What 16 Years in Birth Rooms Taught Me About Building a Business That Lasts

Posted on June 23, 2026 by Sasha Sumling, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.

There is a moment in birth work that every doula knows.

The room gets quiet. The laboring mom looks at you — not her partner, not her nurse, not her doctor. You. Because you are the one person in that space who has no agenda except her. You are not there to manage liability. You are not there to move the shift along. You are there because she needed someone who would stay.

I have been that person for over 650 families across 16 years of practice. And what I have learned in those rooms — about trust, about showing up, about building something people return to — has shaped every part of how I coach.

But I want to tell you how I got there. Because it did not start with a credential or a business plan. It started with the wrong shoes.

The Beginning Nobody Sees

I was a stay-at-home mom of three when I decided I needed something of my own. My youngest was heading to kindergarten. I loved being home with my kids — and I also knew that the daily rhythm of laundry and school pickups was not the whole of what I had to give.

One day I went out running in the wrong athletic shoes and ended up with a severe shin splint. Six weeks of physical therapy followed. And in that therapy office, watching the way practitioners helped people heal — not just physically but in the way they held space, the way they showed up — I had my first real vision of what I wanted to build.

I enrolled in massage school. Completed 500 hours of training. Discovered pregnancy massage almost by accident — there was barely a session on it in the curriculum, but something in me lit up and would not let it go. As a mom of three who had been through pregnancy herself, not once, not twice, but three times, I understood something most therapists didn’t: I could genuinely meet these women where they were.

That became the foundation. Not a business strategy. A deep, personal, specific understanding of exactly who I was meant to serve.

The Moment the Business Became Real

I was at a networking event when I handed a doctor my business card. He invited me to offer 15-minute pregnancy massage demos at his office every Tuesday. He would keep referring patients. I could keep all the revenue.

What I had at that moment: limited resources, no guarantees, and a practice that was barely off the ground.

What I did: bought a massage table, sheets from Amazon, and oil. And I showed up.

When that first client bought a package from me, something shifted permanently. Not because the money changed everything, but because I understood for the first time that what I had built was real. Someone had chosen it. Someone had invested in it. And she came back.
Over the years that followed, I earned my Texas Licensure and National Board Certification, completed an additional 500 hours of continuing education exclusively in prenatal and postpartum massage, built out my practice, added Birth Doula services, became a certified Evidence Based Birth instructor, and eventually — through the Hello Seven community and their Six-Figure Side Hustle program — formalized what I had always been doing intuitively into a real coaching methodology.

What the Birth Room Actually Teaches You About Business

Here is what 16 years of walking alongside women in their most vulnerable and powerful moments has taught me that no business course ever could:

The women who thrive are not the ones who waited until they were ready. They are the ones who got specific about what they were building and decided that it was worth showing up for imperfectly. They stopped shrinking inside the room and started taking up the space that was theirs.

I have watched women walk into a birth room carrying years of being told to be smaller — quieter, less demanding, more accommodating — and find their voice in the space of a single contraction. The woman who uses her code word and clears the room. The woman who says, “Give me a moment to decide.” The woman who knows what she wants and asks for it out loud.

Those same women exist in business. They are the healers, the doulas, the coaches, and the maternal health professionals who have been doing significant work for years and have somehow convinced themselves that asking for full compensation is too much. That scaling is for someone else. That what they have built is not quite ready to be taken seriously.

It is ready. It has been ready.
What I Know For Sure

I did not build my practice in a straight line. I built it around a daughter’s illness, around hospital stays that stretched into months, around the seasons of my family’s life. I went part-time when I had to. I came back full-time when I could. I launched before I was ready. I raised my prices before I felt brave enough. I asked for the sale before my voice stopped shaking.

And I am here, 16 years later, with a practice and a coaching methodology that I am genuinely proud of — not because everything went right, but because I refused to let the hard parts be the end of the story.

If you have built something real and you are not yet acting like it — if you have years of expertise and a practice that should be generating significantly more than it is — I want to be in your corner for whatever comes next.

That is the work. And I know how to do it.

If this landed somewhere for you, let’s talk. I would love to hear what you have built and what you are ready to build next. Book your complimentary CEO Clarity Call here: https://massagemomma.kit.com/ceo_vip