From Skincare to Baby First Aid: The Unlikely Path Behind The Nest
There’s this core idea behind Raffy's village: the people around you who understand without you having to explain it first. Sharing stories is one small way we try to build that, one family at a time. This one belongs to Heidi Young, a paediatric and allergy nurse and the founder of The Nest, a baby first aid and parenting education business.
Heidi Young had already built a business once before The Nest existed; and it had nothing to do with nursing.
It started when her son Dylan was six months old, he'll turn thirteen this year, which puts the timeline into perspective. A friend from her old GP surgery in Scotland, someone she used to ride horses with outside of work, messaged her out of nowhere about a skincare and wellness company built on community. Heidi had never heard of the company.
But it worked, and not in a small way. Heidi ran that business for close to four years, built a team, and eventually walked the stage in the US as the company's top international sponsor. She's candid that she still uses the products today and pushes back, gently, whenever she hears network marketing lumped in with the worst of its reputation.
But by her own account, growing it eventually became "pulling teeth." She knew by then that she wanted to have her own business. She just didn't know what kind.
The turning point
The idea for what became The Nest didn't arrive as a plan. It arrived on an ordinary day, in a park, when a baby nearby began to choke.
Heidi doesn't linger on the details of that moment when she talks about it, and it's worth sitting with why: watching a child choke, even as a bystander, is frightening in a way that doesn't fully leave you. What she does talk about is what it left behind.
In that moment, she understood how much can hinge on whether the people nearby know what to do next. She was already trained for exactly that. Most parents standing in that park weren't.
That's the part that stayed with her afterward.
She'd spent years wanting to build something of her own, certain of the wanting but not the shape of it. It hadn't occurred until then that the answer had been sitting in her own qualifications the whole time.
And that baby first aid, something she already knew how to teach, could be the business itself.
She went home to Scotland for Christmas that year, still turning the idea over. By the time she came back, she'd built a website, found a logo through a plain Google search (a nest, which simply fit) and named the business after it.
What made the leap possible, was that the years in community building had handed her every skill she needed to actually do it: how to build a website, hold a presence on social media, ask for what she needed, and not take no for an answer.
She hadn't set out to gather those tools. She just had them, ready, when the moment that mattered finally arrived.
What it's like now
The Nest has changed shape more than once since: Heidi is upfront that it's "morphed quite a few times," from courses to a private membership called Ask Nurse Heidi, and she's still, in her words, constantly figuring it out. She's also candid about the parts that are genuinely difficult to get right: how public or private a support community should feel, how to talk about health information as a nurse without overstepping into anything resembling medical advice, and the fact that the legal lines around all of it are blurrier, and less consistently enforced, than most people assume.
Who she is, outside of it
Ask Heidi to describe herself in ten words and the first one surprises people who meet her: introverted.
She's quick to explain the contradiction, she doesn't come across that way, but her social battery drains fast, and she's private in the way her mother was, quiet unless something has genuinely caught her interest.
She calls herself a classic Virgo, a planner who doesn't always stick to her own plans, and repeats something a business coach once told her that stuck: not tenacious exactly, just unable to stop once she's started, even on the days she wants to.
Nurse, she adds, without hesitation and she can't picture doing anything else. Good mother. Business owner. Animal lover. Traveler.
What matters most to her right now doesn't take long to name, and the three things are tangled together rather than separate: her children, the direction her business is heading, and, something she describes as almost the first thought she has every morning: the happiness of her family back home, after several genuinely hard years.
She's honest that these aren't really three separate priorities so much as one: her children's wellbeing tracks her own closely at their age, and the reason she won't let the business go is a gut-level conviction that it's building toward the freedom to move between countries when her family needs her to.
What makes her feel most alive is almost defiantly ordinary: mornings.
Getting up early, a stretch of time to herself before the kids wake, their own small routine together before school. That specific window, followed by sitting down to build something that she believes, in her gut, is heading somewhere worth going.
The thing that changed her most
The event Heidi names without hesitation is her father's death. Sudden in the sense that it happened within nine months of a terminal diagnosis, when she'd made it to 44 without having faced anything like it before. She calls that itself a kind of gift, one she's aware not everyone gets.
What she describes afterward isn't only grief.
It's what the grief cleared out of the way. It stripped away everything that wasn't essential, and it forced her to face a fear she'd been carrying for years, living as far from home as she does: being absent if something serious happened.
It did happen, and she wasn't absent.
She went back and forth, was there when he passed, was there at the funeral. Her family talked, cried, and got through it together, and coming through it gave her something she hadn't expected: a strange, specific comfort that distance doesn't have to mean absence when it actually counts.
She says, almost as an aside, that it left her a little less homesick, not more, because she'd proven to herself she could get there if she needed to.
It's nearly four years now. She can talk about it, she says, without crying every time, though it's still, unmistakably, the thing that changed her the most.
Why it matters
Heidi's story doesn't resolve into a single clean lesson, and that's arguably the point of it.
A business she no longer runs gave her the exact tools she needed for the business she does. A stranger's emergency in a park did more to set her direction than years of already wanting to build something.
And the event she names as most transformative isn't about business at all: it's about proving to herself, at genuine cost, that she could show up for her family from a distance when it mattered most.
What ties it together is something she says almost in passing: the reason she keeps building is that it's meant to buy her family the freedom to move, to be present, to close the distance when they choose to rather than when a crisis forces the question.
The business is the vehicle. Yet the reason for it was never really about business at all.
This article is based on a conversation with Heidi Young, founder of The Nest, and reflects her own experience only.
This is what the village is for; not just stories about the moment something goes visibly wrong, but the stories about what actually shapes a person into who they are. Heidi's story is another thread of that. If yours belongs here too, we'd love to hear it.