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

Alright, Emily thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about how you went about setting up your own practice and if you have any advice for professionals who might be considering starting their own?

It really all started with my own birth experiences. Looking back, I realized that my first birth was managed by everyone but me. I did not really know what what happening or why it was happening. I received many interventions without really understanding the point of them all. This left me feeling incredibly disempowered as a mother. Moving forward to my second birth, I became much more informed. I took classes, hired a doula and had a very empowering, confident birth. After this experience, my WHY was developed. I wanted to help every mom I could experience an empowered and confident birth.

I took my why and a whole lot of faith and just starting taking steps forward. I did not plan the next 5 years. I did not come up with this major business plan. I took it one step at a time. I attended a few births for friends, then eventually became trained and certified professionally. Once I got certified, I decided to come up with a business name and a brand and begin showing up on social media. Eventually, between my intentional marketing and mainly word of mouth referrals, the business began growing. Now, 3.5 years later, our team has 19 doulas and will probably have more within the next year.

The main steps I needed to take to get my practice launched was creating a brand that aligned with my vision and my why – acknowledging my target market and how I intended to serve those women. The second step was creating really intentional systems to ensure that there was consistency across the board for all of our clients. Third was to hire doulas that aligned wholeheartedly with my passion, vision, and mission.

The biggest challenges I faced came with navigating the systems. Majority of this was trial and error. So, when an error or conflict arose, I would have to rework the system to make it better. Many of the changes and adjsutments were due to negative outcomes and having to learn from mistakes. Challenging situations, but ultimately for the better.

If anyone is considering starting their own doula company or agency. Just take it one step at a time. Make sure the doulas you have working for you are aligned with your vision and mission wholeheartedly. Don’t compromise your vision for a dollar, either. Stay aligned with who you are and stick with your niche.

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.

I am a birth and postpartum doula, childbirth educator, and Doula Agency owner in Raleigh, NC. I came into this work because of my own two birth experiences. One birth had high intervention and was very disempowering and the other was incredibly empowering and redemptive.

Our company, East Raleigh Doula Company exists to educate, support, and encourage families as they make informed and empowered decisions for their pregnancy, labor, and postpartum experiences.

We provide evidence based education through childbirth education classes, newborn & postpartum classes, fitness classes. Our clients have access to our doulas for any resources, education or support they need in their pregnancy, labor and/or postpartum. We also do prenatal visits with our moms to help them craft birth plans and prep for their birth.
We provide emotional and physical support during the labor process through encouraging coping skills, helping with positions and movements to optimize fetal presentation and progression in labor, helping address fear and having a healthy, confident mindset. We support partners before, during and after the labor process to know how to best support mom in every stage of this experience.

During postpartum, we provide one-on-one doula support to be a support system in mom’s postpartum healing period. We are there to help with ensuring moms are recovering from birth physically, emotionally, and mentally. This may look like addressing birth trauma, talking through the birth experience, helping ensure mom is eating healthy, healing meals. We ensure mom is showering, resting, healing and bonding with baby as much as she can.
We also help with babies’ transition to the world. We help with all things infant care: soothing, swaddling, bottle feeding, breastfeeding support, bathing, babywearing, etc. We also will help to ensure you are confident in all of these things.
Our goal is to ensure you are soaking in every bit of this season, so if the dishes need to be done or laundry needs to be folded, we absolutely assist in those types of things as well. We are here to be your built in bestie, your maid of honor, and your village in this precious healing time.

We also provide placenta encapsulation, bereavement doula services, and virtual doula support.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

We have set ourselves apart from. many other agencies in the area and I believe that has made a huge difference. 1. We are not competitive. My belief if that there are enough moms to go around and the ones who are meant to hire us, will. And that has allowed us to stay in our niche and our target market and my maintaining our target market, word travels fast and we become known for who we serve and how we serve them.
2. We are excellent in our support. Every member of my team is trained to work like an East Raleigh Doula Company doula. Our agency is not made of individuals just doing a job, but a team that has an aligned vision, aligned systems, and consistency in care. That consistency, again, helps families know what they will get and how their doulas will serve them when they come to us. We provide excellent support.
3. We wear our brand. Every one of our doulas wears a branded t-shirt to every single birth and postpartum shift so that people see our logo and our company name every time they see our team working. My doulas know that when we go to a birth, we want the provider, nurse and family to know our name, our company and think that we are the best doula they ever worked with – we make ourselves memorable.
4. We ask for reviews. Every time. After we finish working with a client, we are very intentional to ask for reviews and at this point we still have 100% 5-star reviews. Google reviews are so important!

Any advice for managing a team?

My goal as an agency owner is to empower and equip my doulas as well as my clients. I want my doulas to feel confident, supported, and validated in their careers. I believe that our team retention is so high because I am intentional about preventing burnout instead of cleaning up after it. Here is my advice in doing the same:

1. Be intentional about having consistent, intentional communication and boundary setting. If you were to ask any doula on my team how I feel about boundaries, they would say I am the boundary queen. I am very vocal about asking my doulas to communicate their boundaries with me and I respect those boundaries.

2. Request their schedule of what they have capacity for and then align their workload accordingly. (this is job dependent, but it works in my field) They can take time off as much as they need or want to and I honor that. I also have a very strategic backup doula system in place to help support their clients when they have time off.

3. Hire people, not positions. I have had doulas get hired for one position or role, and completely shift into new positions based on their purpose. Example: one of my doulas came in as a birth doula. After realizing she was not passionate about the birth work including in attending births but rather in the intentional side of healing in postpartum, she communicated this to me and we created an entirely new role for her. She is walking in her purpose, meeting the needs of moms in a fulfilling way rather than just doing a job she was hired for.

4. Make it fun to work for you! We offer referral incentives to our doulas. We have quarterly team outings where we go out for fun. We include our team in our social media marketing. Make it fun. Get your team to connect and become friends. Be real and authentic and sit WITH them, not over them.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.eastraleighdoula.com
• Instagram: @eastraleighdoulaco
• Facebook: facebook.com/eastraleighdoula

Image Credits
Penven-Crew Photography Lauren Jolly Photography