Leverage to Accelerate your Midwife Business’ Success

Accelerate your Midwife Business’ Success

Business get more successful and to a new level of size and strength by utilizing their employees, staff, team, or whatever you want to call their expertise. With your midwife business, it is challenging to meet the high demands of your care with just you. Having someone to answer the phone, organize charts, keep track of inventory, bill out claims, pay attention to invoices, clean the birth center and clinic, care for two women wanting to birth their babies at the same time, help the mother nurse while you finish charting from the birth, and so much more When someone chooses to have a small operation and do much of the office responsibilities themselves, time is traded for the tasks.

Our most valuable resource is our time. Some people will argue knowledge can never be bought or traded. We can always increase or lose knowledge. When a person is on their deathbed, they never say I want more knowledge. I always wish I had more time for things not done before passing away. Spend time with family and friends versus staying at the office late cleaning a floor. 

Create a business plan where income covers all the ancillary duties other than being a midwife. 

 Hire an Office Manager, receptionist, birth assistant, Medical Assistant, nurse, biller, marketer, accountant, partner midwife, and lawyer. Even though initial budgets will be much higher, your business plan will have an operational start up fund to compensate for that costs. 

Long term, your foundational midwife business will be so much stronger than you starting out doing everything yourself. Especially when your business starts to grow faster than anticipated (most do because of high demands for midwifery services), having that extra support staff will be vital to your self-preservation!

Don’t sacrifice family vital moments to being a midwife and business owner 24/7. Learn from my mistakes and history of professional burnout. Don’t lose your life partner or kids in a divorce to give all your time away to this passion. Trying to separate your personal and business life as much as possible (knowing it is hard with birth calls). Make sure vacations are allotted into budgets with coverage for birth calls. 

Your awesome hired team will be that additional time you need to accomplish so much more.

You can only work 40–50 hours a week without getting burned out. By having an additional 10 people working for you, the business can now complete an additional 400 hours of work! You would have to work 10 weeks to do what your entire team could do in a week. Whenever interviewing a new person, see them as having 40 hours each and every week of time. You don’t have to work on things they are better at than you are, like marketing, accounting, and cleaning a toilet!

Leverage other people’s time, knowledge, money, and relationships to grow your midwifery business. You can’t be good at everything. I like to give Henry Ford’s example; he didn’t pass 8th grade and made the massive assembly line of Ford. He knew how to utilize each person’s expert skills. He had a mastermind team and unlimited resources at his fingertips for anything he didn’t know.

Networking and growing relationships will cut your marketing budget down greatly. 

Hire a person who just connects with the community and brands your midwifery business. Having someone who knows the best words to use on a website or Facebook campaign will save you thousands in marketing money and time. Meet with doulas and other birth advocates. Their professional relationship will open doors to more opportunities for your professional career.

With a business plan that outlines your vision and profits to support the success of the private practice long-term, money funding will be much easier to accomplish from the bank or other lending source. Even creating a nonprofit organization and having a clear mission to the community will increase donations to the midwife clinic. Money to start up or improve processes isn’t the challenge when there is a great product and clear, objective accounting numbers to show its viability.

Leveraging other people’s time, money, relationships, and knowledge will have your midwifery business at a level never imagined or dreamed possible. Spend the extra time finding the right people and training them well. Your strong business foundation of employees will be the rock you rely on day in and day out.

Check out our teachable course, Tips for Running a Successful Midwifery Practice, to learn all you need to know about being a midwife.