About

Hi! I'm Darlene MacAuley, the creator of Inspired Birth Pro, and I believe in your ability to serve families and make a good living doing birth work.

I believe this is heart work. This isn't a career where you clock in and out or have an assembly line kind of mentality. You're planning to be a witness to one of the biggest transformations of a person's life, and you're there to help them through it. Your work with them transcends not just the family, but generations. Birth matters, parenting matters, and it's no small responsibility to support parents during birth or their journey as new parents, which is exactly why I started this same path you are on back in 2007.

At the time, I was working with my husband in our 6-year old asset liquidation business, crunching numbers and managing payroll and employee paperwork. I was happy to be self-employed but wanted more meaning in my work than shuffling papers.

It was on a cold winter day when I was flipping through a local Austin parenting magazine, and an ALACE birth doula training ad knocked me upside the head. I remembered my own birth experiences – one with a doula and one without – and thought about what a positive impact my doula made during my second birth. I am usually the type to research a million options and weigh the pros and cons, but instead, I jumped in feet first and heart next, convinced that doula work was what I was destined to do. From there I was hooked and I began looking for my tribe, birth and business-wise.

There were some doulas in my city but there really wasn't much in the way of business support specifically for birth workers, so after learning about a birth network that my trainer had grown in her own home city, I decided to create one in Austin in an attempt to create my own community. Through this network of birth and postpartum doulas, midwives and alternative health professionals, we started getting the word out in our community through monthly birth circles for expectant couples.

It was through this experience that I began to develop relationships with other birth professionals around town and benefited from the power of word-of-mouth referrals for birth doula work and childbirth classes.

In building my doula practice, I certified with Birth Arts International, developed my own business systems, hired coaches and learned more about growing a service business on my own. Eventually, I became a certified business coach with International Coach Academy and a Hypnobabies childbirth hypnosis instructor.

In 2008, I began this blog (first as The Savvy Doula blog) and started coaching birth pros to help them grow their birth businesses. In 2011, I transitioned out of doing birth work as I felt a bigger calling serve birth professionals. I felt I could make a bigger impact helping the professionals who serve families by showing them ways to grow a profitable business that served others as well as themselves. Birth work is intense, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually, and burnout is high. There are more certification programs now than there ever were, and only a select few offer adequate business training and support.

I'm here to help birth professionals who need that extra support with actionable business advice, digital products for birth doulas to set up their client system quickly and thoroughly, personal coaching and community support through the free Inspired Facebook Pros community on Facebook.

As a business coach for doulas looking to feel connected to their community and clients, I've taken my education and business experience, my knack for making connections between people and resources, and my mission of supporting women in birth and rolling it all into a one-stop resource for doulas and other birth professionals to start and grow their own practices.

I don't offer an out-of-the-box system.

Instead, the people I work with are doing the work from the heart AND have a goal to make a living at the work. They understand that it will take consistent action, determination, and effort to bring their dream to life, but they are willing to do it because they believe in the impact that birth work makes in the world.

I believe our businesses are an extension of ourselves, and through group coaching programs, workshops and individual coaching, birth professionals will learn to create a business to support their lifestyle while living out their vision to support families.

Are we a good match?

Could you start your business yourself without help? Of course you can. I admit that I'm a technician. I am the type to DIY the heck out of things and I learned how to take care of my own bookkeeping, client management, website creation, marketing, social media, and on and on. I pick up information and skills quickly and I am pretty good at a lot of different things. However, I've learned all of this over the past 15 years, and I've had business coaches, marketing coaches, CPAs, SBA business training classes, and hours upon hours of research and trial and error.

The times I've made the most progress were the times I had a coach who answered my questions, pushed me past my fears and held me accountable to get tasks done. One-on-one support has the greatest impact, and I serve doulas and other birth professionals as their #1 supporter of their success. Having me available to call on means that you will shorten the time it takes to get from ground zero to clients on your books. If you are ready to put in the hard work, I am ready to give you the help you need to get your birth business up and running.