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 are listening to episode 44. If this is your first time here, welcome, I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to listen to this podcast. And if you've been here for a while, I appreciate the heck out of you. This podcast is so much fun for me to make, even when I'm on vacation, which I am right now, I'm in Israel for five weeks and it has been a rollercoaster. If you follow me on Instagram, I know you've been following along what's going on, but a few weeks ago I thought that I was having a miscarriage. In reality, it was really just a pregnancy that the doctor at the emergency room could not find. And in reality, it ended up being a pregnancy in my ovary or in my abdomen, they're really not sure. Pretty rare. So honestly, it was a teaching hospital and they were a little bit like, "We don't really know what's going on."

But in the end, my ovary ended up rupturing here in Israel, I ended up having a lot of blood in my abdomen, and I went to the hospital in an ambulance, and I had emergency surgery immediately when I got to the hospital to fix me up, to fix the bleeding, to take a chunk out of my ovary, stitch me up, and send me on my way. So that has been my last about seven days, maybe a little bit more than that. It's definitely been a whirlwind, but I'm grateful for the healthcare here. It's been phenomenal. Just I am mindblown at how I was treated with so much respect and how the providers had zero ego, which is so different than the births I've attended in the States because I've really never been to the hospital as a patient in the States except for that ER trip the day before my vacation because I was bleeding and I just wanted to make sure.

I just wanted to see what was going on before I got on an airplane to go on vacation for five weeks essentially. I went to the ER literally 12 hours before my flight, so, insane. Yeah, I was really, really just grateful and thankful for the providers here. So what an amazing change of pace from what I normally experience with my clients in the US hospital system as they are giving birth. So I just wanted to update you on that a little bit. We are doing a 3 in 15 episode today where I'm answering 3 of your best questions in 15 minutes or less. And hey, if you actually want me to answer your personal questions every day, you should consider joining us in the Birthworker Membership. The Birthworker Membership is my business community. We have monthly challenges, weekly coaching calls, there's a community where you can ask questions every single day to me, but also to the other 100 amazing women inside who are doulas and midwives and lactation consultants and childbirth educators, all growing their business, all wanting to make this a full-time income while staying home with their kids.

And so if that sounds like you, if you want to ask me your personal questions all the time inside our community, check out the Birthworker Membership. I'm going to put the link in the show notes. But for now, let's get into these three questions. The very first one is, "Do you ever take on an in-person doula client but let them know that another mom actually has priority for their birth? I don't have a backup doula right now, and I don't trust anyone, and so I'm thinking of doing this with my clients." So to be honest, the question here is really would you ever have a one client be a priority and the other clients would come second, third, fourth, whatever? To be honest, no, because when I think about it, I think about it very logically and practically, and I think, "Okay, if client A is the priority, and I've told everyone that client A is the priority, but if client B goes into labor first and I'm at client B's birth and then client A goes into labor, I'm probably not going to leave client B's birth in a lot of situations."

Yes, of course there's situations where I would leave to go support someone else. For instance, if client B was at the very, very early stages of labor and you could maybe tell that this is going to be a very long process, yeah, maybe I'll go, if client A lives really close by and I can bounce back and forth between the two. But in my mind, no, in my mind, no. In my mind, I go to the first person who goes into labor and I stay there until she gives birth, and then I go support the second person that goes into labor. So that is not something that I would do.

The next question is from Hannah. And Hannah says, "Does a podcast launch work in tandem with a course launch? Should one come before the other? Do I use an email sequence for the podcast launch too?" I would probably launch a podcast before I launch the course, especially if you have both on your calendar for the next, let's say, six months or so. I would say podcast launch could be three months from now, and then course launch could be six months from now. Now, I've done a couple of episodes on launching a course, I am going to tag them in the show notes. There's two different episodes. One is the mistakes that people make when they launch a course, and then another one is just a lot of mistakes that I personally made and mindset around launching a course. So I'll tag those in the show notes. Those are great episodes.

But one of the things that I want to say is that most people, when they go to make a course, whether it's an online course or an in-person course, honestly, they think that the only thing that they have to do is make the course. They don't realize how much actually goes into prepping your community and audience to be ready to purchase something from you. And so when I started this whole online portion of my business, when I started my Instagram and my website, rather than just attending births in-person through in-person connections and referrals and stuff, I didn't launch my course for, let's say, about nine months. And I used those nine months to grow my online community, really, really not only big, but grow the connections really well. And so essentially, what happened is I grew from zero on Instagram, zero email list, to 10,000 on Instagram and 1,000 on my email list in those nine months. So by the time that I got there, I was able to launch this course and I made $14,000 on that very first launch.

And so that would've not been possible if I just said, "Hey, I want to make a course, let me just make a course." And in that journey, in that nine-month journey, guess what? I launched a podcast. So I used to have a podcast called Our Birth Wisdom, and it was essentially birth stories and some solo episodes where I did some teaching and speaking, and it was for moms. And so very different than this podcast, which is for doulas. So this is now my second podcast. So I've done it twice, I've done it a couple of times. And podcasting, like I said at the beginning of this episode, is really one of my favorite things to do. So man, maybe I'll make a podcast course or a podcast workshop for you guys because I could talk about it forever. And to be honest, I cracked the code. When I launched this podcast, it launched that first week or two, it was up to number 17 in the US for business, 17 in the entire US for business, and this is a doula podcast or a birthworker podcast. It blows my mind.

So anyway, let's go back to the questions just a little bit. So how does a podcast launch work in tandem with a course launch? Again, I would probably launch the podcast maybe about three months before the course launch, and that is because the podcast is going to be a way to use that long form content, really nurture your community so they're ready for that course when you launch that course. The email sequence for the podcast launch, I like to go big for launches of anything. So the podcast, I would absolutely do a launch. I would send emails to your email list if you have one. If not, I would focus on building an email list before you launch a podcast. There's definitely a certain way to do things to make them just work better, more bang for your buck. So email list would come first with freebies and all that and website, and then podcast launch, and then course launch is how I would do it.

Anyway, yeah, I would do a podcast launch, so I'd send daily emails, I would potentially do giveaways, if you have that capacity, I would ask people to review the show, and I would launch it with maybe three episodes when I start. So three episodes are launched on day one, and you celebrate it on your email list, you talk about it on your social all week. Maybe you have some of your friends come and do interviews. If you can get some of those bigger influencer type of names to come and do interviews and launch those that first week too, that would be a really, really awesome idea. All right, question number three. This one is from Marissa. Marissa is amazing, this is actually a question that she asked inside our Birthworker Membership community. Again, you can ask me your questions anytime you want inside the community, or I also do coaching calls on Zoom, so we could actually get on Zoom and hash out some of your biggest issues right there, in real time, live on Zoom.

Okay, so this question from Marissa is, "What encourages you to stay the course when you feel like nothing is moving in the right direction?" And this is such a great question because I want to promise you that it's not something that goes away. Having thoughts like this is not something that goes away. So you don't automatically find success, book yourself out, make a bunch of money, and then you never have doubts again. Absolutely not. And to be honest, maybe it's something that even snowballs bigger in the future. I'm sorry, but it's true for me at least. So when I first started, my worries were, "Am I ever going to make this happen? Am I ever going to be able to not rent out the rooms in my house? Am I ever going to be able to afford my mortgage? Am I ever going to be able to not put my kid in daycare or with a nanny, and not go to a job that I hate, the soul-sucking job?" Those were my worries.

And when nothing was moving in the right direction, that's what it came back to, is I just want to make this freaking work. And now my worries are very different, but much bigger in some ways. So my worries are, "Am I really going to be able to pay my staff this month? Am I going to make $15,000 this month to be able to pay my bills and pay my staff and pay for my business so I can pay myself?" That's a very different worry. And it's kind of like Biggie Smalls says, "More money, more problems," or more money, bigger problems. And so I want that to be not something that discourages you, but something that normalizes what you're going through. Because I know that every single person listening to this, I know that you, whether you're driving to the store or making dinner for your kids, or you're on a walk, or you're just listening to this in your house while you're doing chores, whatever it is, I know that this is something that you have felt because we all feel it, and I just want to normalize that.

And I want you to know that it's not going to go away. So instead of trying to make this feeling go away, where nothing's moving in the right direction, I feel like I'm going to quit, let's just normalize that and appreciate it as part of being an entrepreneur. This is really personal, but I just posted in the mentorship communities that I'm in that I pay my mentors to be a part of, I just posted, "What do you do when you just feel like firing everybody and closing your business and closing all your programs?" I literally posted that the other day. "What do you do when you just want to burn your whole business to the ground?" And it's not that business isn't fun, it's just that sometimes it's really, really hard. And the more we normalize that, the less people are going to want to burn down their entire business, fire everybody and close the programs. Marissa, I really appreciate your question and I want to say a couple of more things.

I want to say that when you're ever feeling this way, that nothing is moving in the right direction and you're just not sure if you want to do this anymore, I want you to remember your why. I want you to remember why you chose birthwork, because I guarantee I guaran-freaking-tee that you did not get into birthwork because you wanted to be a business person. I guarantee that you did not choose birthwork because you wanted to make a boatload of money. I guarantee that you chose birthwork because you wanted to make a difference in women's lives, period. And so remember your why and ask yourself, is that something that you're doing? Are you making a difference in people's lives? And if the answer is no, let's focus on that. Let's focus on how do we actually help people and impact their births and help them have amazing autonomous births that they love instead of focusing on everything in your business feels like it's failing right now.

Let's go back to your why, and I think that is going to be the domino that actually really does help your business move forward in the right direction. The other thing I want to say is that this is a long game. And for me, from day one, I swear to God, from day one, I said, "I don't care about short-term success, I want long-term success." This is a long game. I want, 20 years from now, to be able to send my daughter to any school she wants to go to, I want to be able to afford my dream house, I want to work when I want to work, and I want to not have to go work for someone that I absolutely hate working for. This is the long game. I don't need immediate success, I just eventually want to find it. And that was my mantra. And to be honest, thinking that way and almost detaching myself from the immediate outcome of the things that I was doing in my business definitely actually helped me find success a lot faster.

So to be honest, I'm definitely in the 1% of business owners. I'm probably closer to the 0.1% to be honest, I'm not actually sure. That'd be something interesting to look at, how fast do most people businesses grow and how much money do most female entrepreneurs make in their first five years? I would say that I am probably in the 0.1%. So it would not be fair of me to say that exactly what's happened to me is 100% possible for you because though it is a possibility, and though I believe in you, there are certain things that happen in my journey that don't happen with other people. The privilege to invest money in coaches, things like that. My support that I had with my partner in raising my daughter, my mindset that I had, that I don't need to make a lot of money right now, I am more than happy to work 12 hours per day on this business until four in the morning and not make any money for the first year. That drive is something that a lot of people also don't have.

So the privilege, the mindset, a little bit of extra money to invest in coaches, those things really played a really big role. So now that I'm off that tangent, I appreciate you for staying with me through that, I want you to just play the long game. Tell yourself that, "What I'm doing now, even if it doesn't look like anything is coming from, it, is actually laying the foundation for the massive success that I am going to have in the future." And with that mindset, I have no doubt about it, that whatever success looks like to you, you are going to find it. Whether it's an extra 500 bucks in your pocket every single month, whether it's attending 10 births per month as a birth photographer, or five births per month as a birth doula, or whether it's making a million dollars in the next 10 years with the business that you create.

If you play the long game, if you believe in yourself and you stay the course, and you find a community of people who are doing what you want to do, and if you find a mentor to help you, to help steer you in the right direction, I have absolutely 100% faith that whatever your idea of success is, you are going to find it in the next several years, in the next several years. We're going to play the long game. We're not going to pretend it's going to happen this month, next month, this year, next year. We're not going to pretend that because if that's what we're hoping for and if that's what we're counting on, the second it doesn't happen as fast as we want it to happen, we are going to feel like nothing is moving in the right direction. And that is one of the main reasons that entrepreneurs quit. And I don't want that to happen to you, my friend. All right, thank you so much for being here today.

I will see you next week on Wednesday. We have another amazing episode. It's an episode that I am going to do all about the ways that my doula training failed me, and how I succeeded despite it. It's an episode that I've been thinking about making for a really long time, I think I might have even spoken about it before, but I'm finally ready to talk about how my doula training failed me, and what I did instead to grow not only a successful in-person doula business, but create essentially my own doula training mentorship program, and train over 250 people in it in the first 12 months, which is absolutely insane. So I will see you on Wednesday. Thank you so much for being here. If you have any questions about this episode at all, please don't hesitate to reach out to me on Instagram @birthworkerpodcast. I am over there every day, and I would love to chat with you.