84. Saying Goodbye to My Fancy Funnel: A Conversation About Doula Self-Trust and Leadership

This is me officially saying goodbye to my fancy freakin’ funnel.

Not because funnels don’t work, but because this one never really fit.

In this episode, I share how I actually built a six-figure, in-person doula business long before launches, ads, or automation, and why letting go of systems that looked good on paper but felt heavy in my body changed everything.

If your business feels harder than it should…
If you’re doing everything “right” but still feel disconnected…
This is an alignment and self-trust conversation you’ll want to hear.

Because sometimes scaling isn’t about building something bigger.
It’s about building something that actually holds you.

If you're ready to move away from complicated funnels and constant content creation, and get back to real conversations with real families, book a CLARITY call today!

Struggling to grow your doula business? Tired of chasing prospects online? Imagine effortlessly attracting your dream clients and consistently generating a steady income month after month. 

⬇️ START HERE ⬇️

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Transcript

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What do women and birthing people and mothers actually crave right now? So, in an era of robots and AI and automation and constant internet noise, do you really in your heart of hearts think that they are craving more content? Or are they craving to be seen and heard and understood and led by a real human being? Welcome to the Six Figure Doula podcast. This is where confidence becomes currency. If you're a birth worker who's ready to stop overthinking, stop undercharging, and start leading like you mean it, then you're not here by accident. Every week we talk sales without the ick, money without shame, and building a business that actually holds you and your clients. Welcome home, Doula. Welcome back, my friends. What a week. Uh, if you've been dealing with the ice storms and the snow and the crazy weather sweeping the nation, you definitely know that being in Buffalo, New York, we are getting pounded. And it's not that big of a deal. Like we get a ton of snow all the time. We know how to handle it. We're pros at it. But it definitely affects my family in particular, uh, different than most because Hubby is a commercial snow removal cleanup, disaster relief guru, if you will. And so he has literally been working, we're going on day six. He's had about five hours of sleep total, not consecutive. And we're getting to the point where I'm concerned for his health and safety. Um, no, in all seriousness, he is safe, but it's coming to an end. I think tonight will be his first official, like overnight, like able to sleep in his own bed throughout the night. And then I think the storm is is a done deal, but man, has it been a wild, wild week. I've been posting videos in my stories, and it's been so fun getting all the comments from all of you, but all especially my my friends like in the UK and Mumbai and and the people that like don't normally see snow. So that's been fun. And thanks for being on this insane journey with me. All right, back to it. Take a deep breath with me for a second. Because this episode is a big one for me. Like it's it's not a hot take. Um, it's not me trying to be edgy. This is me officially and publicly saying goodbye to my fancy freaking funnel. So I am no longer tweaking a funnel. I am no longer optimizing a funnel. I am not rebuilding it with new tech or a better landing page that converts. None of it. I am letting it go. And I want to say up front that this episode is not an anti-funnel episode or that I'm even like an anti-funnel coach because I know funnels work. I've used funnels, I've had effective funnels, I see the reality when it comes to systemizing. And a lot of people make a lot of money with them. This is about alignment. And this episode is more of like a self-trust episode. It's about how I actually built a six-figure in-person doula business long before I ever touched a tripwire or a launch calendar or an ad dashboard yuck. And if your business is feeling heavier than it should these days and you feel like you're doing everything right, but you're still secretly resenting the amount of work or the work itself, stay with me. So I'm gonna kind of break this episode up into what feels like really big milestones for me since the conception of my business. So I'm gonna start with the incredible and my dear friend, Kylie. Kylie was the very first mentor I ever had, the very first person who helped me understand business on a cellular level. So this wasn't about mindset, even though she's the mindset guru. I came to her for actual business strategy. And Kylie taught me how to track my numbers and understand cash flow. She helped me look at patterns, she helped me make decisions that compound over time. She helped me build the structure and stop winging it, essentially. She helped me understand that feelings are data, but they're not the only data, which was kind of like how I was running the show. And I really needed that at that time. And I still very much value that. But here is where I'm gonna get real, real honest. Even while I was learning all of this, there was friction in my body. And Kylie's brain is impeccable systems and spreadsheets and structure and logic. And my brain is people and energy and conversation. And to this day, we laugh about this truth. Of course, there is crossover, and I'm definitely like really simplifying it. But we say all the time, and I'm lucky enough to get to see her, not as much as I would like, but we do meet up at retreats and things like that. Uh, we collaborate all the time, but we always laugh about how if we were ever able to just like combine our brains, we could build an empire overnight. It would be unstoppable. And it's it's true, but that's the key combined on my own. That level of structure was never gonna be how I led. Okay, so what happened here? Instead of listening to that friction, I did what so many of us do. I overwrote it and I told myself, this is what scaling looks like. Everybody feels resistance at first, Lisa. You'll like this once it works. So I pushed and I pushed hard. I built the funnels, I mapped the sequences, I planned out launches, I crushed launches, I added layers and layers and layers. And I think that the reason I was ignoring some of these signs was because nothing was really broken. It worked on paper, but in my body, I felt hella disconnected, if I'm being honest. I felt like I was managing a machine instead of leading. And I really started to feel like my business only worked if I stayed perfectly on top of the machine, like perfectly puppeteering. And slowly and quietly, and totally without like a conscious decision around this, I started to hide. So the funnels gave me this hiding place. And I was hiding from a lot of direct conversations. I was hiding from a lot of rejection. And I was absolutely not fully owning my leadership. So I'm going to shelf that truth and that honesty. It's very vulnerable to talk about this out loud, but I'm doing it because that's who I am. I'm gonna put that on a shelf for a moment and we're gonna switch gears. So then came Emily. So Emily is a marketing genius, a live launch queen. She's got ads dialed in. Her funnel math is tight, and she's got all these incredible campaigns that convert. And watching her work is like watching choreography in the studio for me. Everything is intentional, everything's got a place. And so I thought, okay, maybe this is the missing piece, right? Like I need more volume, and I never have gone viral. My audience is not that big. This is what's missing. So I went all in and I ran tons of ads and I built out those campaigns and I tracked the metrics and I optimized and it worked. But honestly, something still felt off. I did not feel lit up unless I was on a live stage doing a webinar. And that was such a tiny piece of the whole monster. And it felt like my business only worked if I was preparing for something that felt so big, so much pressure, so much weight. And I felt like it only worked if I showed up in the exact right way and I followed the playbook to a T. And this is, I think, when I started to really realize something very important, which was just because something works does not mean that it works for you. And this story kind of came up for me as I started outlining the bullet points for this episode. And I was gonna make a game time decision when I got to this piece to share it. And here we go. So back in June, which feels like a lifetime ago, but it was only six months ago, um, I experienced a missed miscarriage. And it was extremely challenging. I had a lot of grief. I was very public about it. I, to this day, am so incredibly grateful for this, this audience, these women, these doulas that held me at that time. But what some of you don't know is that during that experience, I was in the middle of a launch runway. I had already invested thousands of dollars in paid ads. I had already put all the pieces in place, sent out emails with dates and times, you know, spent months and months on automations, all the back-end tech that I absolutely despise. And I was faced with a really challenging decision. And I knew that I had options, of course, and it was my decision to make. It's not that I felt pressure to do one thing or the other, but the decision itself was incredibly eye-opening. I had to decide either to move forward with the launch, which would require postponing. And without giving the details, like literally was not able physically, mentally, emotionally to perform the launch as scheduled. So my options were postpone it two weeks and hope to God that's enough time, or cancel it. And I sat with it and I reflected and I know I made the right decision, which was to move forward with the launch. And it's a really important part of my story. But the decision itself was one that I said I don't ever want to be in this situation ever again. And so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to shelf that as well. Put it on a shelf for right now. I'm not exactly sure the point of the shelves, but it's making sense in my brain. So hang in there. Then Ben entered my world. So this is my current coach. And Ben did not give me another strategy or another layer to the funnel. He started asking me questions, really, really hard ones. He said, Why are you avoiding conversations when that's clearly your gift? He asked, Why are you outsourcing the very things that make you powerful? Why are you hiding behind systems when your presence is the conversion, Lisa? And he had me pretty worked up. This this conversation went deep. He stopped me in my tracks because I knew he was right. Funnels had become this buffer and it was really delaying things. And it was a way to almost like soften my own leadership, but not in a good way. And once I saw that, I could not unsee it. So how does this all play together? And I promise that it does, or at least I'm gonna do my best to make the sense of it. But the truth is, every single coach that I have worked with was right. Kylie was right about the foundations, and I needed that in the beginning. Emily was right about leverage, and it took me to the next level. Ben was right about alignment, which is hilarious because never in a million years did I think I would be working this closely with a man. But sometimes the most incredible people in your life and the most incredible mentors come out of nowhere, and it doesn't really matter, right? The mistake was not learning from each of them. Of course not. And I don't have regrets. The mistake, though, that I will not repeat was trying to copy their genius instead of integrating it. So here is what I do now. I spend the majority of my time sparking conversations. I extend very intentional, genuine invitations to women, to mothers, to do-less, to people who would benefit from being on a clarity call with me. I refine so much my sales conversation. I debrief my own calls, I rewatch my own calls. Yeah, cringe. And I will never stop at that mastery. I lead more clearly now and I hold more boundaries now. No more fancy funnel, no more chaos. And the kicker is this is exactly how I built my six-figure in-person doula business. What? Like, hello, of course. Relationships first, trust, confidence. So I think for my own ego, I have to say this out loud, which is I am not letting go of my fancy funnel because it failed me. I'm letting it go because I outgrew it. And it never really felt right. And if you are listening, first of all, thank you for letting me kind of like make sense of this out loud in real time without a lot of organization, which is kind of how I work. But if you're listening to this thinking, I'm really good with people, but my business feels heavier than it ever has. You may just be building a birth business, a postpartum business, a perinatal business that does not match your nervous system. And that is something that we absolutely can talk about. And before you click away or pull out your headphones or tell yourself that you'll think about this later, I gotta leave you with a few questions. And they're not, they're not like marketing questions, they're not like funnel-specific questions, they're human questions. So you might even want to like pause this episode and sit with these because these changed my life. Number one, where is your time actually going right now? Not where do you wish it was going? Where is your time truly being spent? What is getting your best energy? And what is getting what's left over? What does your capacity realistically look like in this particular season of life? Not the version of you who doesn't sleep enough or doesn't rest when you're exhausted, or never says no, the real one, the one with a body and a family and a nervous system to care for. What do women and birthing people and mothers actually crave right now? So, in an era of robots and AI and automation and constant internet noise, do you really in your heart of hearts think that they are craving more content? Or are they craving to be seen and heard and understood and led by a real human being? If everything disappeared tomorrow, so your funnel, your email list, your content calendar, your Instagram account, could you still sell your work in a conversation? If that question makes your chest tighten a little bit, pay attention. That is not shame. That is critical information. And finally, what does scaling actually mean to you? So, not what Instagram says, not what a coach once told you. Because for me, scaling means six figures with mostly profit. It means paying myself consistently. It means supporting my family without stress. It means reinvesting in coaching and self-development so that I can show up better for my clients. And it means having an extra chunk of money set aside for my future overnight postpartum doula when God willing, we are blessed with another baby. And yeah, if you are the praying type, please send all of the fertile, stress-reducing, nervous system calming vibes my way. I appreciate you. Scaling to me is not about building something bigger, it is about depth. It is about building something that holds my clients and my family. And I just hope that at the very least, these questions make you feel seen. But if they make you feel called out or even like strangely relieved, that is not an accident, my love. This is the work that I teach. This is the way that I will lead from now until the end of time. And this is the kind of business that I help women build. So we will keep talking about it, and you are in the right place. Much love.