88. Why Your Doula Business Is Stuck Under 10K Months

There was a season in my doula business where I was stuck making about $2K a month… while working constantly.

Late nights.
 Weekend consults.
 Posting on Instagram.
 Networking in Facebook groups.
 Tweaking my website.
 Lowering my prices.

I was doing everything the industry said to do—and nothing was changing.

In this episode, I’m sharing the moment I realized I had completely misdiagnosed the problem in my business.

Because most doulas don’t actually have a lead problem.

They have a bottleneck problem.

Once I figured out where my business was truly stuck, everything shifted—and I went from $2K months to consistent $10K+ months as an in-person doula.

If you feel like you’re working incredibly hard but your income isn’t reflecting it, this episode will help you identify what’s really going on.

In This Episode

• The brutal math behind my $2K months
 • Why more information didn’t fix my business
 • The funnel rabbit hole that wasted months of time
 • The 4 doula business bottlenecks that keep people stuck

Take the Doula Revenue Bottleneck Analysis and find out exactly where your business is stuck.

Or DM me DIRECTION on Instagram @thelisavee and I’ll send it to you.

Struggling to grow your doula business? Tired of chasing pregnant mothers online? Imagine effortlessly attracting your dream clients and reaching the mamas you're meant to serve!?

⬇️ START HERE ⬇️

FREE Assessment: Why Your Doula Biz Is Stuck Under 10K Months
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Learn more about Six Figure Doula

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I wasn't afraid to work hard or follow the templates, but I had misdiagnosed what was going on. Had myself in this like constant spiral and loop trying to fix the wrong thing. And when you're fixing the wrong thing, you can work twice as hard and stay exactly where you are. And as a doula who also really, really wanted to be a present mom who valued this, it drove me insane. And it and it made me pretty miserable. Welcome to the six-figure doula podcast. This is where confidence becomes currency. If you're a birth worker who's ready to stop overthinking, stop undercharging, and start leading like you mean it, then you're not here by accident. Every week we talk sales without the ick, money without shame, and building a business that actually holds you and your clients. Welcome home, Dula. Happy Tuesday. So I want to talk about something that I experienced last night. I was at my dance class, and my mentor said something that he has actually said a billion times before, a hundred different ways, but it hit me really differently. I feel like I absorbed it in a different way, and I want to bring it up. He talked about this act of just going for it, and he meant it in the way of walking into a dance class, fully present, and truly just trusting your ability to move through the unknown and the discomfort, the super, super uncomfortable stuff that comes up when you are literally dancing in front of a room with varying levels, often like women more and men more talented than I am, and really just working through that until you eventually find your way to the other side. And we talked about what it takes to actually do that. And it made me realize how much of this has been the story of my actual life, like in dance specifically, but also in birth work and in entrepreneurship. So when I first became an in-person doula, I had absolutely no clue what I was doing. Like I had zero births under my belt. I had no proof that I could really make this work, just this deep feeling that this work mattered and that I was meant to be in that room. And when I started my online business, it was literally the exact same thing. There was no perfect strategy at the time. There was zero guaranteed outcome. There were just a ton of moments where I had to show up, speak up, uh, take up space, even when I was terrified, and really just trust that I would figure it out as I went. So, similar to being in the studio, it was very messy at first. Like I was not considered a good dancer in the early days. But I think what he wanted to highlight, and this is the part that really kind of like unlocked in my brain for the first time in this way, was that the magic of the experience and the journey itself absolutely does not come from waiting until you feel like you're ready to take that leap. It actually comes from being willing to number one, express yourself, which can be so terrifying. It is from your willingness to experiment and know that you're gonna screw up and really just leave it all out there, even when it's imperfect. And for those of you that have perfectionist tendencies, I call myself a recovering perfectionist, that is no small thing. And I think that the takeaway from his encouraging words last night was that refinement only happens after the mess. Like whether it is the choreography or the birth or building an online business, you do not get to that other side without first being brave enough to just move through it. There was a season in my business where I really struggled to move through. And that's what today's episode is about. So I could not believe that he was like speaking about this last night. And I was like, of course. And the season that I'm referring to is one that I can actually kind of pinpoint based on revenue. So we're just gonna, we're just gonna start there. I was stuck making roughly$2,000 a month. And if you have been there or you are there, or some of you are even like, I would love to make$2,000 a month. Some of you are like, Yeah, that sucked. You know, it really depends. Uh so just customize this for yourself because I promise there is a lesson here. You know the mental spiral that comes with it, the the being stuck part. So every single morning I can vividly remember, I would wake up and I would think, like, I just need more visibility. And I need to be more confident in going after that visibility. And what I really, really need at the end of the day is more births under my belt. As if confidence was this personality trait that successful doulas already had and that I had not yet unlocked for myself. So that was the loop going on in my brain. Meanwhile, I was working constantly. Like it wasn't casually running a business. I was working every single chance that I could. So if my son went to sleep, I was working. If he took a nap, if it was the weekend, late, late at night when the house was quiet, if there was a spare hour in the day, I was pouring it into the business. So that looked like posting on Instagram, networking with other doulas in Facebook groups, designing new Canva things, tweaking my website, homepage copy, like even to the point where I would adjust my prices because I thought, well, maybe moms just need an easier yes. So I was doing everything that the doula industry told me to do, but nothing was actually changing. There was zero significant change. And I remember another kind of milestone in this season. And it was late at night and I was laying in bed and I started to kind of like do some math. And it was, it was not a good, a good moment because I was trying to, I remember I was trying to be quiet, not wake my husband or my toddler that were sleeping next to me. I and I sat there and I calculated out my hourly rate. Like I took my 2,000 a month and I started breaking it down all of the hours that I was actually working, the late nights, the weekends, the time that I was taking to research, get more specializations, the time I was spending on content creation, the consults that I had that didn't convert. I was, I was literally like tailing this up and realizing that it was absolutely not worth the emotional turmoil or the pay. And I wasn't even paying myself. Let's let's not forget to mention that the$2,000 a month was covering like expenses. And that was it because I I really, really wasn't profiting by the time that I, you know, made this calculation. So I guess I, if I'm being honest, the business felt like it owned me, not the other way around. And then this doubt started to really, really overcome me. And I started questioning, like, well, if this doesn't work for me, then what? Like I already quit my corporate job. What if I'm one of those doulas that loves this work so incredibly deeply? And yes, it's my calling, but I can't actually build a sustainable business doing it. Because when you're sitting at$2,000 a month or insert whatever number that is for you, when you're stuck and you start doing the math, you start asking yourself, like, how long realistically can I keep doing it this way? How long can my family support this? Not only financially, emotionally. You know, am I chasing something that's never gonna exist? And I don't want to keep wasting that time. This this is precious opportune time of my life. And I just remember thinking, this is so damn lonely. These thoughts, this overwhelmed, these doubts, like so incredibly isolating. And all the while I'm still out there posting and showing up because I'm not ready to let go of it. So I'm still talking about how much I love birth work, but inside, like exhausted and defeated is all hell. And then I moved into another phase, still a spiral. And this is like the information overload. And what happened was this phase, I became obsessed with learning more. So I joined a billion programs, I bought courses with money I didn't have. I listened to podcasts nonstop. I was watching YouTube videos, downloading every free resource available because I thought it's it's the skills that I am lacking. I need to learn how to build the funnel. I need to know all the ins and outs of the tech. I need to become a master at content so I can go viral. I need to create the lead magnet so that I can really have everything working passively behind the scenes. So anything that was out there about growing a doula business, I was consuming it. And then the time I was pouring into the research alone started to become insane. Hours searching for this answer to try to find the thing that would finally make this work for me. But what I didn't realize was I was now just drowning in more information, but still starving for clarity. Okay, another phase, and I promise there is an end to the saga, but I just have to be open about this because again, the isolation, like we've got to talk about this. Not only that, but I believe that a lot of these rabbit holes I went down were mis misleading and taking me off course. And so it's really important that I use this platform to help you get clarity, the clarity I needed. And that is lead magnets. And and again, talking about rabbit holes. Um, I fell into this like funnel frenzy. And I hate to admit it, but I was paralyzed by creation mode. I was stuck designing the PDF and tweaking the messaging and writing the endlessly long email sequence and testing the landing page and questioning why I couldn't get, you know, the conversion rate up. And it was not a fun time. And just to get a little more specific, in case you are in this right now, I could not get that conversion rate over like 15%. And I thought, that is terrible. I finally once, so this is like God knows how many freebies in, 10 freebies in, trial and error, trial and error, trial and error. I finally got it up to 30%. And I was like, I cracked the code. And then something extremely discouraging happened. My sales never increased. So here I had this high-performing industry standard lead magnet, finally it to 30%. And these emails I had written that I knew were actually pretty damn good, but still my open rates were mediocre. No one was replying to my call to actions, and nobody was booking calls. So here I had all this time where I built this system that everybody online said would run in the background and bring me clients, and it just sat there. Incredibly demoralizing. And I had, I had to face the fact that I had poured all this time and energy and effort into something that I built that wasn't doing a thing for me. So at that time, I really truly believed that the problem was leads. 100%, I didn't have enough inquiries, and that was the issue. And I thought if more people could just find me, if more people could just land on my Instagram, if more people could just grab a hold of this freebie, if more people could be in my email sequence, everything will fix itself. So I tried harder to get more visible. And I did more educating and more posting and put more time and energy into Instagram. Here is the thing that I couldn't verbalize on at the time, but now that I've reflected and really, as you can tell, like thought through this, it was that I didn't have an effort problem at all. I wasn't afraid to work hard or follow the templates, but I had misdiagnosed what was going on. And so I had I had myself in this like constant spiral and loop trying to fix the wrong thing. And when you're fixing the wrong thing, you can work twice as hard and stay exactly where you are. And as Adula, who also really, really wanted to be a present mom who valued this, it drove me insane and it and it made me pretty miserable. So I threw my hands up and I finally asked myself a completely different question. So it was no longer, how do I get more clients? It was what is actually stopping this business from growth? So I wasn't looking for the symptom anymore. I was looking at the constraint. And when I looked through that honest lens at my business, the answer revealed itself. Wasn't fun, super uncomfortable. Okay. But the problem I had was actually not leads. I did have inquiries if I was really truly looking at my data. I did have consultations, but my positioning was so not clear and my conversion was not strong. Like mothers loved me. Okay. They liked me and my personality. We connected on a call, but they did not feel absolute certainty in choosing me. So the consults would feel great. The connection was, in fact, there, and so was the energy. But then I would hear, we're gonna think about it. We're gonna interview another duel, uh, a couple other duels, and then we'll get back to you. We're gonna let you know. Which, if you've been in this business, you know is basically the polite version of a no. I mean, there are different nuances and this and that, but at the end of the day, it's a smoke screen. And every single time that that happened, I actually internalized it. I'm not proud of that fact, but I realized, like, oh, I talked too much on the consult. I might need more certifications to feel credible. Maybe I need to add more extras to my packages without adjusting the price. But none of those things was the real problem. The real, real issue was that my business had a bottleneck. And this is this is what has brought me to this point because now I'm all in on helping birth workers figure out their bottleneck. And truly, after coaching hundreds of doulas, I can tell you something with a hell of a lot of certainty. And that is when a doula is stuck, let's say under 5,000 a month, there is almost always a very specific bottleneck. And usually it's one of four. I've really pared this down. This is the trends, this is what I see over and over and over. So to simplify things, we're gonna talk about four bottlenecks. The first one is positioning. So, what I mean by that is if positioning is your bottleneck, your message is not creating certainty. Okay. The second one is a traffic bottleneck. So if this is your bottleneck, you do not have enough qualified eyes on your stuff. The third is conversion. And this means that consultations are feeling great, but they are not closing. And then finally, and this is the least common, but it's definitely a trend, and that is scaling. So this is you are so busy, but your income does not reflect it, and we need to take it to the next level. So I have actually created what I call my doula revenue bottleneck analysis because I know what it feels like to be working nonstop at all hours, consuming all the information, building out all the fancy funnels, perfecting your lead maggot over and over and over, and trying all these things all the time and still feeling like the business isn't moving in the right direction. So, this analysis, this assessment is really the culmination of every single thing that I stand for, which is clarity, direction, and honesty about what's actually going on, what's actually broken, the real weakness. Because once you can identify your bottleneck, then you stop fixing random things. And ultimately you stop wasting your precious time. You stop adding a bunch of letters after your name. You stop customizing packages left and right and shaving off prenatles to lower the cost. You stop posting endless educational content to help mothers learn about birth. That's not what they want. You quit waiting for referrals and wondering why word of mouth is up and down and every month is like feast or famine. And you start fixing the real constraint. So I truly believe in my soul that the jump that I made from 2,000 a month to 10k plus per month did not happen because I paid for more child care and freed up more hours. Absolutely not. It was because I finally understood where the business was leaking. And once I fixed the real constraint, I saw massive, measurable change. I saw an increase in consults booked, an increase in my close rate, stronger authority, more certainty. And that's not even just more certainty for me. It was more certainty for the mothers hiring me. And I saw a direct increase in my bottom line. So if you are this doola and you feel like you're working so freaking hard, but your income is not showing for it, stop guessing. Take my revenue bottleneck analysis and find out exactly where your business is stuck. DM me the word direction on Instagram and I will send it to you. Or head on over to the show notes and click it and take it while it's free because clarity is going to be the thing that takes you from less than$5,000 a month to 10k plus on repeat. And once you see the real constraint in your business, you finally know what to fix next. And damn, that return on investment, it feels so, so good.