A (0:04)

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 shifts 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.

B (0:40)

All right, before we get into this week's episode, I have to tell you about the birth worker retreat because in this episode I'm talking all about putting yourself in rooms where the people who are doing what you want to do are. And that is what the birth worker retreat is. It is three days in Clearwater, Florida in January 20th through 22nd at the Wyndham Grand. Three days to hang out with me and Jody Condon and so many other doulas. There's probably going to be 40 to 50 of us. It is always such a great time. The energy level is high, the vibes are ecstatic. We have a great time. We take walks on the beach, we sit by the pool, we do some learning. And it's such a great way to kick off the year by just getting a break. It's like that post holiday trip that we all need and spending your time just being around a bunch of doulas. I've heard people describe it like it's like summer camp for grownups, summer camp for grown up doulas. But it's also for lactation counselors, sleep consultants, anyone dealing with clients in the pregnancy, birth, postpartum, perinatal year. So check it out at thebirthworkerretreat.com shoot me a DM with any questions that you have. It's going to be a great time and I hope to hang out with you there. All right, welcome back, everybody. I really thank you so much for all the feedback on the last episode with my coach, Amber, talking about designing a business to fit your life. That one really struck a nerve apparently. And then I was thinking today how I want to walk you through what this can look like in reality, something I'm doing in my business to make it fit my life right now. And the thing that I'm doing is actually, for the time being, starting on Friday, going to be closing the doors to my Membership program, my Doula Village. So if you're in there already, don't worry, you're in. And if you're not, you can join right now before Friday. But I am doing this so that I can focus on a couple of things in my life. One is if you listen to the last episode and I'm sure most of you like family comes first. I am not. My business doesn't come before my family. I'm designing my business to fit my life with my family. So my son tore his acl, has to have surgery next week. So I want to be able to focus the time I need on him and his recovery, making sure he doesn't fail math while he's missing all this square school, making sure he's getting to his physical therapy and doing all the exercises he needs to do. Also, it's getting cold here in New Hampshire and I need to get focused on skiing. I need to get my equipment in order, plan out all my trips, handle the mom guilt of how I'm gonna go skiing with my little guy on the couch in a leg brace. But also business wise, I want winter focus on serving the people who are in that community in my Doula Village. Also, I've launched a new mastermind called the Village Mastermind for just 10 entrepreneurs. I want to really focus on serving them well and working really closely with them. That's one example of how I'm designing my business to fit my life. So the doors to my Doula village are closing. If you want in, get in there now. The link to join will be in the show notes or just go to my website. But this, I think this is my favorite thing about being, having an online business and being an entrepreneur is you can just change what you're doing at any time. I wasn't gonna talk about this, but there's so many in the online space. There's all this talk about having a team and hiring a team and having virtual assistants and all that is. And no shade on anyone who has a team. But I just, I don't want to. That's one way I'm designing my business to fit my life or fit my personality. I don't want to be managing a team. I don't want to have content meetings on Mondays and this kind of meetings on Tuesday. Because all that feels is my marketing and advertising jobs and my cubicles that I had to be there 9 to 5 and it just feels bleh. I would rather just have it be me. Yes, I hire some. I hire independent contractors to do some projects for me. I do have some virtual assistants that do some small things for me, but not I'm not managing and being team. I love. Like today I was just out on a walk in the chilly sunshine here in New Hampshire and got the idea of doing this podcast to walk you through this example of designing my business to fit my life and just throwing it up on the podcast. So that's me. So what? The other thing is that you can have this freedom too when you build your own online business. You can build it any way that you want and you can change it when you need to change it. So many of the people that I'm coaching or trying to get it perfect, trying to launch it perfect, trying to do everything perfect, and I'm always like, let's just do it this way that we've thought of. And then you can always change it. I always say there's no doula police, there's no business police, there's no don't be a jerk, don't break the law, don't do, don't do illegal stuff. But you're allowed to change the rules of how you're structuring your business anytime that you want. And while we are on this subject, I did another post about this recently that also struck a little bit of a nerve in a good way. Meaning that once you do get into this online business world, you start, the algorithm catches up to you. How they know you're doing it, I don't know. But you start to see all these ads from what I call the bro marketers that are like, hey, click here to get my magic funnel that'll make you six figures in a day. Or learn how I earned a million dollars in a month or how I SC scaled fast without ads or whatever. They're selling you their. No, they, they are selling you their product or service. And whether it's a good product or service or not, what I want you to hear is that, and this is very similar to a spiel I used to give to my postpartum doulas clients, like there's no magic formula. These bro marketers are trying to scare you into thinking that they know some secret, some marketing hack, some magic funnel building strategy that's just going to easily and magically unlock all this money that's going to just fly into your bank account and it's just not true. Same way that a lot of new parents I would as a postpartum doula. When they start to say what's the best way do I feed then change the diaper and then do this, or what's the best way to do that? But as soon as someone says what's the best way? Whether they're a new parent or an entrepreneur, in both cases, there is no best way. There's the best way for you. So don't get all hung up on thinking, maybe you should buy this Bro Marketers magic funnel hack. Because it probably won't work for you, especially if you're selling a product or service that is geared towards pregnancy, birth and new moms. They don't want that stuff. So business, this is what I was saying in the post. Business comes down to. It's actually very simple. And I'll show you explain why we think that it gets hard. Business is simple. Business is one, you make a good product or service that helps people and solves a problem that they're having that provides value. Step one, Step two, you tell them about it and give them the link or the way that they can go purchase it. That's really it. You make a good product and then you tell people about it. Why do we make it so hard? Why aren't we all millionaires? Because step number two, telling people about it, that's just marketing. And yes, there's the bro marketers out there selling these magic hacks and funnels and strategies. And yes, there are. Obviously there's marketing strategies, but get the word out the same way I'm always saying, no one can hire you to be their doula if they don't know you exist. Same goes for your course. No one can buy your digital course if they don't know it exists. It's not that your digital course is bad. It's not that your digital course costs too much money. It's that you're not getting it out in front of enough eyeballs, people who need it. Same for if you're a doula in your town. If not enough people, if not enough people of childbearing age in your town know that you're a doula, no one's gonna buy, no one's gonna hire you. So marketing is the way to solve that problem. And yes, obviously I would like you to join my doula village or hire me to be your coach, or let's do some strategy sessions. Obviously there are strategies around marketing, but you can get some books from the library, you can Google it, you can figure out on your own how to market anything. Hiring a coach, joining a program collapses the time and gets you there faster. But then there's like this other tricky widget that goes along with this, you could buy how many. Whoa, here's a good question. Raise your little hand. If you've bought a marketing strategy or done the program or you think you're doing the steps to get your product, course, whatever, out into the world. How many of the, how many of those courses have you bought? Programs that you bought are just sitting unopened, unused. You haven't even logged in yet. How many people know what you need to do? You need to write some blogs, you need to post on social media consistently, you need to have good SEO on your website and you need to network there. Boom. That's amount. That's the marketing strategy right there. But okay, so if everybody knows that, why are some people super successful and some people not? That's a really interesting thing to look at. Taking it back to doula work. Why are some doulas in the same city offering the same services? Why are some of them booked solid and others are like, I can't even get anyone to book a free consult on my website. Why do some people create a digital product or a course and start selling it and other people's course just sits there unsold? Because along with the marketing strategy is actually all the inner work you need to do as an entrepreneur, as a person, to get over yourself, to get it out into the world. I was listening to, I think it was James Wedmore's podcast the other day and it was talking about how entrepreneurship is just the biggest journey of self discovery you could ever go on. Because it's just you up there, it's just you. And the sooner you get to the point of realizing you only have yourself to blame or thank for your results, you could have the best marketing strategy written out plan in the world. But if you're not actually doing it, if you're just kind of whispering, hey, oh, I have a course that's really good, no one's gonna buy it. You have to actually go do it. You have to to actually go do the steps of marketing and putting it out there. And that can take a lot of getting over imposter syndrome, getting over procrastination, but then actually looking at what's underneath the procrastination, what's underneath your fear of getting this done, what is truly holding you back from doing it. And that is why coaching is so effective and putting yourself in rooms with other people who are doing what you want to do. My email that went out today was about how like when I was a kid, I didn't get to be a really good gymnast by sitting on my couch at home. I had to join a gym and get a coach and join a team and work really hard and like actually join the next level up to really push myself, get in the practice group of the people that were doing really well. You could think of that. A million sports analogies like that. But it's the same thing. Like, I didn't become successful in my doula career until I started to make connections in my community, hang out with the other doulas and really walk the walk of being a doula. It got so much easier once I had some doula besties around me. And then it's like, multiply that by a hundred. When it comes to building an online business, you have got to be in rooms, physical actual rooms or virtual rooms with other people who are doing what you want to do. Other people who are creating businesses out of thin air, turning their laptops into an ATM that just delivers them money because they have built this online business. It's so much easier. It seems so much more real because it is when you're surrounded by other people who are doing it versus home alone or home alone hanging out with your mom friends, no offense to your mom friends, you need them too. But if they are accountants or work at the local insurance company, like they are going to think you're bananas for trying to do this and it's going to hold you back and slow you down. So you have to take the initiative to put yourself in the rooms with the people doing what you want to do next. So one of those rooms is my doula village. So join. Get in there now. But this, I've just been on a tear about this in the past few weeks. After our main retreats in early October, we just. The energy in that house. I had two different groups come through both times. It was just amazing and relaxed. Like we were just chilling but invigorated and being together, having these conversations, listening to how each of us are running our businesses. We got so. So everybody. It's like you can just see everybody's wheels turning. And it got really easy to dream into what could be next, what is next. And I just want to do this more. This retreats, business retreats and joining masterminds have been the absolute biggest game changer for me in terms of the past six years growing this online business. Now that I have and that's. And I want to do it for all of you. I did it with the business coaches and programs that I did and they were great, but none of them were doulas and there was always like this little piece of me but like that needed that doula component. So that is what I'm creating with my doula village with my main retreats for the my doula village people and especially this new village mastermind. And I'm so excited about it. And you can do this in your own community. Set up a weekly monthly coffee date with all your doulas, not all your doulas in town. The one like the cool doulas, the abundance mindset doulas, the ones who want to collaborate and not compete. Get together with them regularly. Maybe you have a voxer group. Maybe you have a what's it called, WhatsApp group. Maybe you have coffee once a week, maybe it's once a month. Maybe you start a little zoom meetup with a doula you met. Maybe you met someone at the DONA summit that is trying to launch a digital childbirth ed course and you guys want to be accountability buddies and you set up like a weekly zoom date. These are the things that move the needle on your life. It's as simple as surrounding yourself with positive thinking people versus negative Nellies. The impact that has on your mood on a daily basis is huge. So I can't wait to hear. I hope this was inspiring to you. I can't wait to hear the little tweaks that you make to design your business, your current business that you have right now to fit your life, the dream life that you want to have instead of cramming your life into the little nooks and crannies left by your business. So shoot me a DM on Instagram. Tell me that you heard this episode. I can't wait to hear your takeaways.