We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Andrea Stainbrook a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Andrea, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?

Life often leads to reflection and curiosity. Building this business Amy and I have poured our hearts, our time, and our passion into it. There were lessons of boundaries, time management, and education on how to grow a business. We hit the 7 year mark this past August. That is a HUGE win. We have crested most of the milestones that many small businesses don’t make it to. Especially a female led business. This has lead us to ponder…. is all our hard work making us happier? Is this where we want to be? What if we had a job where we could clock out and forget about it? While a “regular” job may have it’s perks we ultimately both landed on being happy as owners. We appreciate the flexibility it can offer, especially as parents with busy schedules. This means we set our hours. (Except for those unexpected times. ). We are proud of what we built! We love serving our community! We also love what our business means to so many folk.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Amy Hammer and me, Andrea Stainbrook founded Metro Detroit Doula Services. We have different backgrounds. Hers is childhood education and mine Zoology. We both found ourselves drawn the the birth world. For each of us, after having a child ourselves we knew we wanted to help other parents on this huge life transition. Separately we both went about becoming Labor and Postpartum Doulas. Friendship in motherhood brought us together, meeting a local playdate. A connection was made easily and fast. Once doulas, we worked independently and honestly weren’t growing our own businesses. We would back each other up, but found ourselves doing other jobs, and me personally calling it quits as a doula. Amy heard about an Advanced Business Training specifically for doulas by the organization ProDoula. We went together and the real spark ignited. We were armed with how to move forward! We partnered and never looked back! MDDS was born!

What we offer as a doula agency is simple. We are here to support parents by bringing them comfort and building their confidence along the way. In pregnancy we are available and help families navigate what is most important to them. As doulas we walk alongside our families. In labor we physically bring comfort with our hands. Massage, counter-pressure, positions changes. They know they have positive encouragement always there for them, moment to moment. After the baby or babies are here, our focus shifts to the adjustment of parenthood. We stay the night tending to the newborn so the parents catch up on sleep. Helping establish rhythms and routines, assisting with feeding plans, and simply being that unbiased listening ear are huge parts of what we do. On the postpartum side of things we help both day and night.

Education is another thing we offer too! Not Your Mother’s Childbirth Education and Newborn Care Classes are our current monthly offerings! You do not have to be a doula client to join us!

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

How do you get clients? This was always the question starting off right?! We view it as a snowball. At first you collect some flakes, get some layering happening, then that ball starts to roll. We network with folk in our industry and we enjoy being a part of the community. Of course marketing, working on SEO, blogs, and the normal things businesses do to grow all worked. But the strategy we currently use, if you want to even call it a strategy, is simple. We stay genuine and let that shine. We have no gimmicks or sales tricks. We connect with folk the moment they inquire with us. We want to know what this time period looks like for them, and show them what our support can add to their experience. Our hearts are big and we really want parents in this day and age feeling strong and confident. That never changes. From our initial phone call our clients learn this and I believe it is one of the things we do best. Being authentically interested and caring for all parents.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

In the early days of our business when we were very hungry as most new owners are, we wanted to take any and every client. Our sense of urgency is strong and we wanted to help absolutely everyone even if it wasn’t a good fit. Bending and molding to be whatever the client needed. We found ourselves giving more of ourselves than we really had to offer. More time away from our families. More exceptions to the standards we planned on and had in place. It didn’t really benefit our business much to crumble on our main standards. We actually were recommended a book called The Pumpkin Plan from other doula agency owners we look up to. Both Amy and I read it, or listened (where are my audiobook fans?) and the main take away we took was focus on the clients that are “easy” to work with! They are easy because they see your value and fit what your business does/stands for. From there we can then tailor our business or adjust things that make sense to serve THOSE clients. These folk will continue to grow our business and are a match. If folk don’t value us, or don’t really understand our support, they are not a match. We don’t need to convince them we are or bend on our standards to serve them. They will find what makes sense for them. What you focus on expands they say. So focusing on the clients that really recognize our worth and don’t challenge our integrity is where we focus now.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.MetroDetroitDoulaServices.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/metrodetroitdoulaservices/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MetroDetroitDoulaServices?fref=ts

Image Credits
Candice Lamarand