The Three Things Every New Doula Needs That Nobody Teaches

Every new doula steps into this work with such a full heart. You care about people, you care about birth, you care about justice, and you are willing to be in the room for some of the most intense moments in someone’s life. That is a really big, generous deal!

What almost nobody tells you though is that passion and skill are not enough to carry a doula business through that fragile first year and beyond. You can be excellent at comfort measures, at advocacy, at holding space, at using a rebozo, and still feel like you are shouting into the void when it comes to getting clients and staying in this work.

After years of training and mentoring doulas around the world, I keep seeing the same pattern. The doulas who create lasting and sustainable business, and the doulas who quietly fade away, are not separated by talent. They are separated by three pillars that almost no training fully teaches. Spoiler Alert: bebo mia teaches this as part of your tuition with our full spectrum doula training!

The three pillars are:

1. Clarity.
2. Visibility.
3. Community.

And tucked inside those pillars is a powerful shift that changes everything for your business, which is the difference between selling and solving.

Let us walk through it together.

Clarity as an Act of Kindness for your Doula Business

Brene Brown has that line that says clear is kind and unclear is unkind. I think about that all the time when I talk to new doulas. You are vague not because you are unkind, but because nobody has ever taught you that clarity is a form of care.

Clarity is knowing who you serve, what problem you solve, and the transformation you offer. It is not just a cute tagline or a brand statement or a logo that you liked on Canva. Clarity is the backbone of your entire business. When you have clarity, every decision becomes easier. Your website makes more sense. Your posts land with the right people. You stop trying to be everything to everyone. And the best part, you get to work with the folks you like the most, over and over again! That is a super win as an entrepreneur.

Most doulas come out of their weekend course and go straight to picking a business name and an Instagram handle. They say things like:

I am a non medical support person
I support births
I offer comfort measures in labor
I provide postpartum care

None of that is wrong, but it is also not clear. It does not speak to what your clients are actually lying awake at night worrying about. They are asking questions like:

• Will I get my VBAC?
• Will I be safe at the hospital?
• Will I have to have an emergency c-section?
• Will my husband make it back in time?
• Will I be a good parent?
• Will my baby be safe?
• Will anyone listen to me?
• Will my partner know what to do?
• Will this birth be different from my last one?
• Will I get postpartum depression again?
• Will I lose this baby too?

When I asked ‘what do you do as a doula?’, I once had a student who told me, very earnestly, ‘I help with birth.’ When I asked what she really wanted to be doing, she paused, took a breath, and finally said, I want to support VBACs in my city because I know people can do it if they have the right information and research, if they pick the right hospital and doctor, and the right team beside them supporting the message that they can do it.

That moment of clarity changed everything for her. Suddenly she was not just a doula who helps with birth. She was the go to person who stands beside people who want a different experience after a cesarean, who knows the research, who knows how to speak to doctors, who knows how to support and scaffold her clients when the system starts putting pressure on them to have another c-section.

That is the difference between vague and clear.

Clarity is not a marketing trick or hack but rather it is a way of telling your clients, I see your exact fear and what is keeping you up at night and I am here for you and I am prepared to walk you through it. It is an act of compassion. And it is very hard to build that kind of clarity in a weekend training that is mostly focused on stages of labor and comfort measures.

In the MSP program, which is our full spectrum doula training, we spend months building clarity. We unpack systems of oppression in birth care. We talk about trauma informed support. We look at who you are, where you come from, and how you show up in the room – yes, we even unpack ego and do so much doula self-care and healing. You learn how to speak about your work in a way that is honest, specific, and deeply kind to the people who need you most.

You deserve that level of preparation and your clients do too. This is sustainability for your business. 

Visibility as Care by Doulas, Not Performance

Now we get to the part that makes every doula’s shoulders rise just a little. Visibility.

Most doulas do not struggle with visibility because they are shy or introverted. They struggle because they were never taught that showing up is part of how we care, and because they have only ever seen visibility modelled as performance and self-promotion.

Visibility is not about being the loudest person online. It is not about dancing on video if you do not want to. It is not about chasing an algorithm. Visibility is about letting your community know that they do not have to go through this alone.

When you talk about what you do, you are saying here I am, and I can walk beside you. You are letting a queer couple know that there is someone who will protect their pronouns and their family in the delivery room. You are letting a fat parent know that someone will advocate for them when they start hearing the usual scare tactics about their body and the deeply flawed BMI. You are letting a tired, single-by-choice parent know that support exists before they collapse into postpartum depression.

Research shows that continuous emotional support in labor leads to fewer interventions and a better overall experience, yet those outcomes only reach people who are able to find that support. If you are a secret or invisible doula, they cannot.

I have seen a version of this story play out more times than I can count. A doula finishes training. She is exactly the kind of person you would want at your birth. She posts the occasional vague update but never really says I am taking clients, and this is what I do, here is how to work with me. She does not want to be annoying or pushy, so she stays quiet.

Then one day she finds out that a friend hired a doula and never even thought to ask her. When she says, gently, ‘I would have loved to be there’, her friend answers, ‘I did not realize you were working as a doula, I thought you had just taken the course.’

That is not a confidence problem. That is a communication problem. That is a visibility gap.

In MSP and in the Get More Clients Challenge, we approach visibility as service. We teach you to share in a way that feels honest and grounded, rooted in your values, and connected to your actual community, both online and offline. This is not about trends and algorithms, it is about you clearly sharing that you are there and you can help with XYZ problems.  

Community as Your Doula Business Backbone

We tell families all the time that they are not meant to raise babies alone in a house without support. Yet so many doulas try to raise their businesses alone and wonder why they feel burnt out and defeated.

Doulas are built for community. We do our best thinking in circles, in group chats, at kitchen tables after a hard birth, at retreats where we collaborate and share and connect. Your business needs that same kind of holding.

Your next client is almost always already connected to you through your community. A past coworker, a friend of a friend, your yoga teacher, the person at your kids school, a midwife, a chiropractor, a therapist down the street. Someone you already know knows someone who needs what you do.

One of our MSP students sent a simple message to the people in her life letting them know she was taking on birth and postpartum clients. She did not have a website at that point. She did not have a branding board. But the people who loved her knew how deeply she cared, and they shared her name. Before she had even finished her program, she had nine paying clients. All from her existing community. Nine clients, y’all! 

That is what happens when you stop treating business as a solo project and start treating it as something your people can support you in.

Community is your marketing plan. Community is your nervous system support. Community is what keeps you going when a birth is hard or a client ghosts you. This is why we build tight community spaces inside our doula training and all the programs we offer, and why the final day of the Get More Clients Challenge is dedicated entirely to tapping your network in a way that feels respectful and real.

If you want one small action to take today, let it be this. Think of five people who know and like you. Send them a quick note that says, I am taking birth or postpartum clients right now, and if you know anyone who is expecting or struggling, I would be grateful if you passed my name along.

That is community based business. It is that simple to start scaffolding your business.

Selling Versus Solving in your Doula Business (and Why It Matters So Much)

The bridge that connects all of this together is the difference between selling and solving. This is the part that shifts a doula from invisible to in demand.

Selling is when you list features…
Three prenatal visits.
Continuous Birth support.
Overnight Postpartum care.

It is the language most of us pick up from old marketing trends and from their rushed weekend doula training. It is vague and it relies on the client to guess why any of that matters, and most people do not have the knowledge or the energy to do that translation. They are nervous and busy pregnant people or brand new (super tired) parents. 

Solving is different. Solving is when you speak to the problem and the outcome. It sounds like this:

• I help you avoid pressured decisions during labor by making sure you understand every option before you are in the thick of it
• I help you bring a new baby into your blended family with less chaos and more connection
• I help you come home from the hospital with systems that keep you fed, rested, and supported instead of drowning in dishes and tears

When you speak this way, people suddenly understand what a doula actually does in their real life, not in theory. They can feel the relief of it in their own body.

I taught a group recently where almost everyone came in saying nobody is booking me, maybe I am just not cut out for this. They were all selling. They were listing features of their services in a way that was technically accurate and completely unmemorable and hard for people to understand why they would need this service. When we shifted their language to solving, clients started reaching out.

One postpartum doula who is also a holistic nutritionist changed her message from I offer postpartum nutrition support to I make mealtimes pleasurable again for families with picky eaters and exhausted parents. Within two days she had booked two consults.

Nothing about her skill set changed. Her social media following did not suddenly explode. She simply stopped selling and started solving.

People do not buy doulas. They buy relief. They buy feeling understood. They buy someone who will stand between them and an unnecessary episiotomy. They buy someone who knows how to anchor them when birth gets loud and messy and real.

This is one of the reasons our MSP students often start filling their roster before they even graduate. They are taught the language of care and the language of impact, not just a list of tasks or studies to cite in their marketing materials. Weekend trainings do not have the hours or the lens to teach this, so doulas are left thinking they are the problem when really the gap is in their education.

You deserve better tools than that and your clients deserve better language than that. Your business deserves to be rooted in solving rather than selling. Because people need doulas and they need to see the why.

You Are More Ready Than You Think, Awesome Doula!

If this is hitting a tender place in you, I want you to hear this clearly. You are not behind or late or failing. You are simply under supported in the business part, and that is fixable. Yippee, that is great news, right?!

When you get support with clarity, visibility, community, and the shift from selling to solving, your confidence is no longer something you have to psych yourself up for. It becomes a side effect of having a plan and a voice and a community at your back.

The Get More Clients Challenge has already begun, but you can still join and catch the first replay and move through the week with us. It is one hour each day, small and intimate, and focused on these exact pieces in a practical and easy to follow way.

And if you know in your bones that this work is for you, early bird for our full spectrum doula training is open right now. The code BIRTHBIRD saves you $350 (yes, this works for payment plans too), and the next cohort is March 2026. If you want rigorous, justice centered, full spectrum doula training that includes real business support, you can learn more at bebomia.com/doulatraining.

Your community is already closer than you think.