You're listening to Episode 16 of the birth worker podcast. And today we're kicking off a three part podcast series with the goal of helping you burnout proof your birth business. While, serving women across the entire world at the exact same time. If this is the first time you're here, thank you so much for listening. My name is Kylie banks, and I just finished speaking at the first ever doula convention in Denver, Colorado. Thank God, I was in Denver, Colorado, because I live in Fort Myers, Florida. And we just had a hurricane go through. And so I am slightly stuck in Colorado for a while until all of our flights get rescheduled. But that's not why we're here. We're not here to talk about the hurricane. We're here to talk about business. And so my lecture at doula con was all about how to take your doula business online. And it was a blast to chat with women about the steps to go from completely on call to on call when I want to be on call. And that's another goal with this three part podcast series. It's helping you realize that just because you grow an online business, doesn't mean that you have to stop serving women in person. Of course not. Of course not. I actually think that me personally, I can serve women better in person now, now that I'm not desperately saying yes to every single inquiry I get out of fear of not being able to pay my mortgage. So I have an online birth focus business that is set up to serve women, all day, every day, even when I'm sleeping. And what that does is that allows me to take on in person doula clients, only when there's an energetic match. And that's what I want for you. I don't want you desperately looking for clients and saying yes to anybody who needs a doula simply because you need to pay your mortgage. So that's why we're here. That's what I want for you. And let's get started with part one of this three part series. Hey, there birth nerd. You're listening to the birth worker podcast. My name is Kylie banks, and I am totally obsessed with birth, and equally obsessed with business. And this is the show where I help women turn their passion for birth into a sustainable, profitable and most importantly, impactful career. All right, let's get into it. A couple years ago, I was listening to a birth story podcast, and my entire life changed in one moment. This woman was telling her birth story on the podcast called The Birth hour. And all of a sudden I heard something that would change the course of my entire freaking life. I heard the word doula. Before that day, I had never heard the word doula before, which is crazy, right? Even though I was actively trying to conceive, and I was already starting to get obsessed with birth. I hadn't heard the word doula before then. But I heard the word doula. And immediately it was like somebody poured gasoline on my soul and lit it on fire. And the minute that I heard that word, I just knew I knew that was it. That is what I want to be. That is what I want to do. I want to be a doula. And so I did all the things that you're supposed to do, right? I paid the $2,000 to go take an in person three day doula training course. And of course, it wasn't in my small town, so I had to fly there. So I bought a plane ticket, and I flew to Atlanta, and I stayed in an Airbnb. And so after that whole thing, after the doula training, and after getting to Atlanta, it was like, maybe close to $4,000 when it was all said and done, which is fine. I left the training. I felt so excited. It was so fun for me. And I felt that fire in my soul like, Yes,

this is my life's purpose. Yes, this is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. So what did I do? I got home from that doula training weekend, I quit my well paying job. And I decided to go all in on this birth doula thing. But the second that I quit my job, it wasn't this exciting thing anymore. It was really, really nerve racking. I have a mortgage, right? I have to feed myself, I have a car to pay for. And my boyfriend who at the time who's still my boyfriend, and now he's my daughter's father. He made like $23 An hour or something like that. And we live in a house with the mortgage, the mortgage is like $2,500. So it was just not gonna cut it right. And so when I quit that job to go full time in birth work, it just became really real. And honestly, it became really scary. And at that point, my Doula business required me to be on meaning if I wasn't on call, if I wasn't actively talking to someone on the phone or coaching If I wasn't on call for a birth, I wasn't paying my mortgage. I was just taking birth clients, in person, and virtually. And so all of my income relied on being on call, I had to be on call to support birth if I wanted to pay my mortgage. And that's awesome. It was awesome. It can be a great business model for a lot of people. Yeah. But then I got pregnant, I got pregnant. And with my due date approaching, I had this moment of like, oh, shit, like, wait a second, I don't want to be on call when I have a newborn. But I don't want to go back to work for someone else. And I have a mortgage to pay. So what the heck do I do? Being a birth doula and being my own boss was so fun, it was great, yeah sure. But if it meant that I'm going to be stressed out about finding clients, and I'm going to be stressed out about being on call, and making enough money and finding someone to watch my newborn. Right. That's not what I wanted to sign up for. When I was a kid, both of my parents were working parents, they sent us to public school and daycare, and after school care, and YMCA and all of that, they were both self employed. So they are entrepreneurs. They have their own businesses. But I feel like they still stressed out about money. And I didn't want that to become my life. I didn't want to have my own business, but then be too busy to spend time with my kid or my partner. I didn't want to have my own business, but not really make enough money to like do all the things that I wanted to do with my family. That does not sound like success to me. But that's where a lot of birth workers get stuck. And I almost got stuck there. At that point, if I had continued to try and do birth work, how everyone else was doing it, I would have given up right there, I would have given up as soon as I had my baby because I didn't want to be on call for a while. That would have been the end of birth work for me. That would have been the end of the autonomy, Mommy. And to tell you the truth. That is the end for 1000s of birth workers every single year, every single year 1000s of doulas get to a point where they hit this roadblock. And they they simply don't want to be on call as much as they need to be on call to create the income that's going to sustain their family. For me, it was really scary to say yes, I am a birth doula. But I'm not taking clients right now. That was a really scary thing for me to say, because I didn't know anyone else who was doing it. And so what I did is I found inside of myself, a passion for figuring out how to make birth work, not only my career, but a sustainable career. How do I make birthwork my career in a way where I can still be a birth worker with a newborn, but I don't have to be on call when my daughter is a newborn, I don't have to actually attend births in person, while my daughter was a newborn. So what did I do? I took the business classes, I grew my Instagram, I started a podcast. And I really just set out to find a way that I could continue to like live my life and pay my mortgage in the birth community without being on call. And what I did unknowingly is essentially unlock the secret to protecting yourself from burnout from the start. And so I am now stepping into this role and into this calling to help new and aspiring doulas just like you understand that it is possible to create a sustainable business from day one.

Do you remember in my story, I only did in person birth support until I hit that wall of like, oh crap, I can't be on call right now. I'm about to have a baby. This is not good. I don't know what to do. And it wasn't until I hit that roadblock that I started figuring out what it would look like if I made my birth work business fit my lifestyle and not the other way around. If I stopped trying to conform my lifestyle to what I thought a birth worker should be or a doula should be. I don't want you to wait until you hit that oh shit moment for you to understand that there are so many facets to birth work beyond simply supporting birth in person. One of the main things that aspiring doulas say to me is what's holding me back is that I don't want to be on call right now. Whether they have kids at home or or maybe they're just starting in birth work, and they still have to keep their other full time job so they can pay their bills. So they just can't be on call really. Or maybe it looks like this. Maybe you live on an island 10 miles away from anyone else. And there are only 15 other families that are within an hour drive from you. If you're in that situation, and you want to become a birth worker, or you want to become a doula, but you only think that you have to rely on income just from attending births in person. That's not going to happen for you. You're in a rough space, right. So when people come to me and they say I would love to be a doula, but I just can't be on call right now. What I say to them is, yeah, I get it. I've been there, there was a time in my life to not anymore because my daughter's two and a half now, but there was a time in my life to where I didn't want to be on call. And then I figured out what to do to still work in the birth community, without sacrificing my preferred lifestyle, right, without caving on my boundaries. And so what I want you to do is from the start of your time, as a doula, I want you to really think about what you're doing to make sure that you're not burning the candles at both ends. And I really want you to make sure that you're setting your business business up in a way that if and when you decide that you want to take some time off from attending births in person, you have safeguarded your entire business, you're not putting all your eggs in one basket. Because believe me, there's going to be a time where you say, I don't want to be on call right now. Whether that's you want to go on a vacation, whether you have a baby, whether you just need a break, I want you to burn out proof your business before then. So you can still have a birth business when you decide to stop being on call. That's what this is about. And so what this actually looks like in my birth business, not my business for doulas, my business that serves moms because I have both right, I have an entire business that serves moms, and an entire business that serves birth workers. And so when I'm looking at my business that serves moms, what I have is an entire stack of pre recorded online birth courses anywhere from $22 to $397. And the reason that I can sell those online is because I understand the framework for building a community online. And I can show you how to do that too. I would love to show you how to how to build your community online. So people from all over the world are buying your birth courses every single day. Right? And that's what I did. I built up this online presence so that people are buying my birth courses every single day from across the entire world. I'm no longer Kyleigh, the doula from Fort Myers, who just serves people in person. I am Kyleigh the autonomy Mommy who has clients and students on every continent except Antarctica. That's pretty damn cool. And the cooler thing is that it didn't just work for me, it works for all kinds of people in all kinds of ways. Because remember, the goal here is not that you do things exactly how I do things. No, that is not the goal. I just want to help you understand the framework and the how, how to make your birth business fit your lifestyle, no matter what that is right. Now, I want to talk a second about a couple other people who have burnout proof their business, because it doesn't just have to be in pre recorded online course. Okay,

so let's talk about my friend Haley. You might know her as hehe. she runs tranquillity by hehe, which is her doula agency. Now she also attends births in person. She also does Postpartum Support. She has that agency that I told you about. But the way that she's burnout proofed her business, the way that she's created recurring revenue in her business, so she doesn't have to constantly be on call is that she's created a membership. It's called The Birth lounge. And it's a membership where moms pay a low monthly fee every single month to get access to her entire database of birth education. Right. She also gives them access to herself for weekly group coaching sessions. Amazing. A membership is a great great way to burn out proof your doula business to ensure that you are going to be creating income for your family every single month, even when you're not on call. But maybe you're like, Okay, Kyleigh, I'm just like not an online education type of person. I'm not going to create an online course I'm not going to get on Zoom and coach people, I'm not creating a membership. You know what I would say to that amazing, you don't have to be you don't have to do things how other people are doing things. Now, I want to ask you if you know the naked doula over on Instagram, her name's Emma, and she is absolutely killing it. And yes, she attends births. Yes, she does the childbirth education stuff. But I what I really want to talk about is the other thing that she does, and you can implement this in your business too to protect yourself from that on call burnout. And so Emma is an artist, and she's created all sorts of digital downloads and tangible products like affirmation cards, that she sells from her website every single day. And yes, she has well over 100,000 followers on Instagram, which you're probably looking at and saying like, Of course she's doing well that is so unattainable for me. She's in a totally different level. But here's what I want you to know. I want you to know that when you start looking at zero at yourself as an entrepreneur, and when you start learning the skills to grow the online portion of your business, learning the copywriting skills, learning the email marketing skills, learning how to really use social media to your benefit, when you learn those skills, you can blow up overnight, overnight. And that's what, that's what happened to me, I actually wasn't prepared for the growth of my business. And that's why I'm even making this series, because I want you to do this stuff from day one, I was not prepared for the growth of my business. So I spent literally the last 12 months catching up, catching up with the growth of my business, always feeling like I was behind. I had all of these people reaching out to me that wanted support for me, they wanted to learn from me. And so I had to figure out essentially, what can I do to offer support to these moms? What can I do to help these moms have amazing births, I was trying to play catch up. And so the point is, I don't want you to get to that mindset of when I have 1000 followers, then I'll do these things. Or when I have 10,000 followers, then I'll look at myself as an entrepreneur, or then I'll grow my online business or then I'll create an online offer. No, I don't want you to say, when I'm busy, when I'm fully booked, then I'll start thinking about what I'm going to offer beyond in person doula support. No, not at all. The whole part of this three part podcast series is to help you understand that you need to do this from the get go. So you avoid ever getting to that place of Oh shit. I don't want to be on call. But I have bills to pay to that place of burnout to that place of I don't know what to do to that place of I don't even think I want to do birth work anymore. I don't want you to get there. So from the start, every single day, I want you to get into the mindset of asking yourself, Is what I'm doing sustainable? Is this sustainable? Can I do what I'm doing for the next 20 years without stopping? And if the answer is no, or maybe if the answer is, I'm not sure. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to ask yourself, Who can I turn to? Who can I turn to to learn how to make birth work a sustainable thing for me? Who is currently doing what I want to do and how can I learn from them? That is what I want you to ask yourself. One is, is what I'm doing sustainable. And two is if it's not, who can I turn to to learn how to make it sustainable. 

In part two of this series, I'm going to drop it My biggest piece of advice that all doulas need to hear a s a p. I hope you stick around until the end of my three part series. And even more than that, I hope you jump on the waitlist for the birth worker membership which is my business focused membership for birth workers. We open the doors to the public in just two weeks. So head over to birth worker.com/join to be first to get all of the details when the doors open. Plus of course if you get on the waitlist you're gonna get a little bonus sneak peek inside the membership. Okay, that is all for today. I will see you right back here next week for part two