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

The importance of effectively managing your doula business

Growing a successful doula business requires not only a deep passion for the work of supporting new mothers and families but also running a business that is effective and sustainable.

In building your business there are certain tools that when implemented can significantly streamline your business, increase productivity and reduce overwhelm to focus on what it is that truly matters in growing your doula business into a profitable and sustainable business to support more women in the transformative journey of pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum.

In this blog post, we will dive into five essential business tools that you need to be using effectively within your business to support your business to grow. These tools are to support you to streamline your business, optimise your time and build a professional doula business where you are providing a seamless client experience for your doula clients and managing your business in a way that is practical.

The five business tools you need right now in your business

1. Canva - for creating marketing graphics

2. LastPass - for securely storing passwords

3. ClickUp - for client management

4. OneNote - for creating a content management system

5. Xero - for managing invoices and tracking profit

Now let's deep dive into each.

Canva - for creating marketing graphics and client resources

Canva is a non-negotiable for your business. This is the most user-friendly graphic design platform that allows you to create professional and consistent marketing materials, graphics for social media and client resources. This is one of the most efficient and costly ways to build a consistent brand, and create graphics for social media and your website.

Use Canva to establish brand colours, text and design templates so that you can not only create that consistency but easy rely on templates to replicate marketing materials.

For social media - create templates for any social media posts you replicate within your business. For example reel covers, quote designs, promotional material and have a selection of templates you can rely on each week for your content creation.

For your website - use Canva to create any logos, text designs or graphics you require for your website. Also use Canva to create any blog post graphics if you currently have a doula blog.

For Pinterest - create Pinterest pin templates you can replicate or easily alter to create pin/ideal pin covers.

The key with using Canva is not just to create visually appealing graphics but to also utilise the tool to increase efficiency and reduce the amount of time it takes to marketing your services. Leveraging the resize functionality is a great opportunity to reduce recreating content/graphics from scratch.

LastPass - for securely storing passwords

Using LastPass within your business provides many benefits to your business that include both security and increased efficiency.

Here are the key benefits of using LastPass for your doula business:

1. Increased security: securely stores your passwords in one place.

2. Streamlined password management: you only require one master password to access all passwords simplifying the process for logging on to different systems.

3. Ability to auto-fill: has the option to reduce manually entering usernames and passwords.

4. Securely sharing passwords: this functionality to specifically beneficial if you bring a team member into your business (for example a virtual assistant) as you can securely share specific passwords with them for the systems they need access to.

ClickUp - for client management

ClickUp is a great tool for creating a centralised place for maintaining client contact details, package inclusions, communication history, and specific notes that you may need to reference back to in regards to your client.

This provide a place where you can check in each week to know where each client is at and what they require each week to ensure you are always on top of your clients' needs and up-to-date with packages, payments etc.

OneNote - for creating a content management system

Whether you are posting your first post or have been posting on social media for the past 3 years, there is no better time than now to create and maintain a content management system that stores content you have created within your business for the purposes of repurposing and reusing in the future and across different platforms.

A content management system allows you to create, edit and publish content in a simplified manner. This is what allows you to create content consistently in alignment with your content marketing strategy because you are ensuring old content is easily accessible for you to reference back to. It also allows you to repurpose content as required so that when you create content you are able to continue to use that content as an asset within your business.

OneNote is a great tool for building a content management system that allows you to store content in a way that is easily accessible and easy to maintain.

Xero - for managing invoices and tracking profit

Managing your finances via Xero and understanding how much money your business is making and spending is an essential part of running a sustainable doula business.

Many doulas overlook this in the early stages of business, especially when they aren't creating much income, or find it difficult to implement as their business starts to grow.

Whether you are yet to get your first client or booking consistent clients, it is essential to have processes around managing your finances to not only ensure smooth operations within your business (i.e. you are able to make payments as they are due, and you are aware of any outstanding client invoices and therefore following them up) but it also ensures you are making decisions in the best interest of your business.

The key benefits of implementing an accounting software within your doula business now are:

1. Simplifying your invoicing: creating and sending professional invoices to clients ensuring seamless invoicing, faster collection of payments and therefore an improved cash flow for your doula business

2. Tracking and managing expenses: simplifying your expense tracking therefore making it easier and more streamlined to capture and categorise your expenses on a weekly or monthly basis

3. Insight into how your business is financially performing: increasing awareness of the financial health of your business to ensure decisions you are making in your business are setting you up for long-term profitability and sustainability

Implementing these tools within your business

The question to connect with today in your business is, where do you need tools right now to increase efficiency within your business?

If you aren't currently using these tools right now then I highly encourage you to start looking at how you could implement them today to start building the doula business that is going to attract and serve more mothers during the transformative journey of pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum.