Kyleigh Banks:

Hey there, birth nerd. You're listening to the Birthworker Podcast. My name is Kyleigh 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.

Welcome back to the Birthworker Podcast. You're listening to episode 42. And if you have been listening for a while, I just wanted to give you a shout-out and say thank you so much. This podcast is one of my favorite parts of my week, creating this free content for you. So thank you so much for being here and enjoying it and sharing it with your friends and sharing it on your stories.

And if this is the first time that you're listening, I appreciate you too, and thank you so much for being here. This is the podcast where I help new and aspiring doulas and experienced and burnt out doulas, create a business that fits their lifestyle, create a sustainable business that they can take with them for the next several decades, and so they can leave a legacy for their children and their community and make a full-time income with their passion.

That is why we are here. So thank you so much for being here. Today is Friday, which means we are doing a three in 15 episode. I'm answering three of your biggest and best questions in 15 minutes or less, sometimes more. And today our very first question is from Lexi. And Lexi says, "What do I do if I can't find a backup doula and I end up missing my doula client's birth?"

So Lexi, to be honest, it completely depends on your contract. So most doula contracts have a specific clause about what happens when a birth is missed. And if it does have that clause, it probably also specifies specific reasons that you might miss a birth, because let's be honest, it totally happens.

It's never happened to me, but it happens to a lot of us. And so for instance, you might miss a birth because you're at another birth, maybe a natural disaster. If you live near me, we have hurricanes, and with that comes power outages, road blockages, things like that. If you live in other parts of the world, maybe it's tornadoes, monsoons, snowstorms, those might cause you to miss a birth.

And then even events like a car accident or even sickness, or maybe if it's a reason like your phone died or you slept through the phone calls in the middle of the night or your client didn't call you, or the birth was really, really fast, so you missed it. And so there's tons of reasons that you could potentially miss a birth. And the most important part here is that you have something in your contract that specifies what happens in scenarios like these.

And even though maybe you've been a doula for a while, and even though you've maybe not missed a birth ever, it's still really, really important to have these conversations with your clients before both of you sign the contract. And what I want you to do before you nail down your contract is get really clear about your personal boundaries and get ready to put the systems in place so it's easy for you to respect your own boundaries.

Now in my business at this point, I'm taking on at most two clients per month in person. And so I actually have the capacity to customize everybody's contract. Takes a little bit of extra time, but I have that time, especially because I'm only at most taking two clients per month. Which means some months I'm actually taking no clients. Right now, I'm in Israel for five weeks and then I go home for a week, and then I'm on another vacation.

And so I actually haven't taken a client this year yet. My first due date this year is April. So I go multiple months with no clients, and then at most I take two per month just to give you a little background of where I'm at at this point in my business. And so since I have the ability and capacity to customize everyone's contract, I essentially have this conversation with my client and ask them what they're looking for.

Sometimes I don't have a backup doula, and I also wouldn't offer a refund if I miss the birth, but sometimes it's different. For instance, this next birth that I have coming up, I'm going to be on vacation until her due date, but she didn't want me to set up a backup doula because if I'm not there, she doesn't want another person there. And that's totally justified.

So if she actually has her baby while I'm on vacation, we decided that I would just do a partial refund for her. And that works for me. By the way, I just have to say that I rarely recommend doing refunds or partial refunds for missed births, especially if you're limiting your doula services, like your capacity, and especially if you have declined other women's services because you were quote unquote "Full."

For instance, if you take four clients per month and you turned away multiple clients because you were already at that four, but then what if you miss this client's birth? You could have said yes to those other clients. So I typically don't ever recommend doing refunds. But let's go into reasons why I personally would refund a client and then reasons I would not refund a client.

So the reasons I would refund partially, never the full thing because I'm doing a lot of work upfront. They're getting access to my childbirth education programs, we're doing prenatal appointments, I'm doing phone calls with them and texting with them. So this is a partial refund we're talking about. So a reason that I would do a partial refund is if I simply did not answer my phone. Maybe my phone died, maybe I didn't hear it ring in the middle of the night.

If I totally dropped the ball, I'm going to refund that client. Or if, another reason would be if I promised that I would have a backup doula, but something happened and I did not have a backup doula, that's another reason that I would partially refund this client. Now here are reasons that I would not partially refund a client. One is that she didn't call me. I do not do refunds if you do not call me to come to your birth.

Nope, that is a boundary that I have. I am very secure in that boundary and will happily enforce that one. Another one is the birth happened too fast for me to get there in time. So one of the clauses I have in my contracts is that I will get to their birth within two hours of them asking me to come to the birth. And so if that baby is born within those two hours and I don't get there in time, I'm not going to do a refund for that client.

Another reason I would not partially refund a client is if I am at another birth. Again, this is just part of my contract written into the contract. Another one is natural disasters. So the hurricanes, tornadoes, snowstorms that we talked about. And then even those events like power outages, car accidents, and potentially even sickness, I would probably not do a refund.

So to answer the question, what do I do if I can't find a back of doula and I end up missing my client's birth? Well, the answer is whatever is in the contract. And by the way, if this is something that you're interested in, I cover this extensively inside Birthworker Academy, which is my doula training program.

But if you want access to just my contracts, just my contracts, DM me on Instagram. Because if you are interested and if enough people are interested, then maybe we will put together a contract package for you guys so you can purchase our contracts and just use those so you don't have to even worry about stuff like this. All right, let's jump to question number two.

This one is from Nicole, and she says, "I'm hosting a live birth prep workshop and I want to continue selling it after the live workshop is over. Can I just sell the recording or do I have to rerecord it?" And I love this question because honestly, either way works. It works either way. So let's talk about when and why I would do each of these. When would I simply just record the workshop, the live workshop, and resell it and then when would I rerecord it so it's not live and sell that.

So I would sell the exact recording of the live workshop if the workshop was very straight to the point with little to no distractions. Plus, if the Q and A was fully relevant, fully relevant. I would also only sell the recording of the live workshop if there was no time sensitive pitch at the end.

Because sometimes what I do is I do a live workshop and then at the end I say, "Join my program for a discount this weekend only." And I talk about it like it's time sensitive. So obviously I wouldn't want that in the recording if I was going to continue to sell the workshop all the time, which we also call on evergreen.

If I was going to continue to sell the workshop on evergreen. And I would sell the recording of the live workshop as is just the recording, if it's something that I just want to sell passively from my website, but I don't really want it to be a key component in my online business. So for instance, if I'm not going to run ads to this, if I'm not going to have this offer as the offer at the end of my welcome sequence and things like that, no big deal.

I'm just going to sell the recording. It's okay if there's mistakes in it and maybe it's not completely relevant. That's okay, because I just want to sell the recording passively from my website. I'm going to make it very clear on that sales page that this is the recording of the live workshop, that there's a Q and A, things like that. So those are the instances that I would sell, directly sell the replay of the live workshop.

Now here are the times where I would recommend rerecording the workshop. And that is if you want the workshop to be a key piece in your big picture funnel. So the reason that I would do this is because you would be able to essentially edit out mistakes. You would be able to make sure it's A plus quality, which is a really good idea if you want people to buy the workshop and then continue to buy your other more expensive offers.

So if this is almost step one, the step one offer, so when people come to your world, maybe they download your free resource and then you want them to buy this pre-recorded workshop, we really, really want that to be A plus quality because we want them to go on and purchase your next workshops.

Now I do have to say this is a little bit in contradiction to my last episode, episode 41, where I told you that the quality of the course really doesn't matter a lot of times. A lot of times what's more important and all of the time, what's actually more important is the transformation you take people through. I actually think it's a little different when we're talking about what I call low ticket offers or what we call in the coaching industry, low ticket offers or workshops.

We want someone to buy this workshop and say, "Oh my God, if this is what she gives for just $25, I'm going to go spend a thousand dollars with her because I know that it is going to be 100% worth it." That's what I think. I would also recommend rerecording the workshop if during the live workshop you got off-topic a lot. Right?

Or if it was a very chit-chat style workshop where you went to the chat and you asked people to maybe unmute themselves and come talk, that's fantastic for a live workshop. But when someone's watching the recording, it can make it feel just a little bit like out of touch. It can make it feel, they can get a little bit of fomo. Right? And I don't want to leave them with that sense of that they missed out.

I want them to feel like they got everything from this workshop. And if that means that you need to rerecord it so there's not that chit-chat style, so you're not mentioning, go to the chat, so you're not chatting with the participants, then I would absolutely do that.

And the last reason that I would recommend to rerecord the workshop altogether is if you're just not happy with the outcome, if you're not happy with the way that it flowed. And again, going back to episode 41, the transformation that the client gets is way more important than the delivery of the course or the workshop or whatever we're talking about.

But that is to an extent. Right? It's to an extent. So if your baby is crying literally the entire time, there's actually a chance that that's hard for those students to focus. And so we don't want that to happen. So if for any reasons you're unhappy with the outcome of the workshop, go ahead and just rerecord it and that way you can edit it to your liking.

Now I will say that almost always I use my live workshops to quote unquote "Practice" to see which parts of the workshop get the most engagement, to see what kind of questions were asked during the Q and A, to see what kind of things people are posting in the chat, in the comments. And then what I do is I take all of that information and then I go rerecord a new workshop from scratch with no audience. I'll just record it on my computer.

And oftentimes I'll actually rearrange things, get rid of certain sections, add certain sections into the workshop that I missed before, all based on the feedback from that live workshop. So I love doing a live workshop. And then most of the time, I am going to rerecord it if I want to sell it passively from my website or if I want to sell it in my essentially evergreen funnels, like my [inaudible 00:14:59] sequence or whatever.

All right, question number three. This is not 15 minutes, by the way, which is hilarious, but I try. Question number three is, when is the best time to ask an in-person doula client for a testimonial? And do you have any certain questions that you ask? So there are actually a few kinds of testimonials that you can collect from your in-person doula clients. Number one is one of my favorites, and it's a DM or a text message screenshot.

So if they send you a DM or a text message during their pregnancy or even following their birth, and they're like, "Oh my God, Kyleigh, that support was so amazing." Texts like that, and it could even be after a prenatal appointment. It could even be from the father texting you. I always get amazing texts from the dad.

Make sure to always screenshot those. And then don't just screenshot it and forget it, screenshot it and keep it organized in something like Airtable. Airtable is what we use in my company. It's our organizational software to keep everything organized. So if you don't have an Airtable account yet, head to birthworker.com/Airtable and sign up because it is totally free and it's going to change your life.

Now the second kind of testimonial is one that really gives you the most bang for your buck, and it's really easy for your client too, a lot of the time. And this is a video testimonial. And so what you would do is you would jump on Zoom for a really quick 15 minute chat, just record the whole thing, and then you can go back later and you can edit it perfectly, and you can actually put that video on your website if you want.

Or what you can do too is just take the transcript from that video and use that as a testimonial somewhere on your website or social media. And doing these video testimonials on Zoom, they're a really authentic way to just have a normal conversation about the support that they received from you. And I'll actually chat about what kind of questions you would ask in a minute.

But before I do that, I want to tell you about number three. And the third way that I love doing testimonial harvesting, if you will, is to send them a survey form for them to fill out on their own time. And so after the client is done working with you, this could be immediately following their birth, it could be after six weeks or something like that, you can actually use Airtable again to send them a link to a quick feedback survey form.

And these are super easy, but I do have to be honest, a lot of the times the answers that you get are nowhere near as in depth as they would be if you did the live Zoom call with the person. And so that being said, a few great questions to ask on the Zoom call or in a survey form are, what was your goal going into your birth? How would you describe your birth experience?

Were our prenatal appointments adequate in helping prepare for labor, birth and postpartum? Was there anything that you found particularly helpful or unhelpful? In what specific ways did you love the support that I provided? And then, if you could change anything about the support you received from me, what would you change? And essentially what we're doing here is we want to paint a really good picture of their entire journey.

So where were they when they started? What was their goal? What did it look like for them to prepare to achieve their goal? How did you help them achieve that goal? And how did the entire process unfold? Maybe even if their birth didn't actually go as planned or as they had hoped. All of those things are really amazing things that you could take and then curate into an amazing testimonial for your website or social media or wherever you actually want to post this testimonial.

All right, that's a wrap. Thank you so much for being here today. Now if you haven't already left a rating and review for the show, that is the best way to support the show. So after you leave a review, just make sure to snap a screenshot and then upload it at birthworker.com/review. And then I will send you a little gift to your literal mailbox as a big thank you.

And hey, the last thing that I wanted to say is if you were listening to this episode and thinking, "Kyleigh, can I just ask you questions like these every single day?" Maybe you don't want to wait until next Friday's episode, or maybe you want your business to grow fast and you have questions literally right now. So if that is you, shoot me a DM on Instagram with the word sustainable, and let's chat about how I can help you grow a super sustainable doula business a whole lot faster and with a lot more fun.

So head to my Instagram. And if you're new here, it's linked in the show notes and DM me the word sustainable. But only if you are ready to go from side gig doula to full-time birth worker, and if you're ready to quit your day job, stay home with your kids and make a lasting impact on lives across the entire globe. I cannot wait to hear about your goals and to help you absolutely crush them. Thank you so much for listening today. I hope this episode was helpful for you. And I will see you right back here next week.