About Having a Savvy Business

Business is about integrating who you are with what you do. It represents an unfolding of your passion, an embodiment of your higher purpose. As doulas and birth professionals, our passion revolves around pregnancy, birth, and the adjustment period thereafter. Our higher purpose is to serve women during one of the most powerful experiences in their lives. We communicate our passion outwardly through our business by creating a core message highlighting our individual philosophies and unique qualities.

This concept isn’t taught in business school and can’t be found in most books on how to start a business. For creative people filled with passion, the practical side of business can look boring, tedious or overwhelming.

What Am I Here For?

My name is Darlene MacAuley and I’m here to help birth professionals build their unique and powerful practices by integrating who they are into their business, and by taking the mystery out of the startup process so they can get up and running quickly and efficiently.

What’s Savvy About This Blog?

The Savvy Doula Business Blog is a culmination of my personal and professional lives. It combines my schooling, my professional experience as both an employee and a business owner, my journey as a mother and a woman, and my passion for helping women in their own empowerment, personally and professionally. My intent is to eventually create an online and offline community of doulas, who pursue our personal inerests while serving women during the childbearing year. It will be a resource for birth professionals of all types to come and share their wisdom and their experiences so that we can all expand within this growing profession.

How Savvy Am I?

I have a Bachelor of Business Administration Degree in Travel Industry Management from the University of Hawaii, and 12 years of professional experience in the hospitality industry, from AAA five diamond luxury resorts to airlines and group travel companies. Working for these types of companies, I learned a great deal about the importance of high levels of service and the way big businesses work.

Since 2001 I’ve owned a business with my husband liquidating assets of large companies across the US. We started in our tiny home office and built it into a corporation with two large warehouses and over 20 employees. In 2007 I stepped down from my day-to-day duties, but I currently remain involved on a much smaller scale.

I am a certified birth doula with Birth Arts International and have trained with ALACE. I view the birth environment as my lab in progress to increase my knowledge and improve my business processes, and determine additional ways I can positively affect a family’s birth experience in my community.

As a Reiki Master, I am fascinated with energy – the energy of people, places and things. I integrate my growing knowledge about the energy in food, healing modalities, and spirituality into both life and business.

I am a Certified Professional Coach trained by the International Coach Academy. I have benefitted personally and professionally by working with life and business coaches, and I realized that coaching skills are very relevant and helpful in my role as a birth doula. My doula business, SavvyDoula.net, combines my skills as a doula, Reiki practitioner and business and life coach. My business has one goal – to support women in birth, either directly as a doula, or indirectly through coaching other doulas.

In 2007 I created the Central Texas Birth Network to bring the childbirth professional community together. As an organization, my vision is to educate and empower families during the childbearing year, thereby creating a shift in consumer demand for more mother-friendly care in Central Texas.

I am an “attached parent” of two wonderful children, who really are my greatest source of joy in life. My role as a parent has had a tremendous impact on my life, and it gives me valuable perspective in my role as a doula.

You Can Be Savvy Too!

Whether you’re comfortable about growing your business or not, my goal is to help other birth professionals become Savvy in their birth business by offering free tips and articles through this blog. In time, you will find useful tools that you can utilize in your business, plus opportunities for group and individual business coaching to really move you forward. Subscribe to the Savvy Doula E-Zine to be notified of new offerings, and visit often to learn more about creating your Savvy Doula Business.

With great appreciation for the important work that you do,

Darlene

Tags: birth business, darlene macauley, doula business tips, savvy doula