December 31, 2025
Doula Business Structures Explained: Podcast Episode #322
In this solo episode of Ask the Doulas, Gold Coast Doulas founder Kristin Revere explores the different ways birth and postpartum doulas structure their businesses, including solo practices, partnerships, collectives, and agencies. This episode is a valuable resource for families who are deciding which model of care best fits their needs, as well as for birth and baby professionals who are considering various business structure options.
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Hi, everyone! I’m Kristin Revere, founder of Gold Coast Doulas and co-host of Ask the Doulas Podcast! Today I’m diving into a topic that’s especially relevant for anyone who’s curious about how doulas work and for birth professionals who may be exploring how to structure their own businesses and for clients who aren’t sure who they should hire between solo doulas and partner doulas and those who work in agencies or practice models, and what the benefits are and the downsides to each model of care.
So let’s start with the first model: solo doula businesses. These would be the most common. Many doulas start as solo practitioners. They run their own business, whether it’s a hobby or they are doing full time work, and they do their own marketing. They have their own website. They take clients directly and manage the invoicing and scheduling with clients themselves. Now, this can be a benefit to doulas in that you have full autonomy of your work. You can choose the clients you take, the hours you work, how you want to market and brand, the type of clients that you want to go after. And if you enjoy the business end of things the way I do, it’s fun to come up with a logo and brand and to do the marketing and community events. But it can also be limiting. I found when I was a solo birth doula that I could only take so many birth clients per month, and I could not go on vacation. I had to get back up on my own, who may have a different philosophy or practice differently or may not be available if I am ill or I have two clients go on the same day. It is nice for clients to be able to choose one doula, really feel like their messaging speaks to them personally, and have the doula that you call be the doula that you end up hiring. Again, the con is if that doula is sick or has an emergency or is at another birth, you might have a backup that has a different philosophy and may not be experienced; it could be a variety of things. And certainly burnout can be a factor, even for newer solo doulas. The average doula is only in this field three to five years, and that is for birth and postpartum. Same goes for solo postpartum doulas. I would like to address that it’s not just birth call. You’re limited in the amount of clients that you can take. My agency, Gold Coast Doulas, specializes in overnight postpartum support. So if a client wants seven nights a week, that is really challenging for one doula to work seven nights a week for two months at a time. That would be a downside. You’d be turning work away or you’d be fully booked or you can get really burnt out, whether it’s day or overnight or again as a solo doula, especially if you have children. You are managing your family’s schedule and the hours that you can work, so you end up referring elsewhere. And hopefully you have some doulas who share referrals with you. So that can be some of the pros and the challenges to solo doula work.
I know the reason that I wanted to start Gold Coast Doulas and practice in a partner model of shared call was because I didn’t want to miss my children’s birthdays if at all possible. I wanted to be able to attend conferences and not worry about my clients, and I also wanted to take more than two birth clients a month. When I started Gold Coast, my former business partner who later moved out of state – she and I would share four to six clients a month, which was more than either of us could take with our solo doula businesses. And we could still try to be there for school events for our kids, unless, again, two of our clients went on the same day, which did happen to us a couple of times. That allowed us to make a bigger impact on the number of families we could serve and avoid burnout, and for those long births, we would tag in and out, and our clients knew us both because they interviewed us. They worked with us through pregnancy. And we both became postpartum doulas at the same time, so we also shared postpartum clients for our birth clients who wanted to extend that relationship. We were able to work together in their home with day and overnight support for those families, or work strictly with postpartum families.
So the partner model can be beneficial in sharing call, being able to work more postpartum hours, and I was also in another model which is a collective. I was in a collective before I was a solo doula. Collectives can operate differently, but the one I was in shared marketing costs ands shared a website. There was an owner of the collective. And we had Meet the Doula events where the community could come in and choose the doula from our collective. We did back each other up. The collective was only birth doulas. There was one postpartum doula in our group, but most of us were birth doulas only. And we would work expos. I remember working a women’s expo together. We also had different community events where we would take turns and share the marketing costs and share time working booths. We also were a backup that knew each other well, versus calling doulas in the community if you had overlap. I remember being backup for many people in my collective, and it was a way for me as a new doula to get experience by helping them out when they needed it, even if it was backing up for an hour or two until they could get to the birth. So collectives are another model, and again, they tend to have Meet the Doula or Doula Speed Dating events.
And then the agency model is one that I am a huge fan of. I own Gold Coast Doulas, and we are the first agency in our area when we launched ten years ago in 2015, and we certainly were the first agency in our region to focus on postpartum support. We brought a postpartum trainer to West Michigan and ended up starting the expansion of our postpartum team. I became a postpartum doula, and a lot of doulas that we brought into the agency got trained in day and overnight care. So we were not only the first agency in our area, but the first to really focus on postpartum support, especially overnight. There were a handful of postpartum doulas in our community, mainly offering daytime support, but we really had that focus and our trainer in the training organization that we went through had a focus on newborn care. So that was a way for us to serve the community in a different way with birth partners and with team skill shares and trainings and holiday parties and give backs. An agency could, again, make more of an impact.
And for postpartum support, for those families who want seven nights and seven days of care, we have a big enough team where we can meet the need. And most of the time, we are able to even meet last-minute postpartum requests or birth requests. I’ve had clients who have an induction pending and want to hire at 39 weeks. And we can usually accommodate because we have a big team. We can back each other up. And for those larger postpartum clients, they feel very relieved knowing the care I take in selecting the doulas on our team and the fact that we all share similar core beliefs and that I require certification and insurance for the subcontractors that work for my agency. And they all have their own businesses. They maintain insurance and certification and all of the doulas on my team complete three continued education credits because I have a variety of training organizations that subcontractors have gone through, and they all have different standards. Some require continued education, and some certifying bodies do not. So to have the same standard of care, all doulas on my team, whether it’s trainers that I bring to Gold Coast or outside breastfeeding trainings or NICU baby trainings – our team keeps up with the changing landscape of this profession. So there are some benefits of the agency model in that there’s continuous opportunities for developing skills. If a doula in an agency has a question, has tried different positions, isn’t sure about some baby gear, for example, there is a hive mind, and some collectives also have that, where you can ask other doulas in the agency or collective about what they’ve done with this particular sound machine or what to do if a baby has a lot of reflux or if you’ve tried every position you can think of, and does anyone have ideas for stalled labor, for example.
There are so many benefits to that model, but with an agency, there’s usually an owner or multiple owners, and it is the vision of that owner, so it may not be as specialized or niched down as some doulas might like. But if the agency brings on subcontractors, like mine does, then the doulas can take work on their own and run their own solo doula business and pick and choose work that they want within the agency, as well as on their own. So you can still specialize if home birth is your passion or if you want to be able to work closer to home. You can take clients when you want them, take time off when you don’t, so that is an advantage for doulas who are looking into different structures. With an agency, doulas tell me their availability and the distance they’re willing to drive, and then I do the matchmaking and bring them qualified leads who have seen their bios and are interested in working with them. And I do all the paperwork, the invoicing. They are able to get paid through me and don’t need to market and do things that would take them away from client work. And so for my clients, there’s a lot of relief in knowing that I go through an extensive process before I bring on contractors and that the business structure helps them to feel confident with someone in their home overnight caring for the baby, knowing they’re background checked, they’re CPR and first aid certified. And there is continuity of care. Doulas on my team communicate how a day or night went, so even if someone is ill and there’s a doula from my team filling in, they’re going to get a recap of the care plan for the family or the birth plan from a client and are able to be on the same page. Versus when I was a solo doula and I would back up for other solo doulas, I would just go in and wing it. I wouldn’t know what the birth plan was. I would just try my best to attune and meet the needs of the client and hope that I represented the doula that I was backing up well. As doulas, we do attune well, but it certainly helps to have that longstanding relationship, to know how to meet the needs, what the goals are of the family.
Some agencies do have employees, so that would be a different structure. They are actually working for the agency, and they would be on payroll. That would be a different structure within the agency group, and they may have limited hours or roles within the organization. And there are obviously many structures that I may not be as personally familiar with, since I worked as a solo doula with my own business; I worked in the collective; I worked in an agency. I’ve never worked in a practice model. But a practice model is similar to a lot of other medical groups in that they are on call certain days and share clients and are often large like an agency would be and have multiple birth and/or postpartum doulas working in the practice model. And they would attend births on, say, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, or do postpartum shifts on those days, and then they would be off call. And the client would know when the doula would be working with them and who to call on which day based on the calendar, similar to an OB or a nurse midwife who has hospital days that are set and that is when they’re at births, and they see their patients on other days of the week.
So many different options. No matter what structure you choose as a doula or as a client, what makes you feel most comfortable – remember that doulas share the same goal, which is to support families through these transformative times, and there are pros and cons of all the different business models, but our goal, again, is to nurture, to educate, empower. If you’re a doula exploring growth or collaboration, or if you’re a family who’s curious about how these structures affect your care, you can learn more at Gold Coast Doulas. We are often hiring, so if you’re interested in exploring an agency or interested in mentoring, then I’m happy to talk to you, even if you don’t live in Michigan.
Thanks so much for listening to Ask the Doulas!
IMPORTANT LINKS
Birth and postpartum support from Gold Coast Doulas