Growing A Business: My Journey into the Heart of Entrepreneurship
Welcome April! A new month means it’s time for a new theme.
Leading into the year, the theme was all about the nature of human beings: families, our brains, decision-making, and where our passions and inspiration come from.
February, I explored how we want to be heard and seen, which led into March, which was about where your business is going and goal setting, creating plans to move forward.
And this month is about growth and expansion.
I’m going to talk about ways individuals and businesses can help themselves evolve, transform, move on to bigger things, and how to do that.
Today, I’m going to start with how I grew my business and the changes I’ve seen...
The Beginnings of Big Belly Services
The year was 2001.
When I started my business, Big Belly Services, there was a nascent internet. No Wix, no Squarespace, no online courses.
For bootstrap entrepreneurs on the brink of the technology boom, it was bleak. You had to DIY it or die.
If you didn’t have that start-from-scratch ability, you had to have money to pay someone to start it for you.
I didn't have money, but thankfully, I had an old-school work ethic and dug in. I took free classes from the Small Business Administration on business finances. Wrote and printed out brochures on my home printer. And learned how to create a website with a book.
I didn't know anything about marketing. That was years to come.
I also want to set some context for starting my business...
I had a newborn baby. I’d just turned 40. My father had died two months ago — while I was eight months pregnant — and a few weeks after that, I got laid off from the company I'd been with for 16 years.
A lot was going on.
You often hear people say, “Out of adversity comes opportunity.”
And that's what happened to me.
This confluence of events opened a doorway that I'd been wanting to step through for many years, which was starting my own business.
I didn't know what I was going to start a business for. I thought maybe I’d be a race director or an event organizer or a wedding planner.
But instead — because I was pregnant and I was in the world of birth — it was going to be as a doula, and eureka! 
I became one.
“Out of adversity comes opportunity.”
The Unfolding
Starting in April of 2001, I took a birth doula training. Everything was in person in those days and I was fortunate to live in Seattle where doula trainings were offered regularly.
Two months later, I went to a Birthing From Within childbirth educator training.
When my son was nine months old, I started offering my first childbirth classes.
When he was 11 months old, I went to my first birth as a doula.
It was a pretty rapid process of starting a business and doing the things.
Growth Through Learning and Connecting
I was especially fortunate that my midwives said, “Hey, why don't you teach childbirth classes? We'll refer our clients to you and you can teach them in our waiting room.”
I had some really key connections that helped me get started.
But this was also an area of passion.
I'd wanted to be a midwife since my first child was born 20 years ago. And I'd been a childbirth educator when I was much younger, but in a very different style of education that didn't fit where I was at this time in life.
So things were lining up very nicely for me.
Now, some other things you should know is that I am a diehard do-it-yourselfer. I spent hours and hours and hours in my basement office with my baby in a sling strapped to my chest — either napping or nursing. As he got older, he'd play at my feet while I created everything from scratch.
Registration forms, my curriculum, brochures, a website.
I remember getting my first online sale without even talking to the client and their money just showed up in my account. I thought I was the shit!
This was the greatest thing since sliced bread!
Challenges and Early Wins
Those early wins certainly helped me to grow and expand.
Plus, I'm just naturally creative, resourceful, and dedicated.
I had a lot of energy. I got shit done. I'm 63 now and I still get shit done!
I still work with the same principles of hard work and building what you need, only now there are so many more tools at our disposal.
I was teaching childbirth classes and the people in the classes asked if I would be their doula. So I started going to more births as a doula.
My business kept slowly growing. It wasn’t fast and crazy growth like some folks might see today with an online reach, there was just a nice, steady stream of people coming my way.
Various doctors and midwives heard of me from their clients who had taken my birth classes, so I started to get more birth class registrations from them.
And then those birth class students turned into more doula clients and word-of-mouth referrals.
So my business kept growing.
Now, I don't want you to think there weren't months when I had to cancel classes because nobody signed up because that definitely happened.
But I do want you to know that I attended 25 births in my first year, then 35 births the next year, and 40 or more births per year from then on.
With my birth classes, I was teaching one evening a week for six weeks or a weekend immersion. I'd alternate those every month until more people wanted in.
And there were other professionals in the community who wanted to teach Birthing From Within classes with me.
So I started to offer classes two nights a week, and every weekend a month instead of every other month.
I brought in another teacher, then a second, and a third, and stopped teaching the classes myself.
By now, I was running a childbirth class business. I hired an assistant who managed all of our registrations and communications with students.
Birth of a Doula Trainer
And then in 2004, I was approached to become a doula trainer with the Seattle Midwifery School. It doesn't get much better than training alongside Penny Simkin, the godmother of the doula world.
So I became a birth doula trainer. By 2008, I'd created my own doula training curriculum.
I was teaching it through my own business, and I was invited to travel to different places around the country to train doulas in their communities as well.
Things were continuing to grow very nicely for me.
By 2015, I was done running the childbirth education business and closed that part of my business entirely. I wanted to focus on being a doula and training doulas.
In 2017, I started to offer my doula trainings virtually so people locally could attend in person while people from around the country could attend via Zoom.
By 2018, I put an entire doula training online (when folks said it couldn't be done — of course it could be done!)
Around that time, I retired as a birth doula so I was solely training doulas.
I offered birth doula trainings in several different formats.
I traveled around the country training doulas, and I offered a number of advanced doula courses as well.
Watching the Trajectory
What I want you to notice from this trajectory is that there was a gradual buildup.
There were points where it wasn’t just me wanting to do more, but people in my community recognizing what I was doing and approaching me.
It was a combination of being “self-made” and also having a good reputation and getting tapped on the shoulder to say, “Hey, would you come do this with us?”
That's a good sign that your business is growing and that you're establishing yourself as an expert or leader in your field.
The other thing I want you to notice is that the format, the way that I was teaching, and the things I was teaching also evolved over time.
This was an 18-year process of building and growing, trimming away things that were no longer working, trying new things, and adopting new technology to do work differently.
It took time.
Is It Possible to Do It Faster? And If So, Is It Better?
One of the things I see now, which I think is really interesting, is that the timeline of growing, evolving, developing expertise and leadership has condensed into a really short timeframe for a lot of people who are in the online space now.
They were a doula for a few years, and now they're training hundreds of doulas online.
I'm impressed with the chutzpah that it takes to do that.
But I'm also curious about what it takes to create a thriving business in such a short amount of time.
And I wonder about the quality of the end product.
Because what I've seen in my lifetime is that expertise takes time.
Now, granted, I'm older. I wasn't raised with technology and everything being super fast like it is today.
I certainly didn't grow up having access to people from around the world doing a gazillion things instantaneously. That has changed how we think about who we're going to follow, what we will believe, and what we perceive as quality.
Reflecting on Growth and Mastery
What I've observed over the years from really masterful teachers — which I consider myself one — is that we had to understand adult education theory: How do adults learn? What are all the different ways that they learn? What's the psychology of learning?
As education moved online, I was one of the early adopters. I created the first hybrid program at Bastyr University for training childbirth educators.
I had to learn about online education and the theory and psychology behind online learning.
I put many hours of education, experience, and trial and error into creating the courses I developed.
So I wonder if folks who have always had access to online information — just by being immersed in it — have a sense of what's good and what's not good.
That's very possible.
For me — because I wasn't immersed in it — there was a steep learning curve.
Another thing that I've observed from watching experts in a field is their mastery of the content. Their knowledge.
I often say they could teach things from inside a cardboard box.
They could be in a box or online, and you’d feel their charisma, energy, wisdom, and the nuance of everything that they've embodied, transmitted out of the box or across the airwaves.
Somebody who's new at their game doesn't have that.
For example, I've done the double hip squeeze hundreds of times. I've taught it to thousands of doulas. I know how to describe it in words and pictures and demonstrations. I know the camera angles and all the different nuanced ways to describe where to find the landmarks and what the doula should feel and what the pregnant person should feel and how to ask about that.
I know all the intricate aspects of teaching one technique because of my years of teaching it in person.
What Do YOU Think?
I can’t watch everything out there; I'm just seeing all the new courses popping up.
So I'd love to hear from you...
Do you notice when somebody hasn't been in the trenches a long time to have developed their chops — the personal finesse of doing different things before they're teaching it — is a good teacher?
I don't want the public — who's overwhelmed with choices — to be confused, to not know which course they should pick, or to choose one that isn't very good.
I'd love to hear what you are seeing in the trends of online education or where education, in general, is going.
Are you getting your needs met? Is it hard to discern a quality course or not? Are you satisfied with what you are finding?
And Also, How's YOUR Business Doing?
I'd love to hear how your business started, how it's grown, and the direction you're taking it in.
I'm always ready to help people figure out the business they want to start, or help their business grow, or help market new services or products.
Supporting heart-centered business owners is what I'm all about. So leave a comment below, or send me an email if you have questions, or schedule a call if you need assistance.
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Next week, I'll talk about the evolving role of websites and my formula for a winning website.
