← The Doula Darcy Podcast
The Doula Darcy Podcast
Letting Go of the Hustle: A Guide to Building a Joyful Doula Business
00:35:11
Build a Business That Feels Right for You Are you feeling overwhelmed by the end-of-year "strategize, plan, and grow" messages flooding your feed? You’re not alone! In this candid episode, Darcy reveals why these marketing tactics can feel...
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- [00:04]
A
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. They need to attract more clients and create successful, fulfilling doula careers. Whether you're just starting out as a doula or you're looking to take your doula business to the next level, you're in the right place. Let's go.
- [00:46]
B
Hey there party people. So today's episode is inspired by recent events of me scrolling my phone and seeing ad after ad and message after message and email after email from all the marketing gurus and the business gurus. And it's all this end of year message about strategy and analyzing and making things better in 2025 and all these messages about what you're doing wrong. And I'm just so sick of it. Like, I can see right through it. I'm so sick of the message that they are pushing this time of year that you're doing it wrong. You did a bad job this year and you need to do better. And the only way that you can do that is by doing these next 25 steps that I'm about to tell you in this blog post. And all these messages are designed to make you feel like crap. And so that's where I was coming from when I recorded today's episode. But I wanted to also add in here before we dive into that, that these end of the year messages that you're seeing about planning and strategizing and analyzing and all that jazz, it's marketing and it's gross marketing. It's written and developed in a way that makes you feel bad about yourself, makes you feel like it's scarcity vibes, not abundance vibes. It's that you didn't do enough. You're not good enough. You're not doing it the right way. You're not doing it this perfect way over here. And what they're trying to do is to push your pain points, poke your bruise and make you buy their thing. It's actually marketing and it's just gross. Like, let's not tear you down to try to sell you something that's just not nice. I wanted to make sure that I said this because I have my big marketing background. I can see this. But I don't think the average Joe can see this. So I want to make sure that you're not getting sucked into these messages, that you're not doing enough, that you didn't work hard enough, that you didn't bill enough, that you didn't have enough clients, that you need to scale and climb and do more. And yes, maybe you need to. Maybe you want to. If you want to, great. But don't fall into this trap of thinking that you did a bad job this year. Go back and listen to my episode from last week about going back through your client list, going back through your photos and celebrating what you did do this year. Celebrate who you helped, how you helped them, how you made them feel, how they made you feel. And that is all that matters. And that is the mind frame I'm coming from as I recorded today's episode. So with that in mind, let's dive in.
- [04:28]
C
Hello, everybody. So, as the year is winding down, I have been thinking a lot about strategy and end of year planning. And as you know from my last episode, that's something I don't really do. I scroll through the pictures of my phone and think about all that I've accomplished in the year and start dreaming about the year ahead, but that is about it. And then I just have been thinking a lot about it. As I see. I don't know about you, but my feed is just full of business coaches and marketing people that are talking about end of year strategies and spreadsheets and profit margins and all this stuff, and I don't like it. And then I got laughing because I really started to think about it. And here I am. Doula Darcy. I'm a. I am a marketing strategist, but I don't have content pillars and my social media is never planned out in advance. More than two days at the most. That's it. And here I am. I am a business coach, and yet I don't have a P L statement for my business. And I don't do confusing quarterly projected growth analytics or anything like that because yuck. And then Also, I have 14,000 followers on Instagram and yet I haven't worn makeup since. Since COVID And I rarely ever get out of my yoga pants. And why. Why do I run my business this way with no structured marketing plan and no business growth projections and no fancy clothes or makeup or shoes? I'll tell you why. First of all, there's nothing wrong with any of those things if you are incorporating them into your business. But for me, that is the exact crap I left my corporate career for. That's the exact reason why I left my corporate career. That rigidity, that dressing in uncomfortable clothes and, and the feeling of makeup on my face, which I cannot stand, and the schedules and the spreadsheets and the just again, that rigid corporate structure. I worked in that area, in that arena for 10 years and I'm done with it. I don't want that anymore. That's why I created my own business. I wanted freedom. I wanted to feel good. I wanted my business to be fun. I wanted my business to be life giving, not life sucking. And so not to say I didn't like my corporate career, I did. I loved my corporate career up until I had that first baby. And the moment, not, maybe not necessarily the moment I had her, the moment I was faced with the reality of dropping her off at daycare on the first day, the moment I was faced with the reality of dropping her off at daycare for the first day is when all that corporate crap just seemed immediately pointless. And now looking back, I had un undiagnosed postpartum anxiety. I was having intrusive thoughts about dropping her off at daycare. I also was having like this moral, ethical dilemma. Now that I had a baby, I had this new care for the world, and I wanted to be doing work that was making the world a better place. I did not want to drop my baby off and put her into daycare for 40, 50, 60 hours a week or more so that I could go sit in a cubicle and analyze public relations research. That was the job I had at the time when I had my daughter. I was actually working in sales for a PR research firm. And I loved it. I really enjoyed it. It was super interesting. But through the lens of having a precious baby, it just, the thought of leaving her to go do this job just didn't seem worth it. I was like, what is the point? It's not like I'm saving the world over here. I remember I had so many conversations with my mom, who was a teacher, and I was like, you know, mom, at least you, you're like teaching children. You're teaching the future generation. I'm over here telling Hewlett Packard whether their public relations is doing better than Microsoft's, like, who cares? So it just seemed pointless. And you've probably heard the story by now. I quit. I quit that job two weeks before I was supposed to go back and have never looked back. But I quit my job right then because I knew I needed to do work that somehow changed the world and allowed me to spend time with my Daughter. And I just want to say, no shame on anyone who sends their kids to daycare. No shame on anyone who has content pillars. No shame on anyone who runs profit and loss statements on their business or, you know, makes quarterly income projections on their business. All that stuff is great. It's fine for me. It felt like restrictive jail. And I just also want to add, partly for me, I've worked in marketing and advertising and public relations for so long. Like, I do have a media strategy in my head, but I don't think of it in terms of pillars or, or content containers or any of that. I just post my posts. Content pillars are a great idea. If that makes you feel excited about creating and posting content, please go for it. And the doulas and sleep consultants I coach, like, sometimes that's what we do. We work on their content pillars. But I'm just saying, my whole point in this whole rant is that I knew I needed to build a business that fit my new life as a mom. I needed it to feel good and I needed to feel alive. I needed to feel like what I was doing in the world was actually making a difference. And so fast forward to now. So that was back in 2003. Now it's we're coming up on 2025. And yes, I'm the doula Darcy, big successful doula business coach. I've been a doula for postpartum doula for 14, coming up on 15 years. And I have so much free time. I am making so much of an impact. I am helping way more families than ever before. I truly believe the work I am doing to help doulas and sleep consultants grow their businesses, to get more clients, to help more people. I truly believe we're all out here saving the world. And that just makes me feel amazing. But it took a while to get here. I want you to hear that. That it's not like I decided in a panic to quit my corporate career. And then I ended up here making tons of money and only working a fraction of the hours I used to work. It took time to get here. But since that moment of quitting my corporate career, everything has been focused on those goals of making a difference in the world and being available for my kids and just honestly enjoying my life. And so the very first way I did this after quitting my corporate career was to actually make a spreadsheet. I do love a good spreadsheet. I made a spreadsheet of our household budget and looked at, you know, what our bills were, what we needed to you know, what I actually needed to earn to make, you know, continue our household paying the bills. And I started to make some cuts. I called our phone company, I. I trimmed down our cell phone bill, I cut our landline, I. We cut part of our cable bill, or all of it, I can't remember. We did a whole bunch of stuff. We stopped eating out and to trim our budget. And then what do you know, I only needed to earn like 200 or $250 a week. And then, side note, I was kind of mad. I was like, wait a minute, I've been working for all these years full time, 40 plus, you know, 50, 60 hours a week, commuting, dressing up in fancy clothes like this. You know, this was way before COVID And, you know, I had to get dressed, I had to do the schmooze, I had to attend events. Like, I. I was never home. And all I really needed at the end of the day was 250 bucks a week. So in that moment, I went out and got a waitressing job. And it was fantastic because I worked a couple nights a week. My. On the nights I worked, my husband, fortunately, was able to like, leave his job at 4, get home, I would hand the baby off. And it was kind of awesome. It was really awesome. Not kind of. It was really awesome because it gave him daddy daughter time. He had to figure out how to put her to bed, he had to feed her without me around. And I got. It felt like a night out. I was just hanging out at this restaurant, working, waitressing, but I got like a shift drink at the end of the night. It was a really great little gig, and I earned a couple hundred dollars a week, which is all I needed to learn and I. Which was all I needed to earn. And then the rest of the time I was with my daughter, I was kind of like in the stay at home mom world. And it was great. And then so somewhere in there, I got pregnant again, had to stop waitressing, and through a former employer, got a job at the blogging company zanga.com. oh my God. Did anyone have a Zanga blog? So I worked there. That's where I learned all about online business, online marketing. So much tech stuff I learned by working at Zanga and so much about blogging. And it was actually I was acting like a postpartum doula because at by this point, I had two kids. I was pregnant with my third. I had my third kid while I worked at Zanga. And I was just obsessed with reading people's mommy's blog, mommy blogs and cheering them on, answering their questions, finding pregnant bloggers and telling them like, oh my gosh, you have to plan for postpartum, it's harder than you think. And then one day I read a blog about a postpartum doula and that was when I learned that postpartum doulas exist. I learned that this was a job and that was when things really started rolling and I thought this, this is what I am meant to do, not the nap time hustle while working for Zanga. I mean that was great. It served a purpose. Very thankful for that time that I had there. But it was hard because I was working early in the morning. I would get up before my three kids, work for an hour and then try. Do you know what a circus it is to try to get three kids to nap at the same time? Or actually we were just talking about it today. My older two remember that they were allowed to watch a show when I put the baby down for his afternoon nap and that's when I would work. And they remember that to this day, like keeping it a secret that they got to watch a show while the baby napped. I just think it's so funny what your kids remember. Anyway, so I was doing the nap time hustle working for Zanga and I read this blog and that's when I decided like, this is how I can save the world by becoming a postpartum doula. And I'll just work part time and be around for my kids. And you know, by the, you know, years are going by at this point. And I started, I trained to be and certified to be a postpartum doula in 2010. My youngest at that point was 2 or 3. So between my husband, my mom, my friends, I was in a babysitting co op where we treated babysitting hours like I would get my my two older ones were in school, my youngest was home with me. And that's how I launched my postpartum doula business. And because of my background in marketing, I was able to really grow that quickly and very quickly got to the point where I was working every possible free hour that I had. I was doing a four hour shift in the morning, shoving a sandwich in my face as I flew across town to an afternoon four hour shift. And I mean it was great, I loved it, but I was burning out and I was hitting the point of, you know, if I was working two four hour shifts, I couldn't pick the kids up from school and that I was starting to be like, well, this, you know, the whole point was that I wanted to be with my kids and then also working eight hours a day. I didn't do that every day, but there were definitely some days of the week because I was so busy I had to do two shifts. But anyway, I was just. There were no more hours that I could work. And I really had raised my rates to the point to what the market would allow. And you know, by this time we have three kids and, you know, bills have increased a lot. I just wasn't. I needed way more than $250 a week to make it all happen. And I was just, I was hitting a limit on what I could earn as a doula. It was still great. It was still actually probably better than my corporate career, but I was tired. And I remember coming home from eight hours helping two different families with their laundry and their dishes and their baby, and then coming home and having my own three kids and that, those dishes and that laundry, like I was pushing burnout. And so I kind of was like, well, I love this job saving the world. And I do have way more freedom than I did at my corporate career. You know, I, I could take days off, I could go. I did a lot of volunteering in my kids classrooms. I could go to their games. I could take more than one week vac, but it was hard. Yeah. So anyway, I am sharing all this just to give you kind of the behind the scenes of what my thought process was as I built my business. And one thing that has stayed constant throughout since I had my first baby was that I wanted my work first of all. Family came first and I wanted my work to make a difference in the world and not take me away from my family. And so after being a busy doula launching, starting to create digital courses, I first created digital courses for moms and then quickly decided I could make even more of an impact if I helped doulas with their marketing. So that's when I started to create digital courses for doulas. And all the stuff that you all.
- [22:47]
A
Know that I do now with my.
- [22:49]
C
Doula village and now one on one coaching for doulas and sleep consultants and my podcast and the doula marketing group on Facebook, all these things now. And now, I mean, my impact is immeasurable. I mean, the doulas I'm helping get more clients and grow their business means so many more families are getting doula support than when I was just one sole doula back in the beginning of my career. So I also want to say that Everyone has this ability now in 2025 with the power of the Internet, to create a business that fits their life and not the other way around. And in 2025, I am going all in on helping doulas who want to take their businesses to this next level by adding passive income streams so they can free up more of their time and not be hitting that burnout edge that I was bumping up against at the height of my in person work. And I want to just say that it's not accurate to say that I worked hard to get where I am from the day I decided to launch virtual services and digital courses. It hasn't been hard like, it hasn't been hard like digging ditches or setting an alarm and commuting 40 minutes to a cubicle and then commuting home and packing kids up to drop them off at daycare and, you know, working at a 9 to 5 job. It hasn't been hard, but it has taken consistency. I have had to consistently take action, like on a daily basis. And by that I mean sometimes it was, you know, launching a lead magnet. Sometimes it's like launching a new course. Sometimes it's reading a book about business or a book about mindset, or listening to podcasts or hiring a coach, spending money on myself and my growth. It takes that consistent action every single day. And that's where I see a lot of doulas fall through the cracks in terms of creating passive income. They get started and then they stop. The same with in person doula work. It's the same with any business that you're creating. You can't try it for a month and then stop. You have to keep going. And so it hasn't been hard, but it also hasn't been easy. But it has been so worth it. When I quit my safe corporate job, cut my bills and stayed home with my daughter and started to waitress, I had some friends who thought I was crazy. They were like, darcy, this is bananas. Like, what are you doing? But so, in a way, that was hard. It was hard. But in a way, it was also so easy. That decision to quit my job and stay home with my daughter brought so much ease and peace to my mind, to my body. It just felt so right. And again, it felt right for me. I am not saying this is what everybody should do. This. It felt, I. It felt so right for me. I'm absolutely not saying that you have to do the same thing as me to start your business. I'm saying you have to make choices like this. You have to make scary choices, you have to take scary actions. So it felt right for me to quit my job. It felt scary, but it felt scarier to spend the rest of my life schlepping babies to daycare and then commuting to a job and packing lunches and working in a cubicle for 50 hours a week so that I could have one to two weeks of vacation a year and see my kids for an hour before bed and then on the weekends and that was it. Like that. I got to a point where that felt terrifying to me. That wasn't the life that I wanted and I knew it when my daughter was two and a half months old. And so lots of people ask me, like how, how I did this and, and that was my driver all the time. It was. I wasn't scared about launching or I should. I wasn't super scared about launching a business. I was terrified of staying in my mediocre, status quo, safe corporate career for the next 25 years, 40 years. That felt terrifying. And honestly, back to the cage, that felt like rigid structure that I didn't want to be in. So now I think when people talk about content pillars and their 15 step strategic marketing plans and analyzing projected growth for quarter two, it just, it brings all that corporate stuff back for me and I freeze up. Like, I am not going back. I don't want any of that. And I have built a business that makes now way more money than I ever did in my corporate career. And I'm working so many less hours. I only work a few hours a day. And like I said, I, I feel like I'm making a big difference. I am making a big difference in the world and it is so amazing. And this is what I want for all of you. As my friend Jay from high school says, no one's getting out of here alive, so you might as well go for it. So this is what my personal doula Darcy theme for 2025 is, is helping more doulas build the businesses that feel good for them. And maybe, maybe it has nothing to do with digital courses or passive income or anything like that. I don't even care. I don't care what your business looks like. But I am a genius at helping you talk through, figure out what is that ideal business for you and how does that look? And then what's the marketing strategy that we need to put in place for you to make that happen? So please don't take from this that you have to build a business the way that I built a business. Please take from this you have to build the business that feels good in your gut, that feels good when you put your head down on the pillow at night, that feels good. Every decision that you make for it for your families. That's what we all have, the immense. That is what we all have the incredible opportunity to create now that our mothers and grandmothers frankly didn't have. So this is what I'm working on with my one on one coaching clients in 2025. This is what I'm working on. This is what I have been working on with the doulas inside my doula village. And listen, do you need content pillars?
- [32:04]
B
Do you need a social media strategy?
- [32:06]
C
Is that what will make you feel great? I'm your girl like that. I whip those out like crazy. I would love to create your content pillars if that is what you feel like you need. And it's funny because that is what so many of my one on one coaching clients come to me saying that they need. It's funny. It's a very common thing. They're like, I'd love to, you know, like on Monday have you tell me what like is the strategy for the week in terms of social media and what I need to do and what I need to get done and like next steps and like can you, you know, on Voxer can we stay in touch and you hold me accountable and we check in on Friday. That is what I do all day long and I love it. I love doing that for you all. For me I am, I joke with the. I say it in my doula village all the time. I'm just out here winging it. And for me, doula Darcy, winging it. It's actually, you know, a lot of experience and marketing know how like I do have a plan. It's just not written down. I can change it on a whim if I want to, when I want to and I don't have it doesn't matter. So I hope this was helpful. I hope that you all have a very happy holiday season. Wishing you a very merry, wishing you all a happy new year, a prosperous new year. And shoot me a DM on Instagram if you liked this episode and tell me what your takeaway is and tell me what's feeling good about your business right now and what's feeling a little wonky that maybe you want to change and let go of and adjust. And you know, here's the thing, that's the other thing. This has been a process. Not every day has been this blissed out state of business. But it's been pretty awesome. It's been an awesome ride. So happy holidays and I will catch you on the next episode.
- [34:29]
A
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 doulas 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.