Hey, this is Kyleigh, and you’re listening to episode 3 of the Birthworker Podcast… today we are going to talk about the #1 hesitation I hear from aspiring doulas… and that is, “How can I get into birthwork if I have my own babies at home?!”...

The amount of times that I’ve heard, “I’d love to be a doula, but I can’t because I breastfeed my baby…”... I’ve heard it a million times.

And I’m here to tell you… that there are plenty of ways to be a doula, without needing to be on call 24/7… There are plenty of ways to STILL SUPPORT BIRTHS, when you have your own babies at home… 

If you want to make birthwork happen for you, then this episode is for you because we are going to dive in to not one, not 2, not 3… but SEVEN ways that you can make birthwork fit your lifestyle when you have your own kids to take care of. 

So, if you’ve been thinking about becoming a doula, or maybe you’re already a doula and wondering how you’ll make this all work when YOU get pregnant… then this episode is for you! 

And… by the way…thanks for being here today, if you're already subscribed to the show, thank you so much. And if you are here for the first time, make sure you subscribe to the show because today, like in every episode, I'm bringing you practical tips to help you turn your passion for birth into a fulltime career.

If this episode inspires you to try new things in your doula business, I want you to know that we turn all of our podcasts into FULL ON blog posts… so if you wanna cocme back later this week to take some notes to help you implement one of these 7 way to be a doula when you have kids of your own… then totally come back and check out the blog. 

Since this is episode 3 of the birth worker podcast, you’ll find the blog post at birthworker.com/3… the number 3.

Alright, let’s get into the 7 ways to build a doula practice when you have babies at home… and hang around to the end, because at the end I’ll tell you which one of these I implamented to help me grow my doula business to multi-6 figures with a breastfeeding and cosleeping toddler. 

If you're worried about attending births and being on call, when you have your small children at home, I'm telling you that it's possible to do it. If you want to do it, you can…you just really need to have a plan. 

And so I'm going to walk you through a whole bunch of ways… actually 7 ways…  that this could look for you, your family, and your doula business.

Before we jump into it… You have to know, that there ARE plenty of ways to work in the birth community… to be a birthworker and to not be on call 24/7… 

But if being on call and supporting births in person is something that you want to do, but maybe, you have a baby at home or toddlers at home, breastfeeding kids, maybe…. And they're like attached to you all the time…it can be a little bit scary to leave them at home and go attend births. I totally get it. 

I’ve been there.

I don’t think you know this about me… maybe if you’ve been following me on instagram since the beginning… then maybe you know… but I became a birth doula before I had my daughter… so I’ve lived this… I get it…

So, let me give you my tips from someone who has been through it… let's hash it out. 

What this could look like?

We're going to go through 7 different ways that you could actually make being on call work for your family. 

The first one is, taking you baby to births WITH you. 

Woah, right? Heck ya! It is TOTALLY 100% possible. Doulas take their babies to prenatal appointments and births all the freaking time!!

Now, I have to be honest, I have never taken my daughter to a birth with me… but she has total come to prenatal appointments and postpartum appointments with me. 

It’s 100% case by case, but ESPECIALLY if the family I’m supporting has other children, I feel totally comfortable brining my daughter to those appointments. 

So… if you’ve been wondering if that’s a thing… yes… yes it is…

The second way to make birthwork work for you if you can a baby… is by having a doula business partner.

So, the way that I typically see this done is in 12 hour shifts. So like you would be on call from 7:00 PM to 7:00 AM, and then she would be on call from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM. 

This would be really helpful if your husband ot partner works during the day. And so you can only support birth at night when your partner's home with the kids, or maybe you have breastfeeding, co-sleeping babies, so you want to be at home at night…. Perfect, either way, you can take the shift that makes the most sense for you and your family. 

Maybe it's easier for you to attend births during the day because it’s easier for you to find a babysitter during the day….Awesome, you can take the day shift! 

Really what it comes down to is get out a piece of paper and just start brainstorming and see like how could potentially work for your family based on your schedule. 

I cant to dive into the financial part of this real quick… because when you’re working with a business partner, there are a lot of things you need to know, and you're going to have to find a way to play around with the logistics of the financial part too…

When you're picking a doula business partner, you have to come up with something that feels good for both of you. 

So I'm talking like, how do you actually split the money? If I'm on call from seven to seven, and you're on call from the other seven to seven. How do we actually split the money? Who goes to the prenatals? How does that work? 

So those are really good questions to sit down and consider, start a brainstorming session and just go to town. 

So how do you want to split the money depending on who actually goes to the birth?

(And by the way… all of these questions are written in the blog post… so if you’re driving or on a run and listening in your earbuds… come back later and go to birthworker.com/3 because this is episode 3… and you’ll be able to find all these questions…

Okay.. you also need to figure out… Who's going to attend the prenatals? 

Is that going to be one of you? Both of you? 

Is there going to be like a “lead doula” for each client? 

You also need to figure out, who's going to own the business? Is the entire business going to be owned by both of you? Like, are you going to share it 50/50?

If you're going to share the business 50/50, who's posting on social media, who's going to fund the startup costs? Who's paying for the website, who's writing the emails, who's finding clients?

What boundaries are you going to set with each other? And honestly, like one of the most important questions is how are you going to end it? If one of you wants to get out of the partnership, what’s that gonna look like?

Think of ALLLLL of those things before you even get started. 

And then I would 100% never ever ever do it without doing this… I would pay a lawyer to write up a contract between the two of you, because you need to know… going into it… that like nearly every single business partnership doesn't last forever. And that's not saying they end in like a horrible dumpster fire… It's just that it's like probably not going to last forever. 

So before you even start the business, start thinking about the end. It's just going to make it a lot easier to end on a high note if you've already considered what that would actually look like for you. 

Now… you can still split hours with someone but not own the business together… And that’s actually what I would do, if it were me… I would 100% have my own business.

So I would have my own business. I would choose my own prices. I would have my own social media. I would find my own clients. I would do my own website, all of it…. Like it would be 100% my business, but then I would hire on a contractor on a per client basis. 

It's a little different than having a backup doula because this person is going to be on call for every birth during the hours you’ve agreed on… so it’s not like a back–up where they will only be needed in rare circumstances…

No, they're the one who's going to show up between 7:00 PM and 7:00 AM or whatever schedule you’ve agreed on. 

If you’re on call during the day. They are going to be the one who's on call all night.

Again, a backup doula is more like for rare occasions that you can’t be there…  whereas this, it would be more like a contractor role. I would hire someone as a contractor on a per client basis. 

Now in terms of paying them… I would probably set it up to where I pay them an hourly fee for what they actually ended up doing. PLUS a flat rate for simply being on call for me. 

So they would get paid, let's say, like an hourly rate of $50 to come to a prenatal with me. They would get an hourly rate of $50 if they end up going to a birth, but there would be a maximum cutoff for that….

And then there would also be a minimum flat fee that they're going to get just for simply being on call. 

So, even if they don't support the birth, they're going to get, let's say $200 simply for being on call. And then if they ended up getting called, or if they go to a prenatal appointment with me… all of that would be at an hourly rate of $50 per hour or a hundred dollars per hour, or whatever you want that to look like. 

And what would be REALLY cool is if you could find someone who wanted to do the exact same contract with you, on their side.

So they would pay you to be on call. 

They would pay you that same hourly fee if you go support the birth. 

That would be optimal, in my opinion…

And the reason that I would do it that way, rather than finding a business partner is because I love the business side. I already have clients. I already have an online presence.

And I love the business side. So really, like, selfishly, like I wouldn't want to like give half of my business away. 

I don't want anyone else writing my website copy. I don't want anyone else writing my Instagram posts. Like I've built this solid brand over at The Autonomy Mommy where, like, I am the personality and I love it that way. I love doing the business stuff.

So that's why I won't split my business…

And even when I was starting, I knew as I was starting, that I would most likely work a lot harder than a lot of people. And I’m not saying the reason I got to where I am is because I simply worked hard… no, there was a LOT of privilege and luck involved… 

But it is the truth that there are a lot of nights that I stay up until 3:00 AM behind the scenes,

doing things for the business… right now it's 11:21 PM and I'm recording a podcast. 

I wouldn’t change it for the world…This is what I love to do. But I can't guarantee that someone would love it just as much as I do.

I think it'd be kind of hard to find someone who loves it as much as I do... And who's willing to put in as much time as I am. 

So again, that's a completely selfish business decision for me, but I am here to he real, raw, and honest…

Maybe you want to make a different decision and that's okay, too.

Maybe you don't want to just hire a contractor, maybe you do want to split the entire business…

So let's talk about that for a second. What would that look like logistically to split the entire business? 

So, if you do want to split the entire business… I bet you’re wondering…. Like, “how do I sort out the financials?” Because if one person is on call all the time, it's not really fair just to split the money down the middle, right? 

So one way to work that out, the financials in that respect would be to split the profit into thirds. 

…You have three chunks of profit, and after the business expenses, each of you get one third of the profit. And then that last third is split evenly based on the hours of the birth that each of you attended. 

So, if they attended the whole birth and you did not attend it at all, then they would get the extra third. 

If you attend the birth and they didn't at all, you would get that extra third. 

And if you guys each supported six hours of the birth, then you would just split that extra third down the middle. 

And if you supported two hours and she supported 10 hours, you would just do some simple math and divvy up that last third to make it fair based on hours attended.

The thing to realize is that you both deserve some of that money. Even if, if you're the one who goes to the entire birth, she's still working on a social media, helping find clients, helping do the backend stuff…. So she deserves some of that money from the entire package too. So splitting it into thirds is a great way to do that.

What it comes down to is that there's no perfect answer. There's no one right way to do it. It's a lot to think about. 

But finding a doula business partner is just one way to make your life easier if you have kids at home and it's hard for you to attend birth… So let’s talk about the 3rd way...

Something you can do… if you want to attend births, but it’s hard because you have kids, and being on call is stressful… You can connect with the other doulas in your area who also have kids… And you can simply trade off the kids when you're attending a birth.

Form a friendship with another doula in the area! 

Maybe like you form like a co-op with two or three other doulas, and you have like a childcare share. 

So when you're headed to a birth, you drop your baby off at her house. And then when she's going to a birth, she drops her baby off at your house and you can help her out.

A fun way to do this, and to make it so no one's resenting each other, is to gift her a hundred dollars for watching your babies… And then when she goes to a birth and you watch her babies, she gives you that $100 right back. So essentially you're just trading that $100 back and forth, back and forth… and that way, no one resents each other, no one is like, “oh, but you owe me because I watched your kids twice in a row.” That doesn't exist, you're just trading that hundred dollars back and forth. 

This would really work well if you and the other person (or the other people) are attending about the same amount of births every month… And that way, you're not watching someone else's kid 10 days a month, and she's not watching your kid at all because maybe you didn't have any clients this month, right? 

Again, you don't want to create any resentment there. 

Okay… moving on to #4… another way that you can attend births if you have your own kids… is that you could put together a community of babysitters. 

When I originally started, I put together a community of babysitters. I picked a whole bunch of babysitters that had random availability… I made sure thay they could all stay for long periods of time. A lot of them were college aged kids. And they're really just like, honestly, like up for anything. So if you could find a group of babysitters like that, and then when you're called to a birth, you can send out a group text message to the 3-5 babysitters, and then whoever's the first one that's available is the one that ends up coming to your house. 

So out of those five girls, there's a really good chance that one of them is available to leave their house right now, come to your house and watch your baby.

Now, I am going to assume that at least half of your calls to births are going to be during the nighttime, probably more than half are going to be during the nighttime. So what you would do is you would send a text message to the group of babysitters when you're leaving to the birth, your partner's probably home at night in most cases… So, then the sitter would come to your house in the morning as your partner's leaving for work.

That that's a great way to do it too. 

Okay… we have a couple more, I think it's always a great idea to, it's not always possible, but it's always a great idea… and that is to have a neighbor who you know, and who you trust for last minute situations, where someone calls you and you gotta run…. 

No matter your situation, connecting with a neighbor is always a really good idea for so many reasons…

Maybe your baby can go hang out with the neighbor for 30 minutes while your partner's driving home from work. 

Let’s say, maybe your partner has a flexible job… and you just have to give them a call, like “Hey, I'm headed to a birth, the baby’s next door.”... And then your partner will be home in 30 minutes to grab the baby. Maybe there's even a neighbor nearby that has kids too and they'd be up for like the last minute play date until your partner can break away from work. 

It's a really good way to do it too. A lot of people understand, especially if it's something that they knew about ahead of time. And you're just like, “Hey friend, down the street, are your kids up for a play date real quick? Can I drop off my daughter and my partner will be there in an hour to pick her up?

A lot of people would be totally fine with that. 

The 6th way to still be a birthworker when you have babies at home… is that you can work in birth adjacent spaces until childcare is a lot easier to find. 

So you could be doing placenta work. You could be doing postpartum support, because postpartum support is predetermined, defined hours.

You could be creating your online services, your online classes… you could be leading mother circles… all of those others things… and I teach all of those inside Birthwoker Academy… you could really put your head down and focus on those until you're more comfortable looking for childcare or leaving your children with someone else in the first place…

And that brings us to #7.

This is the one I ended up doing, because I’m kinda stubborn… You can decided that you’re going to do everything you can to make enough money to retire your partner.

You can retire your partner, so he's home to watch the baby all the time.

That's something that you can consciously decide and you can hit the ground running and have that be your #1 goal. 

That's what I decided.

Very early on after having my daughters, I was that like, if I actually want to attend births, now that I have a kid of my own, I needed to find a way to make enough money so her dad could quit his job and stay home…. And so that's essentially why I started growing the online portion of my business.

And it really didn't take me that long once they hit the ground running, it only took about one year until I replaced both of our incomes. So, it's possibl,if it's something that you want to do.

Again, when it comes down to it, there is no right way to be a doula when you have your own babies.

There are many ways to make birthwork, fit your lifestyle, whatever you want that to look like…you just have to pick the one that's going to work best for you….

And then even more importantly, you have to be ready to pivot because if running a business has taught me anything (it's taught me many things) but the most impactful thing that it's taught me is that everything changes and everything grows and everything morphs into something else… and not only is that okay, but it allows me to be flexible enough to serve my clients in a way that feels good to them, but also feels good to me in the moment. 

So when I started, I was attending maximum four births per month, and then I went to three births per month… And then I went to two births per month…. And then I taught a lot of birth courses in one month, and then I didn't teach any, and then I took an entire month off and just did nothing.

I have gone through SO many cycles in my business… but I’ve built my business to be able to sustain the flow…

So, whatever you do, make sure that you're not so attached to the logistics of how you’re running your business, because that doesn't allow you to be fluid.

Whatever you do, really hold on to that fluidity because it's going to make birthwork more fun for you, and it's going to allow you to listen to what your clients want. 

So, if your clients really want more education, if you're flexible, it's going to allow you to say, “Hey, like they're asking for this, let me offer it,” right? “Let me change it up and offer them what they want.” 

And I know that went down a little bit of a tangent there, but I really want to make it clear that you don’t have to wait until your kids are grown to become a doula… or a birthworker in any capacity…

Even if you don’t want to be on call during this season of life, you can still start to build a sustainable income around birthwork, not necesarily around attending birth, but around birthwork as a whole… 

And while your kids are young, what a great time to really lay the foundation of your business! While your kids are at home, while your kids are little… So by the time they go to preschool,

by the time they're a little bit older, you can say “Now that my kids are in daycare and my kids are in kindergarten, I want to attend as many births as I can…” but use the time where your kids are younger to really lay that foundation.

As you were listening to all 7 of these tips… If there was any part of you that thought, “You know, I don't want to be on call full time while my kids are little…”

Find a doula business partner, connect with other doulas in your area, create that community of babysitters. 

But then if you're like, “Hmm, you know what? I actually don't really want to be on call until my kid is five, six, seven…. That’s awesome too!  

Trust me, don't think that you just need to put everything off until you're ready to attend births.

You can work in the birth adjacent spaces. Do placenta encapsulation, do online education, teach workshops in your community, teach workshops online, whatever it is, just know that like you can make it work for your lifestyle….Even if you have a breastfeeding newborn at home.

Now, I’m sure there are going to be a TON of questions about how I build by doula business with a newborn… and I’m the perfect person to ask because I literally built all of this with a cosleeping, breastfeeding baby… 

So if you have any questions, please come into my DMs over on Instagram, either @theautonomymommy or @birthworkerpodcast… I would love to tell you more about what I did, and then help you do it too, because too many women don't follow their passion and don’t even branch into birthwork because they have small kids at home.

But that shouldn’t stop you.

There is a way to make birthwork happen and to make it sustainable for your lifestyle. 

So come ask me questions and let’s build the doula business of your dreams!

OUTRO:  

If you’re already subscribed to the show, thank you, thank you! I appreciate you more than you know and I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you haven't subscribed yet, make sure you hit subscribe because in the net episode, I am interviewing one of my favorite humans Dr. Stu from Birthing Instincts... 

…but first, the other one thing I want you to do, right now is this: go to birthworker.com/makemoney-podcast and download the resource I’ve put together for you all about the different ways to build an impactful doula business BEYOND supporting birth in business. It’s full of ideas that will help you burnout-proof your birth business so you can make an income even when you’re not on call. It’s been a HUGE hit with my community on Instagram, so of course, I had to tell you about it too. Again, go to the show notes or go to birthworker.com/makemoney-podcast and you’ll be able to see all of the ways you can grow your income as a doula… for example, creating an online birth course. 

When I created my first online birth course less than 2 years ago, I had no clue that my passion-driven side-hustle doula business would become the multi-six-figure business it is today… I’m all about expanding my impact and income AND helping you expand too, so we can make a lasting impact on the global birth community even when we’re not on call for a birth. You can grab that free resource right in the show notes, or go to birthworker.com/makemoney-podcast. Alright, thank you so much for listening, I hope today was helpful for you, and I’ll see you again next week.