We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ashley Olson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ashley below.

Alright, Ashley thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

As a sleep consultant, it can feel like there’s this “us vs them” mentality– the sleep consultants who do strict sleep training and those who claim not to do any sort of sleep training at all. It can be hard for parents to find someone to work with for sleep support for their child that can meet them where they’re at, in a place that isn’t so black and white. In a place that holds space for balance and gives them options they can feel comfortable implementing in order to improve sleep for their child (and themselves).

My whole mission is provide parents with methods that aren’t as straight forward as strict cry it out but also aren’t telling them they just need to live with it, that their child is only this small once, etc. There’s always a middle ground that honors and respects their sleep needs without inducing guilt about their sleep habits or wanting to change those habits for the better.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My story is probably pretty similar to a lot of other sleep consultants– I researched so many things whenever I was pregnant with my first child EXCEPT sleep. Which is really funny looking back because I *love* to sleep. I knew I’d experience some sleep loss (like I would be up to feed a baby a few times a night), but I imagined it being very straight forward and simple: put the baby to sleep, put them in their bassinet, go to sleep myself, wake up to feed every few hours, put baby back down, go back to sleep.

It was very much NOT that. Putting a baby to sleep required more work than I imagined and transferring them without them waking the second they touched the bassinet was straight up impossible. I knew nothing about sleep cues, how long they needed to be awake, or bedtime routines. I honestly just thought they’d go to sleep when they were tired and that would be it.

As you can imagine, we spent months being miserably sleep-deprived. We did the most insane things to try to get that child to sleep and stay asleep, just so we could get a few hours of sleep ourselves. Honestly, we weren’t even being greedy– we didn’t want a whole night. Just something more than 30 minutes without holding a baby. My husband even drove around in a really awful ice storm one night, just so I could have a break.

We were in such a bad place. I knew something had to give. But I didn’t know anything about sleep or sleep training. Everything I read online just said to put your baby down and let them cry it out. Looking back, we probably should have just done that considering the sleep emergency we were in, but my mental health was not going to let me do that. I was hanging on by a thread and listening to baby cry for a potentially long period of time would’ve made us inconsistent and unsuccessful.

My husband ended up buying some sort of e-guide, sending me to bed, and doing the bulk of sleep training himself. It wasn’t perfect, but I was getting decent stretches of sleep finally so I really didn’t care. The bar was SO LOW!

We finally entered a phase where we felt comfortable trying for a second baby but during that pregnancy, I soaked up anything and everything I could about newborn and infant sleep. Let me tell you, that postpartum experience and overall journey with sleep was so different in the best way. A night and day difference to our first.

When our second child was 6 months old, I enrolled in a certification program to become a sleep consultant so that I could help families and hopefully save them from the experience we had as first time parents. That was in 2018 and I really thought Heaven Sent Sleep would just be a little thing I did on the side as a passion project. It very quickly turned into a full time business that fulfilled me in a lot of different ways– but I really just loved being able to give parents options with sleep training that they couldn’t just find online and run with, constantly questioning their journey every step of the way. I wanted to be there to coach them in the moment, help them learn their child’s sleep needs, decipher their cues, and make them the true expert on their child’s sleep.

Now, I’m able to provide parents even more support through those hardest parts of sleep training because I work together as a team with another sleep consultant on my team. I always say we are two sleep consultants who share a brain because we are that in sync with our recommendations and gut instincts. Having that extra layer of support means parents always have someone to text or message as they’re going through the process. Modeling my business this way is one of the things I’m most proud of because it’s what I needed as a first time parent that didn’t exist then.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

I was working about 32 hours a week as a Physical Therapist Assistant when I returned to work after having my first child. Physical therapy was my first true love, it had been my dream job since I was 12 years old. I never saw myself leaving physical therapy at all. When I started Heaven Sent Sleep, I just wanted to mostly help and support families while bringing it just a little extra income (since working extra hours wasn’t an option at that time for our family– we didn’t have childcare so my husband and I just worked opposite hours). Within 6 months, I had to cut my hours from the hospital to about 20 hours a week to accommodate clients and phone calls. 6 months after that, I cut my hours to about 1-2 shifts a week. I was able to handle that until I had my third child and when I went back to work, I worked one Saturday a month until March 2020 when I resigned and focused on Heaven Sent Sleep officially full time (or more). In 2021, nearly a year after going full-time, I hired my first team member! I just wasn’t able to handle the volume of clients I was getting and still provide them with the attention and support they deserved through the sleep training process. After having my 4th child in 2022, I hired my second team member and that team member is the sleep consultant that works with me with families so each family gets the support of two sleep consultants for the price of one.

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

Most of my clients come form social media so the biggest source of keeping in touch comes from being able to interact with them on Instagram! I make sure they know that whenever we wrap up support, it’s never “goodbye” and always “see you later” because they become a part of my community. Their success and sleep is so important to me because sleeping well gives you so much of your life back– I want them to know that if any hiccup happens and sleep is compromised, they always have me to turn back to. I try to make sure I’m always approachable and have a resource handy or a way they can continue to communicate with me so that they never feel alone on their parenting journey. I want parents to have a village again, and I want to be part of that village for them.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.heavensentsleep.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/heavensentsleep
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/heavensentsleep

Image Credits
Amber Tice Photo Shelbi Washam