a ton on my own to try to get all of these five things connected to each other but they don't actually go together because they're not taught by the same people and they actually do not have any strategy behind them.
I just know that I lack in each of these categories right? So what ends up happening in a space like that is that some of the stuff works. Like I actually know a decent amount about email automation and about copywriting right?
But I don't like it and so I don't want to do it and so I still resist it just like I used to and if there's no strategy connecting that with my podcast for instance or that with the master classes that I'm doing why am I doing it right?
So here's another example my own personal business because I want you to really I like transparency. I want you to know that I am teaching you this stuff that I have actually been through and so I'm not just like pulling this out of my ass right?
Like this is me being like listen this is how I was doing it and how I was just spinning my wheels right? So when I first started my podcast I was really focused on learning SEO. So talking about those individual classes one of them that I had purchased that was actually gifted to me was an SEO class and it was wonderful but I was trying to like figure out how to fit it in in the all the other like categories right?
And so we pause this episode for a message from our sponsors the educated birth. As birth workers we know that education is power. That's why the educated birth membership gives you instant access to 400 plus trusted resources.
Free entry to all 2025 expert-led classes and 20% off-print products including the best-selling toolkit binder. I have been using materials from The Educated Birth since 2020 and cannot imagine running my business without it.
This past year, I joined as a member with my whole team so we could better serve the clients we work with together and it has been an invaluable resource for all of us to share. For a limited time, you can get $95 off your first year with code TIPS and TIPS95.
Join today at theeducatedbirth.com slash membership and start making an impact. When I was trying to just fit it into all the other systems, I ended up deciding to make my podcast episodes very high SEO questions on Google because I was like, okay, if someone goes to Google and types in like, am I having a contraction?
I want my podcast to pop up, right? The problem with that, and it worked well, like it's not a bad strategy, right? right, except that what I did not realize at the time when I started my podcast, I was thinking, okay, I had, I think at the time I had like 600 Instagram followers.
So I was like, okay, I have this little following on Instagram, and I can like start talking about doula stuff and like grow my credibility, etc. But then what I actually realized is that I did not have any people who were pregnant, listening to my podcast, or on my social media.
And it's not that there was nobody, because sure, there were like a few people here and there. But actually, my following on social media and also the people who were listening to my podcast were doulas.
And so those questions weren't really drawing in the right people, because I wasn't actually drawing in pregnant families, I was drawing in other doulas, other birth workers, people who wanted to learn from my expertise.
And so then I started hearing from doulas, and they would say to me like, Oh my gosh, these episodes are so helpful. When my client texts me this question, I text them your episode. And I'm like, Oh, that's great.
But actually, then I should be talking to you and not your client, because then you can just teach your client the thing, right? So if I'm saying like, how can you tell if you're having Braxton Hicks or regular contractions, I could have an episode in the podcast about like, for the doula, how do you determine if your client is having Braxton Hicks or contractions?
And how do you manage that? How do you support them in that? Especially if they're having a lot of Braxton Hicks, like if they're due in July, and you live in a hot comet, climate, I clearly cannot speak today.
That that would actually have better traction with the people that I have in my sphere, because my sphere online is less about pregnant folks and more about doulas at the moment, right? So one of the things that I want you to think about is Do you actually have a strategy?
Do you have a strategy for when you post and what you post, what kinds of content you put out there? Do you have a strategy on what kind of services you offer and how they go together and how you offer them to people?
Do you have a strategy on helping people book the package that actually works best for them and optimizing those packages so they are really desirable by your clients but also that you love doing them?
So those are some questions. If any of those, if you're like, oh, nope, nope, nope, nope, right? You need this masterclass. This masterclass that's coming up is to help you unstick. And the reason that that matters is as long as you are stuck, you are also kind of teetering on burnout because the business stuff is hard.
And if you could do the birth or the postpartum stuff without the business stuff, you might not be so burnt out. right? But also maybe you're doing the birth stuff and you actually want to do the postpartum stuff, or you're doing births and postpartum, but you actually want to be teaching a lot more, right?
Then that has to start pivoting at some point. The longer you don't know how to strategize, the longer you don't know how to change that, the more time you're going to spend doing the service that you actually don't want to be doing.
So if you're nodding along with this and thinking, yep, okay, yes, I need a strategy that actually works for me. You need to join my live class on Friday the 21st, so February 21st, it's at 10 a.m. Eastern.
We will record it because babies come, I know how that is, but we will have a live Q&A time that will not be recorded. So I want you to try to be there in person so that you can be part of that live Q&A, and I'll have a gift for folks that are there as well.
And then we are going to really dig deep into these categories, these strategies that I think will help you, because I want you to consider expansion and pivoting and scaling your business so that you can actually thrive, because this business is something that can last you, and it does not have to be something that you burn out from, okay?
So please go grab your spot. The link is in the show notes, and also you can hit me up on Instagram at harraddulla, and then we can connect there, and I can give you the link as well, all right? See you in the next episode.
Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Dula 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 harraddulla 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’s episode is sponsored by The Educated Birth. You can get $95 off the first year of your The Educated Birth Membership right now with my code TITSANDTIPS95 at theeducatedbirth.com/membership
Winging it is not an actual game plan! When you become a doula, you do it for a purpose. You do it for passion, right? You do it out of the heart of assisting people in this time of life, in this season of building a family.
Quote from the show:
“I also realized that you often start out without a growth strategy because you're not really a business person, right? And I'm not saying that as an insult. I'm saying lots of personalities that are drawn to doula work are not the same personalities that are drawn to entrepreneurship. And so we kind of become entrepreneurs in order to do the thing we're passionate about, which is doula work. But in the meantime, we also have to be business owners. We also have to grow our business.”
CONNECT with Kaely on TikTok or Instagram
https://www.tiktok.com/@doulacoach
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If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me @harroddoula
Doula Tips and Tits is produced by Kaely Harrod of Harrod Doula Services
It is sponsored by The Doula Biz Blueprint Self-Paced Class for Doulas Launching Successful and Sustainable Businesses!
Music by Madirfan: Hidden Place on Pixabay
