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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 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.

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Hello everybody. Happy day Today. I want to talk to you about what happens when you're a couple years into your doula business. You figured out how to get clients, you figured out how to serve those clients. But then all of a sudden I feel like there's this moment. Maybe it's more of a slow burn when you realize that you have hit the ceiling on the amount of income that you can earn in the current way you're running your business. So for me, this was two or three years in. Honestly, I can't remember when it started to hit me, but it was somewhere around there. And so the first year, I was just so, so excited. I was so excited to actually be a postpartum doula. You've heard me say a lot. I would have paid to go be somebody's postpartum doula. I was, I had just had that burning passion to go help other moms. And so I was just so excited. I was doing it. I was doing what I needed to do to get clients. I had my marketing background, so I knew what to do there. I was just so focused on getting going, meeting people in the community and getting busy with clients. And I did. And then around that two to three year mark, I do remember a day coming home. I did have moments. So I structured my postpartum doula business. I didn't take births. I only took postpartum doula clients because I had three little kids. They were in elementary school, preschool, and I put them on the bus in the morning and I wanted to be there for the bus at 3:30 or whatever at the end of their school day. So I could only work like 9 to 3. I would come home at 3, get the kids off the bus. Sometimes. Sometimes when I did have. You can't control when clients give birth. So if somebody gave birth a little early or someone extended their contract, I would have these weeks where I was working 8 to 12 in the morning, 12:30 to 4:30 in the afternoon. My mom would help out with my kids or I'd hire a babysitter. I was like shoving a granola bar in my face as I drove across town to that second family when I was so helping two families in one day, that's a lot of laundry for them. That's a lot of cooking, that's a lot of caring for the baby. That's a lot of listening to the mom, listening to the parents. And I would come home and my three kids would need me. They would have missed me. The sink would be overflowing with dishes, laundry would be piled up. No one had clean clothes for school the next day. And I just, I'd be like, I have already done like six loads of laundry today and three sinks of dishes. Do I really have to do more? And then the same kind of feeling would hit me at the end of the week, at the end of the month, I was working as much as I possibly could. Yes, I could have technically done overnights, but oh my God, I had just had three babies in four years. I could not, I was not doing any more sleep less nights. I used to joke you would have to pay me $200 an hour to go be up with a baby at night. So I really, and I want, being a mom to me was my first thing. That's the whole reason I quit my corporate job. Go listen to that podcast if you didn't hear the story of me quitting in a fit of postpartum anxiety when My daughter was 12 weeks old. Anyway, so I could work 9am to 3pm essentially. And I was charging what I charged per hour at that time. And I was, I knew I was at the top rate of other doulas in the area. I knew I couldn't raise my rates anymore. So I was earning as much as I could possibly earn per hour. And I only had these six hours a day. And then it felt like a part time job trying to schedule that if I had two clients a month, like doing one Monday, Wednesday, Friday, one Tuesday, Thursday or whatever, lining up the due dates and then I had set my packages up so that I worked four hour days, four hour shifts per day. So then I had these two hours where I didn't have my kids yet, but also wasn't earning any money. And shout out to Jen Taweel, who's in my doula village, she had the same realization. She just started to do six hour shift. I don't know why I didn't think of this back in my day, but anyway, I had this frustration that I was trading my hours for dollars and I only had a certain number of hours and the math wasn't mathing. I was just barely earning what I needed to earn to pay the bills. I was married at the time and we were doing it. We were paying our bills, but we weren't taking big vacations. We weren't saving for the kids, colleges yet. We weren't even. The kids weren't even costing us that much money, that sweet spot before they start joining sports teams and dance clubs and gymnastics. So I just knew that with a pit in my stomach, I just came to this realization that I'm not going to be able to do this. I love being a postpartum doula, but I, as a mom of three kids, like, I, I need to be bringing in more money. This wasn't enough. And I was so sad because I did not want to stop being a postpartum doula. And so I knew I had to figure this out. And spoiler alert, I did. And now I help other doulas do the same. But lately I've just been hearing the talk that from so many of you who are at this moment in your doula business, you're getting clients, you've figured all that out, but you still aren't making what you need to make. And this goes for birth doulas just too. There's only so many births you can do a month before you are just running on the edge of burnout and not doing anybody any good. So the first thing you can do if you get to this point is raise your rates. Maybe you're at the top of the game in your town. Maybe you're already the doula who's charging the most, but maybe you need to raise them more. And if you are not the doula who's charging the most, then definitely raise your rates. Even if you're brand new. And you think, oh my God, but that doula has 20 years experience and I only have one still raise your rates. We just had a great conversation about this in office hours in my doula village. One of the doulas was saying that all the doulas in her town are very experienced and like at that 20 year mark and they just, they don't charge very much money. And so we got talking about it and we were, I was saying maybe they're my age and they bought their house 30 years ago, so they have a very low mortgage interest rate and you know, they're in her. In this doula's case, she was saying they were married, like they have partners, like they just and their kids were grown, they just didn't need a lot of money. So maybe they just hadn't really looked at their rate in a while. But this doula had two little kids. She was just starting out, they were buying their first house. And so we were just saying to her, like, you have to charge more than these other experienced doulas in your town. She felt very weird about it, but we eventually got her through it. And you, at the end of the day, you need to charge what you need to charge to live your life. So first thing to do when you're at this point in your business is raise your rates. And then the second thing that you can do is look at ways that you can boost your doula packages that you're currently offering. What can you add to them that doesn't suck up any of your time, but boosts what you can charge for your package. Do you have ebooks that you've written? Do you have guides? Do you have checklists? What are can you add on like a. If you're a birth or postpartum doula, can you add on like a. This would take some of your time, but it would probably be worth it. Could you add on like a nursery walkthrough? Could you add on what are some virtual services that you could add on? Could you add on virtual birth planning sessions to your packages? Could you also sell those to other people who haven't hired you to be their doula? And so things like that, birth planning sessions, nursery planning sessions, gift registry consultations, like all those kinds of things you can fit into the example I was giving where I had that two hour block in my day, every day when I wasn't with clients but I didn't have my kids yet. What are some virtual services you could offer that you can fit into these little blocks of time that you have that you can charge for, that you can. They could be add ons for your existing clients. They can also be what's called a downsell. If someone says, oh, I can't afford to pay you $3,000 for you to be my birth doula, you can say, okay, fine, but you could over here book a $200 work with me to write your birth plan session. And we do that over zoom. It's like you're building some little offers that you can also sell to people who don't choose you as their doula. So there's so many things that you could do and that you could. And pick the. What is every. I always say every doula has like a little secret sauce. What's your little specialty in the doula world? Do you know all the gear? Oh my gosh. Like you could have like baby registry consultation plannings or even just, oh God, you had your baby and now, or you just had your shower and now you have all this gear and you need me to teach you how to use it all. That would be an amazing one on one virtual service that you could add to your repertoire. But also try to really work in things that don't take your time again, ebooks, digital downloads, things like that. And then even. But even things that do take your time, like a virtual birth planning session, that is better than driving somewhere. So what I tried to do back to my own story is I tr. I became a CLC certified lactation counselor and I would do lactation visits. And before you all come after me, I referred out to an IBCLC when I needed to. And at the end of the day they all were. I probably could have answered all these breastfeeding questions I had in these sessions just as a doula. They were just like little breastfeeding help sessions and they were awesome. But I couldn't manage to do one five days a week. I would do two a month if that. But it was something. But I still had to go drive over to the person's house, drive home, like write up a little report for them. If you could do things like that. That's hard to do a breastfeeding one. But if you could do any kind of sessions virtually, that's ideal. So these are all things you can go home and do and figure out and, and post in the doula marketing group. And if you're in my doula village, like this is the kind of stuff we're talking about all the time in our Facebook group and on our office hours. But get some ideas flowing and then if you really want to take this to the next level and how I got out of this conundrum of hitting an income ceiling and where I need, knew I needed to stop trading my hours for dollars. My limited hours for dollars is starting an agency. I brought up what I did was I brought on my first independent contractor and then slowly brought on more. And then as you all know, then I expanded into offering adding passive income revenue streams into my doula business. And this, I just love this for doulas because not only does it help you with this income ceiling problem, you're starting to earn more income and work the same amount of hours or be away from your family the same amount of hours. You can really when you get into agencies and passive income digital selling digital courses and downloads and products, that's when you can really start to earn way more income and have way more of an impact. You can help more people. It sounds Generally I believe that if something sounds too good to be true, it is. But in this case it is true. You it is possible to work less hours, help more people and earn more money. And if this is something you want to do, I highly encourage you to check out my one on one coaching packages. I absolutely love working one on one with doulas to find out where their little doula sweet spot is, what they would be so good at and what is here's the other thing. For as many of you listening to this podcast, there's that many business operations that we can build. There's an infinite number of ways you can do this. And I love working with doulas to figure out their unique way to build the perfect business for them. They that A meets their needs of them and their family and B harnesses their special sauce as a doula. Their interests, their expertise, their zone of genius to build a business that is bringing them more income and not burning them out. Again, I am all about you all staying in this work for the long haul and you you're not gonna do it if you're getting to that point like me realizing oh my God, I'm working my butt off and we're just barely getting by cause that just isn't gonna cut it for the long haul. We just in my doula village I just did a five day like set up your doula business finances challenge with them and this is what I was talking about. We need to be setting our rates not to just get by like we have to be conscient, conscientiously saving for our taxes. We need to be saving for retirement. We need to save for our kids activities that they want to do and the college or whatever trade schools that they want to go to. We have to be grown ups you guys. And I want you to be a doula and a grown up and feel satisfied. So I hope this was helpful. I hope you gained some little nugget of wisdom from this. Reach out to me if you want to join my doula village if you want to do some one on one coaching with me to figure out what your magical combination of zone of genius and doula business we can build for you. I just absolutely, absolutely love geeking out over this and it is my absolute this is my it turns out zone of genius is helping you figure out the business for you and then the marketing plan to go with it. So I hope you have a great day. My next podcast episode is going to be coming to you live from the birth worker retreat. I am heading off on a plane this weekend flying down to Clearwater, Florida and then we kick off the birth worker retreat on the 20th. I honestly don't even know what day of the week it is. It must be Tuesday. Yes. So we kick off the birth worker retreat on Tuesday. I can't even wait to be in the room with all these amazing doulas, sleep consultants, lactation counselors and more. And we are just going to have the best time kicking off 2026 together. So hopefully I will see you there or on these Internet streets at some point.