I’m Sam(antha) Bevington, founder of The Business of Babies, Mum of 2, antenatal instructor and internet nerd. My super power is making businesses in the pregnancy, birth & postnatal space more visible online. 

Despite being a big fan of the NHS, it is clear that perinatal support in the UK is currently held together by incredible independent practitioners, from fertility support, antenatal education, infant feeding consultants and tongue tie specialists, to doulas, independent midwives and perinatal exercise specialists. 

Baby class providers, weaning & sleep consultants play a huge part in supporting families through the early years, often in place of local authority support that has seen funding cuts in recent years. These businesses are born from a passion to support people at a unique and often vulnerable time, but having passion for something doesn’t make a viable business alone. 

Through my courses, strategy support, membership and custom built websites, I help these businesses to reach more people who are currently in need of support. Why? Because as a new mother, I needed to see your support. I needed to hear your message. 

Just like many of the 700,000 expectant parents in the UK each year, I didn’t know anything about babies or birth before my daughter came along. I didn’t know about the world of antenatal courses, hypnobirthing and doula support or that there were dedicated people to help with feeding and postnatal mental health outside of the skeleton of NHS support. 

And I struggled, like so many. I didn’t connect with the idea that a strong, local antenatal course may have better prepared me for early parenthood and helped me to build a much needed village of support in other local mums - because the details were hidden on a website that had been left to fall down the Google rankings. 

I didn’t see that there were breastfeeding consultants in my own town, so the only support came from the wonderful but stretched community midwifery team, who discharged me on Day 10 once the baby was gaining weight. I was still feeling very much in crisis. An IBCLC operated in Manchester, but she was almost invisible online. When I did find her, the prices were hidden, the home page written in a language I didn’t fully understand. Was she really as professional as she said she was with her website looking like it was thrown together in 5 minutes on Wix? The connection wasn’t there - was this really the solution? My breastfeeding journey swiftly came to an end, but the feeling of failure in those early days had a lasting impact. 

Many businesses in this niche focus on building a strong word of mouth reputation. But what happens when you don’t know another experienced mouth? If, like me, you were the first of your friends to have a baby, you go online. You search. You explore.

Local businesses, more than ever before, need strategic online visibility to reach the people searching for their services right now. People like me, in your local area, are navigating the system alone and are in need of your support. They sit scrolling and searching, desperate to find guidance in a sea of conflicting advice and overwhelm. 

How did I get here?

Did I grow up wanting to be a business strategist for birth and baby businesses? Absolutely not. Now I’m here, I love what I do, but what an adventure it has been…

Starting a degree in broadcast journalism & politics, I had dreams of becoming a music journalist or a TV presenter. But everything can change in three long years and the good old ‘credit crunch’ recession of 2008 hit local press outlets hard. Newspapers were disappearing and the face of online media was changing. I vividly remember sitting in a guest lecture with Helen Boden, the director of news for the BBC. The audience audibly gasped as she described the potential for a news article online with… A VIDEO EMBEDDED WITHIN IT. “We just don’t know what this is going to look like, but we know it’s coming…”

It’s hard to imagine that this caused equal amounts of excitement and uproar. The truth was that although it sounded great, nobody was investing in the skills to be able to actually produce content in that way. The course began to rapidly change but we were also encouraged to pick up work experience placements outside of the media, so I spent 6 weeks in a primary school helping the juniors to write and produce a school magazine as well as time with a PR company learning to write for search optimisation! Both ended up being essential experiences for my future…

It wasn’t just the world that was changing - I was too. My priorities had shifted from wanting to travel the world as a journalist to wanting to settle down. I was young, almost too young to want such stability, but I was in a stable relationship and I knew even then that motherhood was part of my future. A career in the media still excited me, but the prospects were bleak at that time with all jobs being temporary and most being based in London. My time in a school made me reassess. Teaching would be a great, stable career choice ahead of starting a family.

Or so I thought.

I loved teaching! I was a primary specialist and worked my way up through to management. I loved being a version of myself that wasn’t too serious in front of the kids, walking across the room like a chicken one minute, teaching long division the next. It was fun when the kids were there and I loved that teaching is both an art and a science, but the political side wears you down. The constant cycle of scrutiny, the lack of funding and support, the lack of provision for children with additional needs… it all results in a job that actually isn’t very compatible when you have a very young family who also need your care and attention. In the end, despite loving so many things about the job, I just didn’t feel supported to be the best I could be for everyone. I was almost set to apply for Deputy Head jobs. Instead I gave in my notice and walked away. 

Thankfully, I’d also been building something up for myself for this exact scenario. Quitting my job was safe because I already had another income. When my daughter was young, I’d dropped days at school to spend more time with her, but with that came the need to supplement my income. I’d trained to become an antenatal instructor, so I would teach one night per week in my local community centre, supporting expectant parents. 

My courses were full from early on - I was determined to succeed (I needed those days off with my daughter) and I had a strong understanding of search engine optimisation and effective content marketing. I was ranking number 1 on Google for ‘antenatal courses in Manchester’ and my content on water birth, home birth, hypnobirthing and caesarean birth in Manchester also brought a significant amount of traffic my way. Before long, I was upgrading my venue and taking bookings from across Greater Manchester. 

During the Covid lockdowns, NHS antenatal education in Manchester reduced down to almost nothing. My online sessions were thriving, providing the basics for hundreds of people who just needed a platform to have their questions answered and feel more prepared in the most uncertain of times. It was no surprise that other antenatal instructors began to ask me how I was bringing in so many clients during this time. The answer was in the online visibility & tech set up that I’d put in place long before 2020. 

In early 2021, I began to see that there really was a need for an online community of other birth & baby businesses. They needed the visibility I had and I had the skills to teach it effectively. In April 2021 I launched The Birth Business Growth Club, later rebranding in 2024 to The Business of Babies. This was a low-cost, low-risk membership for anyone in the industry to access support and training. 

These days my business has developed into something else entirely. The membership is still a thriving community but I also have a range of online courses too. These support everyone throughout the spectrum of perinatal support - from fertility counsellors through to baby class providers. My favourite aspect of the business is Hatch & Grow - the website development arm of The Business of Babies. I design and build custom Wordpress websites for doulas, private midwives and antenatal instructors, taking into account my SEO skills but also my years of research into the search queries made by pregnant and postnatal parents. 

I’ve also started Pregnancy Pal, an online perinatal magazine with an ambition to provide the UK's most trusted, realistic and honest parenting content. This content is part generated by the businesses I work with, giving them the platform they deserve, whilst providing new and expectant parents with an alternative viewpoint alongside links to the latest research and evidence base on pregnancy & parenting.  

However we end up working together, I always want people to remember where the idea of all this came from. I needed you. I needed support and you were not visible. Where were you? Posting to the same people on Instagram every day or happy with popping a few posters up around town? There are people out there, right now, searching for your support online, just as I was. Are you coming up in their searches? Are you answering their questions? If something is holding you back from becoming completely visible, let’s chat. Working on your online presence does require a bit of investment in either time or money (and I’ve got options to suit both budgets!) but it’s worth it. Because I needed you. And they do too.