From burnout to balance: redesigning a postpartum business
Interview with Jessica Prescott
I chat with Newborn Mothers graduate Jessica Prescott from Mama Goodness. Together we discuss authoring recipe books, doula photography, and the evolution of Jessica’s business model from meal delivery to postpartum support. At the core of this conversation, we explore the importance of balance in career and life.
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About Jessica
New Zealand-born and Melbourne-based (with stints across Berlin and New York in between), Jessica Prescott is a photographer, author and postpartum doula. A multidisciplinary creative, Jess shares her recipes, photography, stories and experiences of food and family with her online community, weaving these threads together with warmth, good humour and a nurturing spirit. Her postpartum book — Life After Birth — is available internationally via Hardie Grant.
Reach out to Jessica here: https://www.instagram.com/jessica_prescott
We explore the following questions:
How did your journey into postpartum care and meal delivery begin, and what inspired you to start this career path?
What are the key lessons you've learned about balancing your personal life and running a business in postpartum care?
How can postpartum professionals avoid burnout while providing meaningful care to families?
What advice do you have for doulas or caregivers in valuing their work and setting sustainable boundaries?
What role does food play in postpartum recovery, and how can doulas integrate it into their care services?
How can doulas and postpartum professionals determine what services to offer while remaining sustainable and avoiding overextension?
What are the unique challenges of scaling a postpartum meal delivery business, and how can others navigate them?
How can photography and other creative outlets complement postpartum work and create deeper connections with families?
What advice would you give to someone starting their journey in postpartum care, especially regarding pricing and package creation?
How can postpartum professionals network with and learn from others in the field to grow and improve their services?
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Transcript
Julia Jones:
Hello and welcome to Newborn Mothers podcast. Today I've got a very special guest, Jessica Prescott, who I'm sure many of. Jessica is a photographer. She is a recipe book author. She has a postpartum doula, and you've done so many different projects. You've really actually worked on a lot of different sorts of businesses and experienced a lot of different things. So I'm really happy to have you here today to talk a little bit about what you've learned along the way.
Jessica Prescott:
Thanks, Julia. It's so nice to be here. As I was saying to you before we started recording, I have been fangirling over you for years, so it's really nice to be on your podcast.
Julia Jones:
Well, I'm pretty sure it's not the first time I've asked you on the podcast, so I've also been fangirling over you for a while, or maybe it's just been in my head, but I'm definitely very excited.
Jessica Prescott:
I hope I didn't miss it.
Julia Jones:
Dunno, maybe it was me who just thought about it for ages before actually doing it.
Jessica Prescott:
Well, I'm glad to be here. I feel like it's a very good time.
Julia Jones:
Time, yeah. Good, good. Yes, because you've been very busy, you've learned a lot and always appreciate having podcast guests. So we're happy to share a little bit about the ups and also a little bit about the downs. But before we get into that, do you want to take us back to the beginning? How did you get interested in postpartum care? Where did you start?
Jessica Prescott:
So I had a business named Mama Goodness. I imagine some of your listeners would know it, but others wouldn't. So basically I had my first child in Berlin. I had Louis in Berlin, and while we were living there, when we were planning to move back to Melbourne, I was sort of thinking, what do I want to do when I get back to Melbourne? And I just kept having this thought about a postpartum meal delivery business, I think because I'd had a friend have a baby while I was living there, and we did a meal train for her. And it was sort of my introduction to meal trains, and there was something about cooking for new mums that just, it lit a fire inside me. I really loved it. So I'd sort of had this idea, and I've always been around food. I'd already, at that stage, I'd written one cookbook and I'd ghost written a cookbook for another person.
And I was working on my own second cookbook. So food's sort of always been, it's my love language. It's just always been such a big part of my life. And so the idea of starting a meal delivery business for new mums was sort of there and I couldn't shake it. So when I moved back to Melbourne, I met Vaughnee Geary. And when I met her, I was like, I knew that it sort of came up that she had a similar-ish idea, and I've always been such a lone wolf, and I always do things solo. But once I met her, I was just like, I have got to do Mama Goodness with her. And I already had the name, and I said to her, let's do this together. And she was like, yep. And so we started a business together, and then we hardly knew each other when we started the business, but we became very close, very quickly as you do when you're working that intensely with someone.
And she was working not only as a birth doula, but also as a postpartum doula. And at the time, so I had two children by then and I had a doula at both of my births, but I'd never even really heard of a postpartum doula. And we'd talk about our week and she'd say, oh yeah, I'm seeing a postpartum client tomorrow. And I was sort of like, do people actually pay for that? And she's like, yeah, they do. And so I was so lucky. I was working right alongside her, and I got to learn so much about what her postpartum doula visits look like and how much she charges and just all these little bits that a lot of people would have to just figure out on their own or ask a stranger and hope that they'll get an honest answer. So I was really lucky that I had her.
And so we were in lockdown, and as you probably know, Melbourne's lockdown was horrendous. And I started doing your course and I was just sort of doing it where I could once the children were asleep and whatnot. And then when I weaned my second child, he was nearly two. And I went to my in-laws for a weekend and I just crammed. And I finished your course, and I felt like I was back at uni when you're on a study bender and you're just like, I don't know. I didn't even want to stop to go out and get food. I think I ordered food. And I was just like, and I now know. So I have since had an ADHD diagnosis, and I now know that's just hyperfocus, which is definitely the strength. So did my course. And then we were in this funny, my husband was a hairdresser, and so he wasn't working because of lockdowns and he was studying to become a teacher, but we didn't know how long lockdowns were going to last. And I was encouraging him to study full time because it would mean that he would finish his degree a lot more quickly. But he was worried about how will we afford to live if I'm not working? And I was like, I got this. And so I'd finished my doula training and I had Mama Goodness, and I started working as a postpartum doula. And that was four years ago. Now, and sorry, what were you going to say?
Julia Jones:
Oh, it's amazing when people just get pushed off out of the nest like that. I was the same when I started, I was like, well, this can't be a hobby. I need to pay rent.
Jessica Prescott:
And there's a lot of people out there who maybe don't need the income, but it's nice to have. And they also enjoy the, I mean, being a postpartum doula is so rewarding in so many ways, more than just financially. But for some people, they don't need the money. Whereas for us, it was like, well, yeah, this is how we pay rent. If we want to do anything or buy anything, it's from this income. So it was good. It was a really good sort of foray. Is that the right word? A good way to sort of doula work, but also I probably went a little bit too hard.
Julia Jones:
Yeah, because from there you started lots of different things. You've, in just that small four years, you've got a recipe book, you've got a meal delivery business, you've worked at a postpartum hotel, you've done so many different things.
Jessica Prescott:
Yeah, there's actually two books in that, well, three in the last decade. I've written six books. One was for someone else.
Julia Jones:
All recipe books, or are they different?
Jessica Prescott:
So all of them are recipe books except for Life After Birth, which is mostly practical advice about how to care for yourself after you have a baby. And with Vaughne being a naturopath, she wrote a whole bunch of stuff about nutrition and food to put in your pantry and blood tests to ask for at your six week checkup and things like that. There are recipes in that, only 30, whereas my other books have a lot more. But just so as we also chatted about before we started recording, I'm not working as a opposed postpartum doula right now. I've opened my books up for next year, but I'm recovering from burnout. And when I zoom out, I'm like, okay, so you were running a meal delivery business that was three days a week of hardcore hands-on hours. And then all of the admin on top of that, working as a postpartum doula, having between two and four clients a week, depending on, there's sometimes the bottleneck where people give birth late or early, and then people that want extra sessions and stuff like that. And I'm never going to say no. I loved it so much. And then I was writing Life After Birth, and I also have two kids, and one of them is incredibly fussy.
Julia Jones:
It was also COVID time as well.
Jessica Prescott:
It was COVID time and the amount of cooking I was doing, I look back and I can't believe how much I was doing. And it's no wonder I feel the way I feel now because I feel like I got off that hamster wheel. When you're on the hamster wheel, you don't realise that you're on it and you don't realise, especially if you love what you're doing, you don't realise the toll it's taking. And then you come off the hamster wheel for one reason or another and you're like, whoa. So that's where I'm at now.
Julia Jones:
So how did you realise that you needed to stop? What was kind of your breaking point?
Jessica Prescott:
So I took a job helping open a postpartum hotel, and so I stopped, stopped one-on-one doula work last August because I needed to create space in my schedule for the postpartum hotel. And that was wonderful. I had so much fun. I was helping with everything from designing the menu to helping build the team to then when it was ready for it to open, deciding where things go in the kitchen and where things go in the laundry. It was so much fun. Once the postpartum hotel opened, it wasn't fun for me anymore. And so I left that job and it was when I left that I kind of went, oh, and the lead up though I'd been noticing I wasn't loving cooking as much and I wasn't happy with my cooking either. I kind of felt like my cooking had kind of fallen off a cliff a little bit. I'd lost a skill, and I now know that that's one of the first signs of burnout. It's something that I've always done. It's always come so naturally to me, and I've always been told I'm really good at all of a sudden I was struggling with, and even now I'm cooking again, but I've really, really changed the way I feed my family. And if we're going to a gathering, I don't have all this pressure on myself to make this amazing thing, I just take some cheese. So yeah, I've really sort of started to approach things differently.
Julia Jones:
So not enjoying the things that you usually love, not being good at the things that you're usually good at.
Jessica Prescott:
And also just this, there's a fatigue, right? I have energy. It's not like I'm bedridden, but I mean, look, maybe I'm just getting older too. Maybe I need to get my iron checked. I do that often, because I’m vegetarian. But yeah, there's just been a fatigue, just a deep exhaustion.
Julia Jones:
Globally, a lot of people are feeling that right now. I really feel like COVID was such a stressful time. And then we had this little bit of excitement when the world opened up again and now we’re actually realising that we need to still recover. We haven't recovered. Everyone was so —
Jessica Prescott:
We haven't.
Julia Jones:
— go outdoors again, get back into their social lives. But it wasn't a gentle transition.
Jessica Prescott:
No, it wasn't. And funnily, that's when it was so long ago. Now it feels, but Vaughne and I started Mama Goodness, and then less than six months later, everything shut down in Melbourne. And at the time I was like, we need to just pause. We need to just not do Mama Goodness. While, because there was things that we couldn't get. We couldn't get lasagna sheets, we couldn't get passata at one stage, the idea of driving around, we had to have permits and stuff like that. And it all felt very hard. And it was Vaughn’s idea to push through, and it was really good for the business. We went gangbusters in lockdown because —
Julia Jones:
It was so needed.
Jessica Prescott:
So needed. But what we didn't realise was how much we were doing. It was once the world opened back up that living a normal, whatever normal means, or however normal looks for people, but living our lives while running that business was impossible because it was so demanding. And when we couldn't socialise or go to gigs or go visit our parents or whatever it was, you didn't notice how big the workload was. But once everything else was also demanding your attention, we realised, oh, this is a beast.
Julia Jones:
Yeah, it is such an interesting observation, isn't it. Something that you started in COVID that doesn't actually work outside of COVID once normal life starts again. So once you kind of had that realisation, how did you start to strip away the layers and decide what to let go of and what to keep and what to do next?
Jessica Prescott:
So we had a lot of demand for our food to be, so we started out small and we gradually expanded our delivery radius to the point where we were delivering Victoria wide. But to do that, because we don't use preservatives and because we had, so by the way, we had zero startup capital. Everything we did, I know you're a fan of bootstrapping, and this was like bootstrapping 101, we had nothing. We had to pay for everything from our own. I think I got some money for one of my books, and that just went straight into Mama Goodness.
Julia Jones:
You sell a lasagna and you buy the next batch of ingredients.
Jessica Prescott:
Yeah, exactly. So sorry, I forgot what we were saying. Oh, the demand for us to be available wider was there. So we were like, okay, we will start doing frozen meals because then they can be delivered more widely. We didn't have the capital for machinery that's going to seal everything and put gases in it to make it more shelf stable. And I think we were using compostable packaging, so that wouldn't have worked anyway. You know how they can preserve stuff like how some businesses do with the gas.
So we decided to, we needed frozen, and that meant a bigger kitchen, and that meant just so many more overheads. And we did that for a year and we were like, this is fucking fucked. I'm sorry, I didn't ask you if we can swear on this podcast. You can bleep over me. And we had a two year lease on the kitchen and we said, okay, once the lease is over, let's stop. We are really, really exhausted. And once we agreed on that, we both felt like the biggest weight was lifted off our shoulders. And then so I said to Vaughan, what are we doing if we feel like a weight's been lifted off our shoulders when we finish at the end of next year? Why not finish now because we're about to go on a break for Christmas? And we were so, so exhausted. And it's almost like we gave ourselves permission.
And once we did that, it was just the obvious answer. And so then we stopped doing the meal delivery and there were some people who were upset about that, but ultimately we had to put ourselves first. We had to look after ourselves. It was just not sustainable. I had two kids at home that needed me and a husband, and we don't own our house, but I hope to own a home one day and running a food business, that is not how you get there. I just felt like we were even the stress on the weekend of, oh shit, got to get on socials to remind people to buy our packs so that we can sell enough to break even this week, it was just too much. But we did keep the cookies and tea and products going because there was a lot of demand for those as well.
Julia Jones:
And they’re shelf-stable.
Jessica Prescott:
They’re shelf-stable.. And also we weren't making them, so we did make the cookies in the beginning and then we outsourced the production of the cookies. And with, so I didn't realise that I wouldn't be staying in the postpartum hotel. I sort of thought that was going to be my job I had until I retired. And so looking at our lives, and Vaughne was also coming to work at the postpartum hotel, we just realised that neither of us had time for Mama Goodness anymore. And so we sold what remained of the business, the cookies and the tea and the products to our cookie manufacturer, which was really wonderful because we know that they care and we've got a relationship with them. And there's been funny things, like I accidentally was, my Ubers were being charged to them just because the business handover there was, I don't know, something, I think the PayPal, it was linked to the Mama Goodness PayPal. And then so she could just write to me and be like, oh, hey hun, can you just pay me for this Uber? It’s been really wonderful. And I'm still there if tThey've got questions or if they, I've said to them, I've got so many recipe ideas, so if you're ever ready to expand the range, I'm here. I can help you. And it's been really lovely.
Julia Jones:
This is such an interesting story. What it strikes me is that there's just huge for postpartum care and meals, so many opportunities for you to work so much demand, but you really need to do it in an intentional way where you think, is this going to work for me? Is this what suits my family, my stage of life, my needs, my longer term goals? But it sounds like you were just swamped by demand on this kind of roller coaster ride.
Jessica Prescott:
And also trying to please everyone. It's interesting. So I'm also a photographer and I'm in this photography group and in that group I was introduced to this concept and it blew my mind at the time. But it's so basic and obvious, and it's just the idea of you don't have to be for everyone. You're allowed to repel people and you're allowed to say no. And I'm just like, what do you mean we don't have to be for everyone? Because if there was demand for something, we would try and fill that demand. And I think that was to our detriment if we'd stayed small. I know other people who have opened postpartum meal delivery businesses, and my biggest tip to them is just stay small. Don't try and grow too big. If you are a restaurant that's already doing meal delivery and you make an arm of your business, you dedicate an arm of your business to postpartum, I think that's a lot different to what we were doing, which is renting a commercial kitchen, but we're only there three days a week, just the overheads and the expenses and never having enough capital to buy 10,000 of something. We'd buy a hundred of something. So then of course it costs more. All those little things.
Julia Jones:
So it's just that the business wasn't set up to scale, because there are definitely business opportunities for meals, for example, there is so many instant meals in the supermarket now, quite fresh ones, like you're saying with the proper packaging and things, these must be making money. And there's so many of those Hello Fresh type mailboxes. There's so many, this must be like a profitable market. However, if you build a big business, you need that capital and you need the plan to scale, you need the staff, and it need to be that model from the start. But I agree, if you're starting just cooking in your home and it just turns into this octopus without much of a plan, I think it's just high overheads, it's high labour, and it's just a recipe for being exhausted, isn't it?
Jessica Prescott:
And I'm a testament to that. So yeah, I am going to start, I'm taking on postpartum doula clients again. Yeah.
Julia Jones:
Before you tell me about that, you've actually stripped back everything. You're not working at the hotel, you're not doing meal delivery. You've sold the biscuits and teas. You've just got your recipe books and —
Jessica Prescott:
My photography.
Julia Jones:
And photography.
Julia Jones:
And now you can take those learnings and do something intense.
Jessica Prescott:
So I've always been a photographer, and I think something that's funny with Mama Goodness is I think we gave this air of being really cashed up, or maybe it looked like we had an investor or something. Because from the get go, all of our branding and all of our imagery and everything was really professional looking. But that was just because I did it.
Julia Jones:
Beautiful photography.
Jessica Prescott:
I designed our logo. I then had someone sort of digitalise it for us. I didn't know how to do that. I took all of our photos in the beginning, and so we sort of looked really bougie. And I mean, the food was incredible, but I think we gave this, it kind of created a facade of being bigger and more just a bigger business than what we were. But also, so I've always been a photographer and I photographed my first two cookbooks and I photographed everything for Mama Goodness. And I photographed Life After Birth as well. But it wasn't until I made a photo Instagram that people were like, oh, you're a photographer. Also, always with my postpartum clients, there was always the option for me to take their photo while they were pregnant if they wanted me to. Interestingly, only about 50% would say yes, and the ones that didn't always, always, always said they regret it.
Julia Jones:
Oh, interesting.
Jessica Prescott:
Yeah. So once Life After Birth came out, I did get a bit of demand for photography, family photos and things like that. And it was really beautiful. Shooting Life After Birth gave me a really good insight as to how it would look if I was to become a family photographer, because that was so when I said earlier that I really wanted to start, Mama Goodness, when I moved back to Melbourne, I also had this, oh, but I also really want to be a family photographer. It was like this pull, like which one? And then when I sort of decided Mama Goodness was the one, I also had this thought, well, at least you'll be able to take all the photos you want to take of people eating your food and stuff like that. We were way too busy for all these. I had all these photo shoots in mind for Mama Goodness, that never happened. We were in the kitchen. But yeah, it's been really lovely to have this time and space finally to really just grow my photography business and meet so many people, photograph so many interesting and incredible people that in the past I just would've been too busy. So it's been really at a very different pace as well to how things have been in the last four and a half years. So it's been really nice.
Julia Jones:
I always think being a photographer is a little bit like being a sort of a celebrant. You’re there for the rites of passage in someone's life.
Jessica Prescott:
Yeah, that's so beautiful. That's such a beautiful way of looking at it.
Julia Jones:
There is sort of a doula element to the work. You might photograph someone's wedding and then you photograph them when they're pregnant, and then you photograph them after the baby's born and you become sort of embedded in people's lives in a beautiful way. So I can really see that crossover between. You love both.
Jessica Prescott:
Especially. I definitely bring a doula touch to the photo sessions. I think if I wasn't a postpartum doula, I don't know that I would be able to navigate people's homes and emotions. And I know how new mums are feeling and not just from my own experience. And so I definitely think my doula skills, they really benefit each other. The photography and the doula work, I get it. I get how mums are feeling and I get, I've seen, there's nothing I haven't seen.
Julia Jones:
Which is why the photos are so beautiful too, because you really see the person.
Jessica Prescott:
Thank you. And I've started, so now when I was running Mama Goodness, I couldn't be on call for births because that business needed me in the kitchen. And if I wasn't there, then things would've fallen apart. But once, as you said, I sort of cleared my plate of everything. I finally had space. My kids sleep through the night now as well, and I finally had space to start attending births. And so I've started photographing births as well, which has been, oh my gosh, it's just everything to me. So Sonya, who's on the cover of Life After Birth, I've been at both of her births, and it was after her second birth that I was just like, I had this overwhelming, I need to be a birth photographer feeling. At the time, I didn't know how that was going to work or how that was going to look because I was starting the job with the postpartum hotel, but things worked out how they were meant to.
And I'm now photographing births, which is really wonderful. And now that I've opened my books again for doula work, postpartum doula work, I have the option for everyone that's my client to have photos. In the past, when I was photographing Life After Birth, I didn't photograph any of my clients because it felt like a conflict. It felt like I'm there to care for them. And it felt opportunistic to be like, oh, I've got my camera. Do you mind if I just take a few snaps? I need them for my book. It didn't feel right to me. The doula visits were about them, not about my book. So I never took cameras to my visits in the past. But now I love this idea that each family will have a camera dedicated to them, and I just take it to each visit and I snap away.
Like anything I see that's a lovely moment. Or the birthing person might say, can I go and lie on that field of grass and breastfeed my baby? And I'll be like, yes. But it might also just be the washing, the way the light's sitting, the washing, and it's all red towels. I'm a real magpie for certain colours and things like that too. So I've now realised that there is a demand for that. I always put so much pressure on myself to be doing food, food, food and food is the thing that people want, and food is the thing that people need. So food will still be a part of my packages, but I'm also incorporating the photography because I know that there's people out there who value that and want to be documented and want to be seen and witnessed.
Julia Jones:
And it sounds to me like you've sort of realised that you want those more intimate relationships with the people you're working with rather than mass producing something and sending it into world.
Jessica Prescott:
Definitely, definitely. And I love the idea of being at someone's birth and then being their postpartum doula and documenting all of that. I love the idea of a lot of my postpartum clients are having second babies now and being there for them is just so beautiful. And recently I photographed the mother of one of my postpartum clients, and that was so beautiful because I never met her mom while I was her doula. But she's such a beautiful person and her mom's such a beautiful person. And I don't know, it just feels really beautiful to sort of be welcomed into people's families in this way on such an intimate level.
Julia Jones:
So that leads me to really the last question, which is what's next? You plan to be doing doula work and photography?
Jessica Prescott:
Yes, those two things. So I've said no more books. So I'm 40 next year, and my thirties were my book writing decade, not what I planned, but my gosh, I feel so fortunate that I to, I had my children on me or playing next to my feet while I was writing my first three books, and it meant I didn't have to go back to work. I was working for myself from home, and I've stopped using the word lucky, not luck, but I feel so incredibly fortunate to have been able to do that. Books are also incredibly taxing. And yeah, I'm ready for that chapter, the book chapter to be over. However, there is a lot of demand for my one pop book, and it's no longer in print. And there's a whole thing with the publisher. The publisher sold. So a different publisher now owns the rights, and I'm in the process of trying to get those rights so I can release the book as an ebook because I get messages every day or every week about my vegan One Pot Wonders book. Just the recipes are so easy and perfect for new moms. So while I say no new books, there's also a potential that I might do something a little bit less intense than a publisher book. So more of a self-published ebook vibe.
Julia Jones:
Interesting.
Jessica Prescott:
And then doula work and photography work.
Julia Jones:
Yeah, I love it.
Jessica Prescott:
Yeah.
Julia Jones:
So where do you live online now? Because Mama Goodness is not—
Jessica Prescott:
Yeah, Mama Goodness is gone.
Julia Jones:
So how can people find you?
Jessica Prescott:
So I have a website, jessprescott.com, that's got all my photography services on there. I'm in two minds about whether I just add a doula section. I never had a website when I was a doula because it was all word of mouth. I'm not sure yet what I'll do there. I'm open to suggestions. And then there's my Instagram, so Jessica Prescott, that's got my recipes, my cookbooks, and that's where I used to promote myself as a doula and share little snippets of doula life. And then I've also got Jess photo for my photography account.
Julia Jones:
And have you got any words of advice for people who are either just starting out, still following their nose and figuring things out, or maybe who are already starting to feel those feelings of burnout and yeah, what would you say the biggest you learned from all of this?
Jessica Prescott:
Well, I think it's really important to know your worth. And I think that one of the reasons I got so burnt out is because I didn't know my worth. And so I was overdoing it. I was doing too much for too many people, saying yes to too many things because I'm such a people pleaser, and I just wanted to do everything for everyone. The way I'm doing my doula packages now, I'll be taking food to my first visit, but subsequent visits, if people want food, I'll be cooking it at their home or bringing food in from another doula who's cooked for me. And I think in the beginning, it's so difficult to ask for money for care work, right? Because it's stuff that we would all do for free for our friends, and most of us do to some degree, do that kind of thing for our friends when they have babies.
Jessica Prescott:
And it's really difficult and scary asking for money for care work. And so you feel like you've got to add all this stuff and you've got to do all this stuff, make all these meals, make it as lucrative as possible for people. But that's what got me to burnout. One of the things that contributed to my burnout for people starting out just factor in every single thing you're doing. If you are taking food to people's homes, make sure that you're factoring in the time it takes to write a shopping list, going to the supermarket, cooking the food, cleaning up from cooking the food. All of that stuff needs to be factored in when you're pricing your packages. And I think when you look at the time that's spent on that stuff, it might make you revisit either what you're charging or how much you're taking to a visit. Also, it doesn't have to be about food. There are plenty of dollars out there who don't take food because that's not their thing. They're body workers or are cleaners, and that's really beautiful too. I don't think doulas need to be chefs or cooks.
Julia Jones:
I love it. It goes back to one of my favourite things to tell all new doulas, which is, you are enough.
Jessica Prescott:
Yeah, it's true.
Julia Jones:
Because people do always want to throw in the kitchen sink, particularly when you're new and you're a little bit nervous that you don't know.
Jessica Prescott:
Am I enough?
Julia Jones:
And so you're like, I'm going to add this and I'm going to do that, and I'm going to pay someone else for this service because me alone is not enough. So I think it's a really classic journey that many, many people go on to find the right path for them. And for you, obviously, it feels like you've come to a good place now.
Jessica Prescott:
For now, I mean, I have ADHD, so —
Julia Jones:
Might change.
Jessica Prescott:
Who knows what tomorrow will bring, but I'm getting better at reining it in.
Julia Jones:
Yes. But also, I want to put it out there too, that for some people doing a large scale national food delivery postpartum business, that might be actually what floats their boat. But go into it with your eyes wide open. Think about how you're going to make this work in the long term.
Jessica Prescott:
Anybody wants to make one and they have an investor, please come to me. I'll be so glad to help.
Julia Jones:
And I think that's it. Do check with lots of, there's so many women doing amazing work in postpartum. Yeah, go and connect with each other and learn all these learnings from each other and support through it. Thank you so much for sharing. Jess, do you have anything else you want to add?
Jessica Prescott:
Nothing that I can think of. But I guarantee you when we hang up, I'll be like, oh, I forgot to talk about this thing and that thing. But that's just me. I don't think so. I'm just scanning my notes.
Julia Jones:
That's great. So people can just find you at Jess Prescott and we are so glad that you've come on the podcast and shared all of this. And I know when I invited you on the podcast, you were like, oh, but I'm actually not working as a doula right now because I'm feeling really burnt out. And I was like, that's great. That's a great podcast. I appreciate you coming on and talking about that so openly.
Jessica Prescott:
Thanks Julia. I appreciate you having me.
Julia Jones:
Alright, cheers. See you next time. See you.
