IBPA consistently receives questions on How to Become a Baby Planner and we thought it would be wise to write a post about the most important tips on how to get started! Here are the key items we think you need to think about before becoming a Baby Planner or Maternity Concierge:
- Have you researched your local market and know if you have a good target market to secure clients in? You are looking for people who can afford your services and have the disposable income to pay you.
- Do you have a passion and related background in helping new parents specifically in dealing with pregnancy, birthing and parenting situations?
- Are you business savvy?
- Do you have a good head for marketing and sales?
- Do you have $1,000 -$3,000 to spend in your initial start-up costs (this budget would be for the essentials like your website, logo, marketing collateral, business registration etc.)?
- Do you have at least 15-20 hours a week to devote to launching a business?
The most popular question we get asked is “do I need to be certified”? Our answer to this question is no. IBPA does not recognize any baby planning certification programs currently and frankly believes our niche still needs to mature in order to gain strong credibility. However, if you decide to get certified by any organization we advise that you do your research into who is the certifying body (ex. is it industry recognized) and what value are you gaining for that investment. We advise that before you invest any amount of money into a baby planning business you should determine if you have a local market to sell to first. Afterall, if you don’t have a market you won’t have clients to sell to and who’ll eventually purchase your services. We’ve seen many baby planning businesses fail within the first year because they do not do their market research. Once you do your market research and find that you have a viable market we suggest you spend your money wisely on items such as:
- a great website with strong SEO (strong site engine optimization can help people find your site easily on the internet through key search words)
- a professional looking logo and graphics
- marketing collateral
- marketing tools such as Constant Contact
- business start-up advice from a baby planning/maternity concierge expert, business attorney, business accountant
- become a Child Passenger Seat Technician through SafeKids Worldwide
- look at joining organizations like the International Association for Child Safety and brush up on your child safety background
- experience as a lactation consultant, doula, midwife, nurse, child birth educator, counseling, background in early childhood education or baby product retail are all excellent skills to have on your resume
We also believe spending more than $3,000 on your start-up budget is really unnecessary unless you’re looking at building a major website, database and marketing machine with all of the bells and whistles.
If you have any questions related to How to Become a Baby Planner please email us at info@internationalbabyplanners.com or call #503-297-5326. We’re happy to help you if we can!
Good luck if you’re launching your baby planning business and please consider joining IBPA once you’ve started your business.
