Building a Sleep Consulting Business with Emily Meindertsma

 

In this episode of the Becoming a Sleep Consultant podcast, I’m joined by Emily, a recent graduate of the CPSM program and a thriving new sleep consultant. Emily shares her journey from enrolling in CPSM in April 2024 to launching her consulting business just three months later. Emily Meindertsma
We discuss her transition into entrepreneurship, how she balances her family life and part-time work as a physical therapist while also growing her business, and the strategies she’s putting into place in order to grow her list of referral partners and clientele. Emily is passionate about changing the narrative around sleep training and in this conversation you’ll hear Emily share how this mission is driving her work with families.

 

 

Links:

Website: Sound of Sleeping
Instagram: @soundofsleeping

 

If you would like to learn more about the Becoming a Sleep Consultant, please join our free Facebook Group or check out our CPSM Website.

Book a free discovery call to learn how you can become a Certified Sleep Consultant here.

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Transcript: 

Intro: Welcome to Becoming a Sleep Consultant! I’m your host Jayne Havens, a certified sleep consultant and founder of both Snooze Fest by Jayne Havens and Center for Pediatric Sleep Management.

On this podcast, I’ll be discussing the business side of sleep consulting. You’ll have an insider’s view on launching, growing, and even scaling a sleep consulting business. This is not a podcast about sleep training. This is a podcast about business building and entrepreneurship.

In this episode of the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast, I’m joined by Emily, a recent graduate of the CPSM program and a thriving new sleep consultant. Emily shares her journey from enrolling in CPSM in April of 2024 to launching her consulting business just three months later.

We discuss her transition into entrepreneurship, how she balances her family life and part-time work as a physical therapist while also growing her business, and the strategies she’s putting into place in order to grow her list of referral partners and clientele. Emily is passionate about changing the narrative around sleep training. And in this conversation, you’ll hear Emily share how this mission is driving her work with families.

Jayne Havens: Emily, welcome to the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. I am so glad you’re here today.

Emily Meindertsma: Hi. Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here as well.

Jayne Havens: Before we get started, please share a little bit of your story. Tell us who you are, what you do, and why you decided to become a certified sleep consultant.

Emily Meindertsma: Okay. Yeah, so I’m a mom of an almost two-year-old. Going into motherhood, I decided to take a step back from my career as a physical therapist. I work at a part-time capacity at this point.

Before my son was born, I have siblings who I saw navigate sleep. One of them struggled significantly for the first year of their son’s life. My sister has a daughter, and after a few weeks of having a newborn realized she needed some sleep. They found a course and figured out how to do sleep in the newborn phase. I remember kind of laughing because she was doing a bedtime routine with a four- or five-week-old and she’s like, “It’s supposed to work. We’re just doing it. It’s supposed to work.” And it did.

Seven months later, my son was born, and I did the same course she did. Actually, I did the course before he was born. I educated myself on what sleep could look like with a newborn, what I needed to do, to just prepare myself. And it worked. By 12 to 16 weeks, he was sleeping through the night. He was getting long stretches pretty soon in the newborn stage. I was so excited, and I was telling everybody about it. Then about nine months into being primarily home with him, I realized that I had the capacity to do something more.

But I didn’t want to work outside of the house more than I already was. And I kept coming on to the same conversation with people with kids thinking they couldn’t do anything with sleep until four, five, six months. That’s just not the case. That’s not my experience. That’s not my experience talking to others.

And so I researched becoming a sleep consultant and what that might look like. Because I just found myself talking about sleep all the time, and it really made me upset that the prevailing narrative for parents is that you become a parent and you just don’t sleep for a year or years. That does not have to be the case, and I wanted to do something about it. So I kind of researched becoming a sleep consultant. I found your podcast, Jayne. I listened to the entirety of it, and it ended up guiding me to your course, over all the other ones. And I launched my business.

Jayne Havens: And here we are today. What a full circle moment. I don’t think I realized that you have listened to literally the entire show, and here you are today as a guest. That’s amazing. I love this.

Emily Meindertsma: Yes, so I kind of updated myself on the style of the podcast in the last week. But yeah, I’m super excited to be here. And this really was a great place to come in deciding to become a sleep consultant and listening to your podcast.

Jayne Havens: I love that you watched your two siblings sort of go through very different sleep journeys with their children. You saw one sibling have a really hard time with sleep and the other sort of take control of it at a really early time period, and you sort of decided, “I’m going to be on that team.” Right?

Emily Meindertsma: It’s been quite the benefit of being the third one.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, right. You got to see how your siblings did it. I’m the oldest and I had my kids first, so I sort of paved the way for my two brothers. Thankfully, they both — I don’t know if they listened to me, but they both did things similarly. They both established healthy sleep hygiene from the beginning. So we don’t have any kids in our family that are up all night, which is a beautiful thing. But for parents who are struggling, it’s no joke, right?

Emily Meindertsma: Correct. Yeah.

Jayne Havens: So you enrolled in CPSM — I was just looking back. You enrolled in April of last year, and you graduated in July. So it took you almost exactly three months to complete the program. You’ve been in business now for I think about six months. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to share a little bit about your experience going through the training while also working part-time and having a little one at home, and then also what it’s looked like for you to launch your business and land those first few clients.

Emily Meindertsma: So I had my call with you, I believe, in April of last year, and I signed up for the course. I honestly didn’t really dive into it for about a month. Because we had a really busy spring, and it was kind of the decision we had made as a family of how much time I could put into it. But I read all of the books in the curriculum before I actually dived into the entire, into the course. So I did that in first month. Then in phase two, I did all of the course work.

Again, my child sleeps. And at that point, he was having three to four hours of sleep during the day. So I just would go through all of the coursework while he was asleep and just kind of prepping for the business as I got to the end of the program. I’m pretty sure my husband went on a business trip in the last couple weeks of me being in the course. And so I was doing evening work as well. I mean, I loved the material.

Jayne Havens: You’re enjoying going through it.

Emily Meindertsma: Yeah, it was nice to be doing something with my brain. Because again, at that nine-month point of having my child, I was home. I was just scrolling through my phone during his naps, and it was just kind of mindless. So it was really nice to just be learning again. I’ve always loved learning. I wouldn’t have gone to school for as long as I did to become a physical therapist if I didn’t love learning. And so it was really fun to just get a greater knowledge base of something I felt as though I had a handle on already and learn all the different methods.

Again, I have a little under two-year-old, and so I haven’t experienced the older stages. So it was really fun to kind of see what I might be getting into if you do have struggles. So I really enjoyed that. Once I graduated, I was pretty quick to launch my business. I was excited about it. Again, I did it all during naps for the most part. It was really nice. At that point, he transitioned to one nap. So I had a really focused amount of time to work on my business and the time just like flied or flew during that time.

So I started my business. And I think before I officially launched, I started networking a little bit in my area. I was really eager. I talked to my prenatal teacher. Then on like a Richmond Mom Facebook group, someone had posted about being a lactation consultant. And I was like, “I’m going to just connect with them real quick.” I got so excited about that. Then I started my business. I did all the Facebook posts, Instagram posts about it. It took a little bit of time for me to get my first clients. I think I launched at the beginning of July of 2024. And then by the end of August, I booked two clients in the same week, which was a little bit wild.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, that’s really exciting.

Emily Meindertsma: Yeah, but in that gap of July and August, I’d sit at my desk during my son’s nap. I had a task list of what I was doing, whether it was building my website or creating content. Because that’s something I had decided I was doing a little bit of. Every single day, I would find five different providers in the area—whether it was yoga studios, pediatricians, lactation consultants that I would call—and just start networking and get my name out there and introduce myself.

Jayne Havens: Okay. So let’s talk about that a little more. Because I think some people, when they’re just getting into something new—sleep consulting specifically, since that’s what this podcast is about—they don’t necessarily know how to start those conversations. What do you say? So let’s just use one of them as an example, whether it’s a lactation consultant you’ve connected with, or maybe a chiropractor, or a pediatrician, or whatever it may be. How do you approach them, and what have you found to be effective in order to make those meaningful and strategic connections?

Emily Meindertsma: So, typically, what I would do is, if there was a phone number, I would more easily get a response if I found someone on the phone versus an email. So typically, you’d get a front desk person, and I would just introduce myself and ask if whatever provider was available.

I have a script in my Google Docs of my networking calls and what I kind of say, so I don’t get tied up in my word if I do get someone on the phone. I just introduce myself, tell them I’m a local sleep consultant and just tell them what I do. I’d love to discuss it further and how we could maybe develop a partnership where we could help each other. And whether they continue that relationship or not, it was a numbers game for me at the beginning.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, I think that that’s right. I think that people reach out to me all the time for various things. Either they want to do VA work for me or search engine optimization for me. A lot of the time, I don’t need that support or I’m not interested in their help. I usually try to be polite and respond back. But if I’m being totally honest, sometimes I don’t. Right? It is what it is, right? And I agree. It is a numbers game, and you have to talk to a lot of people to form those relationships that really do last the test of time.

It’s great that you sort of hit the ground running and started having those conversations right away. Because I’m a firm believer that you can’t grow a successful business without making those meaningful and strategic connections.

Emily Meindertsma: Yeah, exactly. When I was in middle school, my dad started his own consulting business. So I kind of watched him just calling every single day. And this was to support his family. I have very low stakes in my business right now in the current stage of life, thankfully. But he was making calls and calls and calls to everybody he knew and then everybody he knew he knew in every level. And so he’s been a really good motivator. That was one thing that, starting out, he was just like, “You just need to, to just…”

Jayne Havens: Talk to people, right?

Emily Meindertsma: Talk to people.

Jayne Havens: You just need to talk to people.

Emily Meindertsma: What I have found though is, the people who usually will respond to me in the most authentic way are the other small business owners. Because they know what it’s like to be in my position, as well as I feel like it’s easier for a small business to support another small business and vice-versa versus, like, what am I going to do for a big pediatrician’s office?

Jayne Havens: Well, they also see what’s in it for them, right?

Emily Meindertsma: Exactly.

Jayne Havens: I always talk about, like, when I approach a professional about collaborating in some capacity, or networking, or having a conversation just to see if we can refer business back and forth, I always approach it from the standpoint of how I can help them rather than how they can help me.

So if I was approaching, let’s say, a pediatrician—which I actually don’t really do but if I were going to—the way that I would do it is I would explain that the reason it makes sense for us to collaborate and communicate and refer business is because if they have all of these patients who are not sleeping well, and the parents are exhausted, and everybody is sort of suffering, I can help them to be better off. Right? I can help solve their problem.

A pediatrician only has, what, 15 minutes in a room with a child and their parent. They cannot adequately explain all of the different sleep training techniques. They can’t adequately support them as they’re working through the process. And so the way that I would approach a pediatrician is not like, “Can you send me business? I’m trying to grow my sleep consulting business.”

But it’s like, “Here’s how I can help your patients. Here’s how I can help the families that you support. You’re not in the position to help them in this way because you only have so much time, or you don’t have all of this information. I provide text message support. I provide emotional support.” Right? So really articulating to the person that you’re connecting with how you can help them, how it makes their business look better. Right? And if we can act as support people for what they’re doing, I think that’s a win-win.

Emily Meindertsma: Absolutely. I did actually get in with a pediatrician last week, and not even in my area. It’s a client’s pediatrician, who she went for her four-month check up with her son. I had worked with them in the newborn phase. The pediatrician was so impressed by the sleep patterns he had and wanted my name. So she sent over the pediatrician’s information. And I did, I reached out with a phone call just to touch base, introduce myself, answer any questions they might have about what I do. Because, you know, some pediatricians don’t know what a sleep consultant is. So they don’t know it’s an option to refer their patients out to us.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, I love that. I love that. And I think that now that you know that that’s happened, I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to ask your clients. Like the next few clients that you have if you have a really good outcome with them, ask if they’d be willing to connect you with their pediatrician. Right? Because sometimes it’s hard to get a pediatrician on the phone if you’re just cold calling them. But if somebody already has a relationship with them is making the connection, I think they’re far more willing to have that conversation.

Emily Meindertsma: That’s a really good idea. I’m definitely going to do that. Thank you.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, you’re going to put that into place.

Emily Meindertsma: Add that in.

Jayne Havens: I, actually, for a while, was getting referrals from a pediatrician in Great Neck, New York. I live in Baltimore, Maryland, and I was getting all of these inquiries from this pediatrician in Great Neck. I’m like, “Who is this?” I don’t even know who this doctor is. But obviously, the same thing happened. I obviously worked with a family who told their pediatrician about me. Then she started referring me business, which is fantastic. I always say if you do a really good job, your business is going is going to grow. Because people are going to talk about you. People are going to share your name with their friends and their colleagues and their healthcare providers. And all of that, in time, is going to snowball.

Emily Meindertsma: Yeah, exactly.

Jayne Havens: So let’s talk about your snowball. You are just getting started. You are about six months into your business. I think you said you’re supporting like two or three families a month at this point. What does that look like for you? Are most of your clients right now, any coming in by way of referral, or are they people that you’re connecting with in Facebook groups or on Instagram? Who are these people that you are supporting?

Emily Meindertsma: So it’s been very interesting the last couple weeks. Previously, it has been pretty direct in my network of people I knew growing up. My sister-in-law referred a friend. Those were my first clients. Then they have kind of referred to siblings. I will ask on a discovery call because, recently, I’ve been getting a lot of calls with people I do not know, and that is new to me. In the last few weeks, I think I’ve had like seven or eight discovery calls in the last14 days, and nobody that I knew.

Jayne Havens: That’s amazing, I love that.

Emily Meindertsma: And they’ve all been from four or five different referral sources, which also is amazing and wild because I’m kind of seeing all of those little things that I was doing at the beginning of my business to, like you said, snowball. And I’m seeing where it’s paying off.

There’s a doula group that I connected with in August. I didn’t realize they actually did put me on their resource sheet. I’m in a Richmond moms’ group, and I’ll post most Saturdays because it’s a small business Saturday. Someone picked up on that. They’re just kind of lurking in the background, but they found me through that. Then from other clients, and then I think I talked to a speech therapist, they’ve been referring me. And so it’s been really awesome to see where it’s been growing just from those referral sources.

I have found one connection that has been like a powerhouse recently. I’ve gotten a couple of clients from her already that have signed and paid and I’ve worked with them, or I’m working with them. And that’s from my first connection I made before I launched my business, which is wild. It was from a lactation consultant, who we just kind of connected. We talked, and then she needed sleep support. And so I worked with her and her daughter or the whole family. Since then, she’s just been kind of referring me out to different clients or people she knows and friends. It’s been really cool to see.

Jayne Havens: So I want to tell the story. We had this weird, serendipitous thing happen recently. I was at a doula retreat. This is what you’re talking about, right?

Emily Meindertsma: This is what I’m talking about, yes.

Jayne Havens: So I’m sitting at a table with a bunch of doulas and postpartum professionals. I’m at a retreat for birth workers in Clearwater, Florida. Everybody knows me at that retreat as the sleep consultant. Everybody else there is pretty much postpartum doulas, a handful of lactation consultants. I mean, there are CPSM grads who are doulas and sleep consultants, but I’m sort of the one there that’s not a doula.

And so we’re all sitting around this table. Francie is talking about how she had this life-changing experience working with a sleep consultant. She’s just glowing from ear to ear talking about how this sleep consultant changed her life. She was literally floating talking about it. And I just love that. Because it doesn’t matter who the sleep consultant is. As long as somebody’s life was changed by a sleep consultant, I think that that’s just so amazing for our industry in general. But for whatever reason, I just asked her who her sleep consultant was. Because look, I’ve trained hundreds of them. I just figured a shot in the dark. Maybe it’s somebody I know. And she tells me.

And it’s you. That just made me so happy. Because first of all, you’re new in your business. You’re just getting started. And here, somebody is singing your praises in a way that — she’s not just a mom, but she’s a lactation consultant. She has this whole business supporting families and supporting other moms. And I just knew, oh my gosh. This is like a goldmine for you, right? You literally changed this person’s life in ways that were totally unimaginable to her. Her daughter was, I think, what, four years old when you worked with them. So they had had a long stretch of no sleep, right?

Emily Meindertsma: It was really hard for them.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, team no sleep for a really long time. And you swooped in. What I loved most about the way that she spoke about your work together is that she was still nursing her four-year-old. She was feeling like maybe she needed to stop nursing in order for sleep to resolve. You actually said to her, “I don’t know. I’m not going to tell you to do that. You can still nurse your four-year-old if you want to. But we’re not going to nurse her to sleep.” Right? And she was so relieved, I think, to hear that.

And also, just how amazing is that for lactation consultants to realize that sleep consultants are not going to ever, at least we are not going to ever tell people that they have to stop nursing. Nursing and sleeping can co-exist. She was so blown away that you were really sort of steadfast in that. That like, no, if you want to make that decision and if you want to wean, that’s fine. But If you don’t, that’s okay. We can still work on sleep.

Emily Meindertsma: Yeah, it was really fun working with her. She’s awesome. I mean, humbly I will say, she will sing my praise forever. We talked recently. She was just like, “What’s your capacity? Because I’ll keep sending you people.” I was like, “We’ll figure out what my capacity is,” because I’m not sure what it is yet.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, we had so much fun. We had so much fun connecting over her life altering experience that she had with you. She’s actually going to come onto this podcast. I think we’re recording in a few weeks. She said, she’s like, “I just want to share a testimonial of the work that you do and the work that your sleep consultants are doing. Because you are out there changing lives.” I’m like, that’s what I always say.

So yeah, it was like such a full circle moment. I really didn’t think she was going to say somebody that I knew. But not only was it somebody that I knew and somebody that I trained, but it was like a fresh, brand new sleep consultant. And that just made me so happy. It’s not like she worked with someone who I trained three or four years ago and was totally seasoned. You were fresh out of the gate, and you changed her life. And now she’s going to change yours because she’s going to send business your way, I think, forever.

Emily Meindertsma: Yeah, that was awesome. And her little four-year-old, that was my oldest client yet. It gave me confidence in that room because, again, I have an almost two-year-old. So it was really fun to see the coursework at work that I felt confident in being able to do that and to step into that role as someone speaking into parents’ lives. Basically, just parenting coaching is the most part of that role. Because her daughter knew how to sleep. She just, it was bedtime behaviors. And it was awesome. I used the Facebook community to ask questions and bounce ideas off of, because it was my first, and I knew I didn’t know everything. But I was able to provide confidence support to them because of that.

Jayne Havens: I love that. You said, when we were prepping for this interview, you mentioned that it’s your mission to change the narrative around infant sleep and sleep training. Can you speak into that a little bit? What do you mean by that, and how are you going about this?

Emily Meindertsma: Yeah, so my mission is to change the narrative surrounding sleep and parenting. That was what started this all. It was just hearing parents continue to say that you can’t work on sleep till a certain point. Or, “I’m just not going to get sleep for a year, and then it’ll work out.” And I get so passionate when I talk about that because it infuriates me that that’s what society is saying. It’s coming from somewhere, and society is saying it. I needed to be a part of the change in that. It’s not just going to be me. But I wanted to be able to help families, educate families.

And so the way I’m doing that is, one, I initially was like, okay, I don’t really want to do a lot on social media. But Instagram does put me in front of enough people to maybe change that narrative if I do it correctly. And so I initially was not going about it necessarily correctly. I sought some guidance and kind of figured out how to effectively use it. And hopefully, it will help. And even if it’s not necessarily bringing in business for me, I’m providing useful help to families to know that there is a way to do it differently.

So there’s an amazing prenatal studio, yoga studio, by my house that I connected with. The owner does yoga, but she also brings in professionals to do workshops for women during pregnancy and postpartum. I connected with her, and so I’ve started doing workshops at her studio. So we’ve done a newborn workshop so far, and that’s going to continue. Then I’m going to do a next-steps workshop of four months and past and what that looks like. Because I really do believe that there’s a gap in education when it comes to prenatal education.

We talk all about how to prepare to give birth, which we need to. We prepare all about breast feeding, which we need to. But we don’t really talk at all about sleep. And that’s kind of the missing link in a lot of it. Because if you can feed your baby, your baby has the capacity to sleep well. You just have to know how to put the puzzle pieces together. And moms don’t know that. And before they have a baby, I think there’s just so much importance to educating them when they’re already sleeping at that point, that they can take in the information before they’re waking up every hour at night and then need to change it.

So I’m kind of putting myself in places in the community where I can educate. I also joined the local fit for mom group, which I go with my son. It’s an amazing organization. But I’m also connected with their owner here in Richmond. We’re going to be doing a similar workshop where I can educate. Parents can come and ask questions. It’s just trying to find where I can be placed in the community, where we have a similar demographic that we’re speaking to, to just support moms and families and their children. It’s been really awesome because these, again, are small business owners who see the value in holistically caring for their community.

Jayne Havens: It sounds to me like you’re off to a really strong start. I give you a lot of credit. I think you got out of the gate right away, and you’re already doing some really, really great work—both with regard to laying the foundation for making those connections and planting the seeds but also supporting families successfully. So I think you should be really proud. I’m wondering how you envision your business evolving over the next six months to a year. Where do you hope to be?

Emily Meindertsma: That’s a very good question. So we are actually expecting our second in June.

Jayne Havens: Congrats.

Emily Meindertsma: Thank you. So I was thinking about that today, of what that’s going to look like in taking a little bit of time off for myself. So leading up to that, I’m hoping to continue to grow in the capacity that I have been, continuing to support at least two to three clients a month, if not more, trying to figure out that fine line of what that looks like of still working PT, as well as being home with my son. Because I do have limited hours to put into the business. And then hoping that my referral basis and just the foundation that I’ve created now and when I started will kind of lead me, will kind of bridge the gap of taking a little bit of time off. So then by the time I come back, I’m able to pick up where I left off with reasonable expectations, which I tell all my families we have reasonable expectations, and ramping back up when I come back.

But I think that my goal maybe in six months to a year would be at at least three to four clients a month. Nothing wild. But I think that would be a great place to be. Because again, this is kind of my side thing right now. There was no expectation of me doing anything on top of my PT in this season of life with raising small children. And so it’s really exciting to see it grow and have this opportunity to do it and do it the way I want, because I’m not stressed about it being our supporting income.

Jayne Havens: I think that your business, if I had to guess, is going to be that sort of like slow, organic, grassroots-style growth that hopefully happens with — I don’t want to say minimal effort because I know you’re already putting in a lot of effort. But I think that your business is going to grow without increased effort. I think that what you’re doing now is going to lead.

Right now, you’re putting in however much work, how much time, how much energy. And it’s producing, it’s yielding two to three families that you’re supporting a month. I think you’re going to continue to place the same emphasis on your work and put in the same time and the same effort. And that’s going to grow to three or four families a month, or maybe four to five families a month. And really, because you’re doing such a good job, you’re actually getting families the results that they’re looking for. Those referrals are going to start to pour in. And it’ll just roll, which I’m really happy that it’s already happening for you.

Emily Meindertsma: Yeah, like I said, the last couple weeks have been wild. Before this call, I got someone else put on my schedule for later this week. And I was just like, “Where is this from?”

Jayne Havens: Yeah, it’s so exciting. I love when that happens. My business was very much homegrown to start the way that you described. I built my business off the backs of friends and friends of friends to get started. And really, once those names start coming in and you’re like, “Who is this person? I’ve never heard this name. I don’t know this area code. I don’t know where this person’s coming from,” that’s all really, really exciting. And for that to be happening to you six months in, you should be really, really proud of yourself.

Emily Meindertsma: Thank you.

Jayne Havens: Before we wrap up, do you want to share your website, social media, whatever you’d like to share?

Emily Meindertsma: Yes, so my website is soundofsleeping.org and then you can find me on Instagram @soundofsleeping.

Jayne Havens: Thank you, Emily. It was great chatting with you. And we’ll have to do a circle back in another six months to a year.

Emily Meindertsma: Yes, I would love that. Thank you, Jayne.

Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, it would mean so much to me if you would rate, review, and subscribe. When you rate, review, and subscribe, this helps the podcast reach a greater audience. I am so grateful for your support.

If you would like to learn more about how you can become a certified sleep consultant, head over to my Facebook Group, Becoming a Sleep Consultant or to my website thecpsm.com. Thanks so much, and I hope you will tune in for the next episode.