By Kristin Laffrey, business coach for women leading impact in fertility, birth, postpartum, motherhood, parenting and matrescence.

There are many misconceptions when it comes to growing your doula business and this blog post is to cover four myths about growing a business as a doula that may actually be holding you back right now.

Working as a business coach supporting women to solidify their foundations, align their mindset and simplify their strategies, a big part of my work is supporting women to overcome the myths they hold around business to actually connect to what is important and essential to be able to grow.

These four myths are going to serve you greatly within your business to focus on what matters within your business and take the action you need now to get you moving forward.

The four myths are:

• Starting a doula business is just about serving clients

• I can just build my business through referrals and word of mouth

• I just need to reach more people and my business will grow

• I need to learn and know more

Starting a doula business is just about serving clients

Whilst serving clients is why you started this business, it’s important to recognise that there’s more to building a profitable and sustainable business than just working with clients.

I get that in an ideal world you would just work with clients and not have to do the business side of things like marketing your services, reaching more people, selling your offers BUT it’s so important to recognise that to be able to create sustainable impact and serve clients for years and years to come you also need to be building out the foundations and strategies within your business to support that to happen.

I can just build my business through referrals and word of mouth

Building your business through referrals and word of mouth is a powerful place to be in and an integral part of building your business but here is the challenge I also see so often with this. When businesses focus just on referrals and word of mouth and don’t build out a pipeline of clients through a repeatable marketing strategy and sales process, they lose their ability to control how many clients that are getting. This becomes particularly important if you are looking to grow your business or create online offers, workshops or programs and need to increase the number of clients you intake.

Setting your business up for sustainable success is about creating those levers within your business that you can pull when you want to increase your capacity or take on more clients. And this is why having a marketing strategy that you can further lean on to grow your business is essential to growing your business in the long-run. So how are you currently growing your audience? How are you nurturing your community? And how are you moving people into your packages?

I just need to reach more people and my business will grow

There is this perception in online business that to grow your business you just need to post content and your ideal clients will appear and one of the challenges with this is that so many people believe that posting content every day on social media is the solution to attracting a consistent flow of clients. Yet what I see time and time again is the gap that exists for so many people is not that they aren’t reaching enough people but rather that they aren’t moving their audience into their packages.

This is why it’s important to recognise that there are two parts of the process to attracting clients:

Firstly, being seen by your ideal clients (getting in front of the right people through increasing your visibility)

But also secondly, having a sales process in place to move them into your packages.

Right now if you aren’t attracting clients, break this down to see where the gap currently exists. If you are getting in front of your ideal clients, are they becoming paying clients? This supports you to see where the obstacle may currently exist that’s holding you back from getting clients.

I need to learn and know more

Here is the reality in business, it’s easy to learn something but the challenging part is applying that to your business because it takes implementation and refinement to be able to make that happen. Learning more marketing tips or learning more ways to support your clients isn’t going to grow your business IF you aren’t building your business to make that happen.

Early in your business I get that your focus is on obtaining qualifications but ensure that you are actually connecting to the things that are essential in being able to attract more clients and grow your business, like building out your marketing strategy and sales process, and ensuring that it is effective within your business.

So this is your reminder to connect to what is actually required to grow your business because in building your business it's important to understand what foundations and strategies are essential to build your business and focus on establishing those so that you can attract more clients to create more impact and income within this space.