← The Doula Darcy Podcast
The Doula Darcy Podcast
A Doula’s Guide to Strategic Outsourcing and Work-Life Balance
00:21:22
In this episode, The Doula Darcy reflects on a major turning point in her doula business journey from several years ago. As a busy postpartum doula and agency owner, she found herself struggling to expand her business without sacrificing all of her...
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Welcome to the Doula Darcy podcast. I'm your host, Darcy, a business coach for doulas. And I love helping my fellow doulas master the art of marketing so that they can grow their businesses and help more families. On the podcast, I combine my decade of experience in Advertising with 14 years as a doula to empower other doulas with the marketing strategies and mindset shift gifts they need to attract more clients and create successful, fulfilling doula careers. Whether you're just starting out as a.
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Doula or you're looking to take your.
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Doula business to the next level, you're in the right place. Let's go.
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Hey everybody. I'm excited to be back with a new episode. It is a beautiful fall day here in New Hampshire, and I have been spent the day getting ready to welcome several of the my doula village doulas to our main retreat, which kicks off on Tuesday in York, Maine. The weather forecast looks fabulous. The foliage is peak, and we are going to be holed up in this gorgeous mansion on the rocky coast of Maine. And it's just, just I. It's going to be epic. I can't even wait. So I've had so much fun today, finalizing a few little details, getting things ready. I can't wait to welcome them all here to my beloved New England. And New England, really, Maine is going to be showing off with the sunny, you know, relatively warm temperatures and beautiful foliage. So I just can't wait. It is. I'm so excited. So it also has gotten me thinking. What I wanted to talk to you all about today is, I mean, I feel like I'm always talking about growing your doula business, but I want to tell you the story of a. And it comes down to a mindset shift that really helped me have a lot more growth in my doula business. So this is. This probably happened about five years ago. So I was nine years into being a postpartum doula. I had a couple doulas working for me. So I had an agency. I was still seeing my own clients. I hadn't started with my doula business coaching and marketing strategy for other doulas yet. And I was, I was just really busy and I was trying to figure out how to. I was really busy and I was also bumping up against. There weren't any more hours in the week. You know, I was working with clients as much as I could. I had other doulas working with clients. So that was one way, you know, that increased my income a little bit because the Agency was making money, but I was spending all my time working, which is fine, but I was also in a mastermind. And everything that I was reading at the time was just talking about the way to grow your business is by hiring a team and hiring out like a virtual assistant or some kind of assistant or some part time worker to handle tasks in the business that, you know, I could hand off. And I just looked at this for months and months and months and couldn't figure out how to do that. And at first I thought I was struggling with it because I'm a self proclaimed control freak. I mean, it took me forever to actually get to the point where I did bring on doulas because I had worked really hard to create a stellar reputation in my community as a postpartum doula. And I was really hesitant to bring other doulas on. And maybe that'll be another whole podcast episode about how I did that. But so at first I thought, well, maybe I'm not ready to hire somebody as a virtual assistant or an in person assistant because you, you know, I have control issues or I want things done a certain way. And that really actually wasn't part of it. The issue was I just didn't have enough tasks in a week to justify hiring somebody. So, you know, the general rule of thumb is to hire somebody to do, you know, the easy tasks that, you know, are repeatable every week that you can make a standard operating procedure for them. But there just wasn't anything I had that I was doing. You know, I was like, maybe I spend 10 minutes a week on this or maybe I spend 15 minutes doing that. Like it just seemed pointless to train someone to do these little things in my business. I did start looking at things like my biggest time suck maybe was invoicing and sending out contracts, sending out invoices. I had been running my business on a spreadsheet, really, which worked for the first few years when it was just me solo. But then once I had several doulas working for me, I was spending a lot of time on the invoicing and keeping track of hours. And so it then it made sense to not hire somebody but to use a service. So this is another thing that you can do in your own doula business. Like maybe you don't need to hire someone, but maybe you do need to buy a software or a program or some, you know, kind of monthly subscription that's going to help you. So for me that was, I chose Edula Biz, but there's Honeybook, there's Dubsado, there's Dulotto. There's so many choices. We just had a really great conversation inside of my doula village with everybody sharing what they use and, you know, getting lots of. Lots of great feedback from doulas who are using these programs. But, you know, and one of the doulas said, but yeah, but, you know, Whichever one is 30 bucks a month, I just don't want to add another expense to my business. But if paying 30 bucks a month is going to free up more than one hour of your time, that is so worth it. And so for me, freeing up, you know, the five or six hours a week I was spending on invoicing and contracts and that kind of thing to pay to have a software that helps me do it faster, no brainer. Definitely need to do something like that. So, but then the other, the bigger mindset shift, that really shifted things for me because I kept looking just at my business. What could I hire someone within my business? And they're just, like I said, there just really was nothing. And then I started to just think of my life. Me as a mom, me as a person, you know, my house, all the things I do, and my business, my life. Looking at that. And then what do you know, I realize, oh, I'm spending hours, you know, every week cleaning. I, at the time, my kids were all. Didn't have their licenses yet, so I was spending so, so many hours driving them just around town to, you know, after picking them up from school, soccer, gymnastics, all the things. So instead of hiring someone for my business, I hired someone for my life. I hired someone to clean my house. I started to hire my friend's kids, who are a little older and like a neighbor, to drive my kids around. And, you know, at first I was like, oh, but that's, you know, that's time with my kids. But my kids aren't chatty in the car. It's not like, I know some people say that's, you know, the time they get with their kids to have good conversations. My kids and I just aren't like that. We're not. We're not chatty in the car. And I still certainly drove them a lot, but sometimes some days it would work out where I could pay a local teenager to get my kids where they needed to be. And that freed up so much more time. And as a postpartum doula, that enabled me. I could, you know, there's another benefit of being a postpartum doula versus birth doula. Like, I could schedule shifts longer into the afternoon on the days I knew my kids had other rides. And so, you know, paying a local kid six, seven dollars so that I could work two more hours, three more hours at $45 an hour made total sense. So hiring people to do things like clean my house made a lot of sense too. So I hope this is helping you think of your business in a little different way. The way that it helped me in looking at my life and then really starting to not keep my business and my life separate. I'm a solo business owner and I love my business. I always say, like, I feel like my business is my best friend. I love hanging out with my business, I love my clients and I love. Now I've really gotten into this idea of looking at the whole picture. I mean, I'm a mom. I'm a mom. When I'm with my clients, I'm always a mom. And so it's all interconnected. The good news is we get to design our businesses, we get to design our lives too, and we get to design a business that works really well with our own life. Case in point. I love business retreats. Actually the mastermind I mentioned earlier, we had a business retreat for that, you know, several years ago, is the first one I went on. And I loved the experience. I loved being together with like minded other business women and spending a few days together really focused on growing our businesses, growing ourselves. And so I wanted to bring more of that into my life and I have incorporated that into my doula village and it's working out great. So you can design your business in little ways and big ways that capitalize on your strengths, that focus on the tasks and the services that you love doing and outsourcing those that you don't. So like I said, making this mindset shift of looking at my life and not just my business in terms of my time and my energy and my money, this was when things really shifted for me and I really was able to increase my income and really just make my life better and my business better. And so I hope that this helps you. So another example of this is I started to pay for one of those meal delivery services. I tried them all, hello, fresh, you know, those kind of things. And you know, I used to think, oh my God, that's a lot of money. But when I looked at it, that I'm paying to have fresh meals delivered and then that means I don't have to spend my time cooking, you know, I can spend my time. And here's another piece of this. I don't love cooking every day. I do like cooking every once in a while, but like on a daily basis, it's not something I really enjoyed. So hiring out tasks in your business, in your life that you don't enjoy is another plus. If I'm paying for a meal delivery service so that my family has a healthy dinner that night and then I can put my time and energy into some task for my business that actually brings in revenue, then that makes the decision to book that meal delivery service a no brainer. So that's what I chose, a house cleaner, meals. And then I got really into ordering my groceries online, ordering stuff on Amazon and just looking at every aspect of my life through that business lens. And if you do that as well, your answers are going to be different. For example, I, you know, again in the podcast I was listening to the mastermind I was in the people I was talking to, a lot of people were saying, oh, they, you know, they decided to pay to hire a bookkeeper, which is great. But for me personally, I actually really like bookkeeping. I know I should have been an accountant, but I really, I enjoy it. And I even interviewed some bookkeepers and looked into it and I just, that didn't. The task of bookkeeping isn't a drain to me. That's what it comes down to. Cleaning my bathrooms, yes. Making dinner every day, yes. Those are draining to me. So looking through your life and your business at the tasks that drain you, that's worth hiring someone for or finding a service or a software or something that will help you take that off your plate so that you can pour your time and energy into the tasks that give you life and that also bring in more revenue. So here's another one. I hear a lot of people say that they want to hire someone to do their social media. Again, for me, as a marketing expert, I enjoy doing my social media. And even if you don't, if you're listening and you don't enjoy doing your social media, I really, really recommend that you still do it because as doulas, social media is a great chance to get, first of all, get your name out there in the community. But it's also people hire us as doulas based on our energy, our personality. It's a real personal decision who someone chooses and hires to be their doula. Social media is a great way to get your energy, your personality, your ideas, all that across for free. And I really think you are, I don't think, I know you attract in the clients that are the best fit for you when you're writing your own social media, you don't want to hire that out and have the voice of your social media be someone else. Maybe you look into softwares and even just and this one's free. The business suite, the meta business suite within Facebook. If you can schedule your social media in advance, batching your social media in advance, you know, look at doing some things like that or purchasing like my Instagram for doulas which is 30 posts that are already pre written, that's $47. So here's the other thing. Figure out what you as postpartum doulas you already know this. But as a birth doula, you know what, what do you earn in an hour and you sitting down for an hour to write social media posts, does it make more sense to just purchase Instagram for doulas and get 30 posts that you can batch schedule in advance? Maybe don't hire someone to do your social media, but you do things like that or use ChatGPT to help you with your writing. But again, I really, really encourage you to write your own social media so that your own flair is in there and that helps you attract in those dream clients. So when it comes down to it, as business owners we have two resources, time and money. So it's really important to look at those things and decide which one you want to invest in something. So a great example of this is your website or learning something new like designing a website. Yes. You could put in the time to go on YouTube and watch the tutorials and figure out how to do it. And it's going to take you a lot of time, but you can absolutely do it. Or you can spend some money and have a professional design you a website and have it done in a couple days. So you have to kind of decide what tasks are worth just spending the money to have them done faster and better. What tasks are you okay with spending your time on? So again if it's super enjoyable, then sure put your time into it. If it's a task that you don't like and it's going to take you a lot of time, but it has to be done for your business, then you have to invest the money in it. So I hope this helps you look at your business in a different way. Look at your business and your life together in a different way. And, and maybe if you're like me, the hiring and the outsourcing that you need to pay for actually comes in other parts of your life, not necessarily your business. And then this is the kind of thing to revisit every few months, you know, because our businesses are always changing. So this is something to come back and look at again and reassess and as your business grows, looking at ways that you can spend your time and your money wisely and get the most bang for your buck.
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Thank you for tuning in to the Dula Darcy Podcast. I hope you found this episode valuable, and I'd love for you to join me on the next one. Let's keep the conversation going. Shoot me a DM on Instagram thedula Darcy, or join my free Facebook community, the Doula Marketing Group, where we dive deeper into growing your doula business. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to rate and review the podcast on your favorite platform. Your feedback will help more doula discover the show, which in turn helps more families find the doula support that they need. And I believe that that is how we save the world.