PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Welcome to the Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast, the ultimate no-BS business podcast for ambitious personal stylists ready to build a six-figure and beyond personal styling business.

You won't hear the typical snoozefest business advice that most personal stylists get told all of the time. Nope. Instead, I'll be sharing business-building strategies that will help you create a killer personal brand, a cult following of loyal personal styling clients, and make a ton of cash while creating lasting style transformations for your clients.

I'm Nicole Otchy, your host and a former personal stylist of 14 years who built a lucrative styling business in three major cities, but only after spending years trying to crack the six-figure styling business code without burning out. And now I'm here to tell you how to do exactly the same. Let's get into it.

In episode two, I asked you to think about what kind of stylist you want to be. In the next several episodes, I'll be defining the two types of approaches to personal styling that I outlined there: transactional and transformational.

These terms and the way I use them describe the relationship between the client and the stylist, not necessarily the outcome of the styling experience, and absolutely not the inherent value of each type of styling approach.

Each of these approaches to personal styling calls in a specific type of client. When we are conscious and intentional about how we market and create our styling services, and in order to be conscious and intentional in how you present your services, you need to be aware of the differences in approaches and expectations to styling that your clients have so that you can decide which of these ways of being a personal stylist is right for you.

Today, we're going to dive into the transactional style of personal styling. I want to start this off by giving you a little bit of a background on where I got the terms transactional and transformational.

They both come from the leadership development space, and that is a space where psychology, organizational psych, different aspects of business, and how organizations are run come together to explain how different leadership styles elicit the motivation and behavior of the people that are being led.

So, both of these types of styling approaches are direct reflections of leadership styles. I think that's really relevant because you are leading your clients through this experience and it's really important to think of yourself as a leader, just like it's important for you to think of yourself like a business person because you are.

Knowing that you relate to one of these different types of leadership styles more than the other is going to help you call in a client who's a really good fit for that style and everybody's going to be much happier and things are just going to go smoother in your business.

I was delighted when I came across this research because I couldn't believe how incredibly relevant it is to personal styling and to the different expectations that clients have.

Transactional leadership is really well exemplified in somebody like Bill Gates. Bill Gates is known for his transactional leadership style. It is a style that goes hand in hand with maintaining the status quo of actions and processes that have been proven successful.

It is really based on a more short-term view of what is the objective in front of us and how do we carry out the actions needed in order to get to the goal in the smoothest way.

Again, we're not talking about reinventing the wheel, we're talking about doing what we know works. What's interesting about this type of leadership style and also personal styling is that it's a style that works really well with a self-motivated individual who's not looking to seek inspiration from their leader, manager, or stylist in this case.

If that sounds a little odd to you, I want to offer you a little bit of a peek into what a transactional client can look like because the way that transactional styling works is that, first of all, it's where all of us start. It's where all of us start. Nobody can get to transformational styling until they have mastered transactional styling.

Most of the time, we're trying to put one foot in one world and one foot in the other world, and that's where we get some wonky results with our clients. The reason why transactional leadership really makes sense when you're looking at personal styling models is that some stylists have certain types of packages where you're looking at an hourly situation, you're looking at a one-off closet edit, a one-off shopping edit, a one-off styling session.

It is usually in those cases that the client is self-identifying into which one they need. Not always, but it's often the case that when you have those types of services, you're going to have people come into you and say, "Hey, I need personal shopping. Hey, I need this," and it really is important regardless of what the client says for the stylist to have a way of vetting the client and making sure that the problem that they think they have is, in fact, the problem they think they have and that the solution that they're choosing is the right solution to solve the problem.

Because, again, remember, people are coming to you with a problem, and they've had the problem potentially for a long time, depends on the client. If that's the case, they may not actually know what they need, but they might have just heard about a closet edit and think that's the answer. So you do need to be able to vet your client.

But what you're going to see in transactional styling is it's the type of client who knows what they want or need or, on the other end of the spectrum, is just looking to take a little bit of one step at a time, one step at a time.

The reason why this client is really, really good for you when you're getting your bearings as a personal stylist is that it's the kind of client that lets you learn how to be a better stylist.

Because this client isn't really looking for a long-term relationship, it may end up being one, but that's not the way that this relationship is entered into, it's hourly or it's in a one-package-at-a-time kind of way, because that's the case, you don't have the pressure of like, "Oh my gosh, I have to deliver this big huge thing."

So I think all stylists should start here, and this is really where they should stay until they're super, super comfortable with having the deeper, more identity-based conversations with their client because it's really hard to be good at the styling process and trying to learn the styling process while also trying to do inner reflection with the client.

You have to master the actual process before you can, in any skillful way, get into the more identity-based conversations. What this looks like is you're going to have a specific type of business model and you're going to usually attract a specific type of client.

Let's talk about the characteristics of transactional personal styling and that type of business. This business is often a, whether stylists mean to set their business up this way or not, it can be a more numbers-based business. Meaning you need a lot of volume to meet your goals.

Sometimes that's the case because stylists are charging very little while they get their confidence up. Just so you know after four or five clients, it's time to raise your prices. There is no end-of-the-day, like, “Oh, I have to achieve this many clients, services, or whatever in order to raise your prices.” You need to live.

What you really want to do is be able to get those appointments in under three hours. If you're going more than three hours, the most I would say is four if you're stopping for a snack, you really need to work on getting that handled because what this particular group of people wants is a transaction, which means they're going to get in and they're going to get out.

They do not want to be there for eight hours. They certainly do not want to be there for like a six-hour closet edit. They usually want a solution that is very clearly defined. When you have things like a standalone closet edit, a shopping session, and a styling session, you need to be clear about what that person is going to get at the end.

Are they going to get 20-styled outfits depending on what's in their closet? Are they going to get a fully edited closet for that season? Are you going to organize it? You really need to be specific because that's going to be the thing that helps the transactional client convert to a paying client as soon as possible.

Often, if you're in this world and you do not have a target market, you do not have a clear demographic, you work with men, women, photo shoots, kids, whatever, you are in the transactional world. You cannot be in the transformational world and serve everybody. It is not an option. We'll talk about that more next week.

But one of the things that's super common in the transactional styling world is that you often have a lot of services on your menu, like more than three, like four or five, six. If that's the case, and you have that, again, you really want to be able to clarify who each particular service is best for, what the problem is they're trying to solve.

Because lots of people try to solve the same problem with shopping and editing and they may or may not get to the root of the problem. Something you can consider. Really, this type of styling service is a standalone thing. Could the person string together a whole bunch of services? Absolutely. But that's not how they're entering into the relationship.

It's not like a six-part styling service that they know is going to take three months. It's kind of in and out. Again, you want to keep that time down and you can have packages and be transactional, but I tend to notice that when we get into packages, stylists are really promising something that's more transformational, so that's important to note.

It is more expected and understood that if you're doing a one-off shopping appointment for somebody and you don't have an in-depth style discovery process, which is another aspect of transactional styling, it usually does not have an in-depth standalone session that is about the style discovery process.

Someone handing you a Pinterest board, not style discovery, that's the client telling you what their preferences are, which may or may not work out. It depends. We've all had experiences with that where somebody hands us a board and they're like, "This is what I like," and you go and you shop for it and they're like, "Oh, just kidding. I don't like this."

There's a whole series of reasons for that, but if you are getting to a transactional styling client, you have the right client, you're marketing to that client, that won't be a problem though what they say they like, they like.

You get two different types of clients when you market and build a transactional styling business. Again, we all start here, we all have to learn how to do an edit, a shopping session, and a styling session. That is the foundation of being a personal stylist.

The problem is some stylists think that that's where it ends, and if that's where you want it to end, fantastic, do you. But there are a lot of ways to be a personal stylist, and I want to open your eyes to them so you feel excited, motivated, inspired, and just ready to grow your business in a way that's unique and different so you can stand out, so you don't have to market as hard, so that you can make more money and knowing where you sit in the marketplace is what's going to help you do that.

Understanding that the transactional client usually identifies as busy and they often have two ends of the spectrum that they sit on. On the high end, meaning this person wants a really high touch service and is willing to pay a fair amount of money, this person values their time more than their money and so they would like you to do it for them.

Most stylists do not know what their ideal client values more, time or money. If you do not know that, you really are going to struggle to market to them in a way that's going to capture their interest.

This person identifies as busy. What do I mean by that? Everybody thinks they're busy. My toddler thinks she's busy. Everyone in the world thinks they're busy and most of us are busy. But not all of us identify as busy.

I am busy, but I do not want people to think, “Oh, she's busy all the time.” That's just not how I want to show up in the world. But this actually is how this person wants to show up in the world and it's how they identify. It's part of their story about themselves that they're just very busy.

That's important because that means they're not going to want certain things from the styling experience or they might not be attracted to it. This client on the high end often has a very clear sense of their aesthetic preferences. They may have worked for a while on their personal style. They may know what colors, textures, silhouettes, and things like that they want in their closet, and they often want the stylist to do more of that.

Another version of the transactional personal styling client that I have found, not just in my own career, but with many of the clients that I have worked with that are stylists is this person may be looking for an update in their personal style as a result of their career, which doesn't have to mean but can mean they're looking to signal, and of course everybody's signaling with their personal style, but they're doing it in a way that is not signaling their internal world to the outside. They're signaling status specifically.

Examples of places and client types I see this with are when you have a very high-end realtor, for example. I was listening to a business coach for realtors the other day, and she was talking about how they need to project the lifestyle if they're in the multi-million dollar renting or selling world.

They can't drive a Honda, is what she was saying. They need to lease a Mercedes, a BMW, or something. They have to give off the aura in their clothes, their watches, with their shoes. This was her as a business coach. This was her recommendation. I'm just telling you what I heard, that they need to give off this idea that they don't really need the sale.

By signaling with their clothes and their possessions, they don't really need the sale. They're already doing well. This is not the only field that I've seen this in. When I worked with presidential advisors as a stylist, I saw this all the time. It wasn't very flashy, but it was very transactional in the sense that there were norms and rules we had to follow and colors signaled different things.

It wasn't really them looking inside and being like, “Do I want people to think that I'm sensitive, confident, or whatever?” It was just like you're projecting a persona. Think of it like that. Is every high-end client like that? No.

Some of them have actually figured out their style. But if you have a client who's really, really interested in only luxury goods, and specifically for one context of their life, like work, but say their apartment when you go to their house, it doesn't look like that, or in general, when you're meeting with them on Zoom, you're not getting that vibe, but they want that, they want you to shop for luxury stuff for their work life or whatever, that's a transactional client.

It's because they're really, like I said, signaling in a way that is not about the internal world. It's about perception. It's only about perception. Now, of course, perception and signaling happen in a transformational styling service, but it's led by the client's view of themselves or their ideal vision of themselves, not with what other people think of them.

That's exactly the opposite of what we're trying to do in a transformational styling service. We'll get into that next week more, but that's one end of the spectrum. Like I said, that person values their time more than their money, so they're willing to spend a lot.

Now, at the other end of the transactional spectrum is an interesting other type of client. This is a client who is looking to babystep their way into personal styling. This is someone who maybe buys a PDF about style, they take a class, or they've read a couple of books, but they are operating from the view that they don't really maybe have a style, they feel lost with their style, or they feel like they have lost their previous personal style that felt good for them.

Maybe they're going through some kind of a transition in their life, either that you're aware of or that you're not, almost every person that comes to a personal stylist, but for the record, is going through some sort of transition. Internal, external, it can be different, we'll talk about that in another episode, but that's important for you to know.

You are looking at someone who maybe wants more of a rule-based, prescriptive type of styling service. A styling service that looks like that would be color analysis, it would be body shape analysis. Of course, body shape analysis and color analysis can exist in transformational styling.

I create packages like that all the time with my clients. However, what's important about this is this person doesn't actually want to do any type of analysis of that to see if the rules or the protocols that you give them in terms of color and shape fit into what they want to project into the world.

It's very much just like, “Okay, now I have a place to start. Let me go play with these colors. Let me start here.” Some people need a foothold into their style exactly using this.

I have had lots of clients that really wanted to have color analysis in their packages, which I would do virtually with another company. I would add that in because I don't have that expertise. They really felt like it gave them not necessarily “confidence” about themselves, but just confidence in their shopping, confidence in their picking of things when we were going over them.

They felt like they had added almost insurance in that conversation if they knew something was in their color. That's just a personality type that tends to be a rule-following personality type. They tend to be people that need a way in through a framework or, like I said, a prescription.

Now like I said, you can have a transformational service that includes those things, but that also needs to then include an analysis for that specific client of what's going to be a good match, not a like, “Here are the rules, go follow them.”

If you're handing them a PDF with their colors in them, their body shape in them, or anything in it, and they're just walking away and no conversation or style discovery happened before it, after it, or at any point, was there a discussion of their values and what they want to project in the world? It is a transactional personal styling service and it is very much something that a lot of people want.

Nothing wrong with it, but just important to know that because if you were trying to sell a big internal transformation to the client that wants the prescriptive transactional guide, you're not going to get the client you want.

This person is not interested or not in a place in their life where they want to talk about their identity in a great amount of depth beyond just like, "This is what my lifestyle looks like. I don't want anything I have to dry clean. I have two little kids. Maybe it's not a light color."

You're going to have some conversation about the person's preferences, sizes, what colors they like, and what colors they don't. But it will not be a deeper conversation about identity, embodiment, and things like that. Again, nothing wrong with it.

Lots of stylists who sit in the transactional world that do hourly or do one-off kind of services, they do not have a styling self-discovery process, a way of looking into not just what kind of things the client is attracted to, but why and if the thing they are initially attracted to is actually giving off what they intend to, for example.

Because just because the client hands you a Pinterest board full of classic clothes, for example, like stripes and J.Crew-type things, if they internally want to be seen in a different way, they may be visually attracted to those clothes because they're, say, safe.

But when they put them on, you're going to get a lot of like, “Oh, this doesn't work. This doesn't work. This doesn't work.” They may not be able to tell you why, because there wasn't a style discovery process before that.

I'm just sharing that because it doesn't mean that you need to do one. It just means that you should be aware that that could be where the miscommunication comes from.

This type of client can either identify as really, really busy or identify as just wanting a little step at a time on the other end of the spectrum. They're often seeking immediate results. They're not looking for this long-term drawn-out type of styling service, they want an in-and-out experience.

If you are doing anything that's just like personal shopping, first of all, more stylists should just be going the personal shopping route cause more people want that and it’s much easier to sell, but I think lots of stylists behave like personal shoppers and they are selling personal styling and people are confused by that.

If you don't have a bigger process around the shop, people don't consider that personal styling. Well, you don't know enough about that person, for example, to make it some deep transformational situation.

It doesn't mean you're not going to get them a result, doesn't mean they won't feel good at those clothes, just not the same thing. You're going to see also in this group that sometimes this is a group of people that are really interested in trends and I think that stylists styling people in trends has really gotten a bad rap. It's totally fine if that's something you're drawn to and are attracted to.

I think there's a lot of language out there in people's marketing like, “I'm not going to put you in trends.” What I think is problematic about that is that even if you're not going to put say a 40-year-old woman in trends, she still wants to feel modern. You're maybe confusing those two things.

That can make a client think, “Ooh, I want to work with them, but I don't want to look old and stuffy.” Some people just think trends mean modern. You really need to think, “What do the people I want to work with want?” Often when I see people looking at targeting women in their 40s and 50s, and they talk about like, “I'm not going to give you trends,” it wasn't even on that person's mind that you were going to give them trends. That's not even in their world.

It's also okay to give people trends if that's what they want. That is also going to speak to the transactional personal styling client because it's like you have to move quickly with trends, I mean, not really that quickly if we're being honest, but it's seasonal, it changes with the seasons, what's in, what's out, and stuff like that.

They're not going to want to do one shop a year or two shops a year. They're going to want to keep these quick appointments up so they're staying in the now. That's great. There are tons of people like that. It's okay if you find it fun and it's okay if you find it exciting to do trends.

I do think this is getting a bad rap. There are a lot of ways to be a stylist and if you're super into trends, market to people that want trendy clothes because there are plenty of stylists that are knocking in.

I guess one of the things people could argue is, “Oh, you're just going through so much clothes, and it's wasteful,” but not always. I had clients who spent a lot of money on clothes and wore trends from Prada, and they didn't just throw out clothes, they just had tons of money.

I think we need to also remember that there are people in that world, they're not necessarily being wasteful. Maybe they're re-selling their clothes, maybe they're auctioning their clothes off, maybe they're donating them for charity. I saw lots of clients do that.

Just because it's trend doesn't mean that it's throwaway, and I think that's also something that gets convoluted. So, if you're into that, this would be a great client for you. Like I said, they're usually wanting something that's pretty quick turnaround, so you're not going to want really long drawn-out services.

What are you going to be talking about in your marketing to get a transactional styling client? Let's talk about that so that we can get you the kind of client you want if this feels like what you want.

Again, remember, we're going to be thinking a lot about if you're going to the high-high end of what I talked about, someone that really is maybe looking at this for their career, they already have a good sense of their style, so I've had stylists go into people's closets and they already have really high-end stuff, they really have good basics, or they have a pretty good sense of their style and they're just filling in the gaps, there's a whole world for that, by the way, it's not transformational personal styling because you're not transforming the style into something else. You're giving them more of what's already there and making it more cohesive. That's what you should be marketing towards.

You should be emphasizing speed, convenience, and availability in your messaging. You should highlight the changes of seasons. I do want to be temporary with that because you should always be marketing yourself. It shouldn't just be when there's a change of seasons.

That's what creates really high highs and really low lows for stylists. But in general, if you really want to attract the person that maybe wants a lot of fresh and new, and maybe even trend-driven things, you want to make sure you're speaking to that.

If you think you're more on that high-end type of client who's willing to pay quite a bit, you probably don't want volume, but you do want to then signal in your marketing that you are in the know about luxury goods and project that, to be honest.

If you are more in the other end where you're doing like hourly here and there, or you're working with more of a prescriptive styling model, like you're just doing color analysis, you're just doing body shape analysis, and you want to stay in that place, which I know stylists that are making half a million dollars doing just color analysis, go, there's a whole world there for that.

But if you want to build that out, call me and we can do that and make it an even bigger business. But aside, if that is where you are in prescriptive doing color analysis one-off, you're doing body analysis one-off, you're going to need a lot more clients.

You're going to have to think of ways to make that work for you, which might mean you do something like a styling party, which you can do in other types of worlds, but you can do like a color analysis party.

I saw somebody the other day in a mom's Facebook group here in Brooklyn that asked if they knew anybody that could do a color analysis party for a 40th birthday. That's a whole world. I have a million ideas for that kind of stuff. That's what I mean. You really want to be thinking about how are your services a good representation of the value, desire, and experience that the person that you're trying to call in wants?

No one's going to say that you're going to get to the deepest levels of your soul, and it projected into your style if you're doing a style party or a color analysis party. It's fun. It's probably going to give people some things to think about. It could even be something that deeply impacts them. They might see themselves differently because they start wearing colors, for sure.

Again, this is not to say that you can't have a deep impact on your clients when you are in transactional world. Especially if you have a client who really, really, really values their time. It is so important to that person that they can trust you to carry out the tasks at a high end and deliver the clothes to their office, say, or get a tailor to their house. This is a very convenience type of group when you're going down the high end.

At the low end, you want people that are getting that excitement and that dopamine hit of the prescriptive experience. That's how you continue to keep that client coming back when you need such high volume.

What's really important is that you're talking about the experience in a way that speaks to the values of the ideal client, which is fast, convenient, potentially the availability in terms of like it's seasonal. I know what the freshest is in this kind of trend-driven market. I know a lot about say the colors that are dropping this season.

You're going to really be talking about those things. You're going to be staying a little bit further away from this identity conversation, because if you do that, and I mean, you do that outside of just a client testimonial, if a client says, “Your services completely made me so confident, blah, blah,” fantastic, put it up. Not saying that it can't make that person feel great about themselves, but you don't want to promise a style discovery experience.

You don't want to promise this full makeover experience if you are not going to be giving them the tools to be your partner in that. I think that's what's really important is that this can have a bit of a different vibe.

If you don't have a really solid sales process, client intake process that gets deeper than just like your size is, that has some more introspective questions on it, if you don't have an entire session that's just related to style discovery and helping that client think about how do they actually really want to show up, not just what do they like, if you don't have those pieces, if you don't have space for that client to ask questions and explore the things that are going on in their mind, even after the session, then you are probably going more towards transactional and you want to stay away from any type of promise of the transformational.

Because when you do that, you make sure you call in a client who is on the same page as you. When I hear a lot of stylist promising things like big deep transformations or talking about identity shifts and talking a lot to the type of client who's going through massive transitions like a divorce or something that and they want this whole new style, but they're offering two-hour appointments, there's something off.

If the stylist is offering a two-hour shopping session with nothing before and nothing really after, except for a form that gives them their sizes, you're going to have a lot of people that are a bit confused.

That's just really important to know because people are much savvier consumers than they were years ago about personal styling. This is often the reason why things like tips and tricks in your marketing don't really get you anywhere in terms of converting clients. It's because specifically if you're saying, "Here are some tips and tricks and I offer an hourly model or I offer a one-off styling session," that person does not want your tips and tricks. They are busy or they literally don't know where to start.

You may get somebody that is in the transformational world a little bit more willing to apply some of those things. Somebody that wants that deeper change might be looking to take a few steps towards the process before they hire you, but you're not going to get it from the transactional client so they're just going to glaze right over it.

Those are some things to think about in terms of the transactional styling world. Again, we all start here. It's really just a matter of if you want to go into the next phase or not. And you do not need to to make a lot of money.

In fact, as long as our marketing is really aligning with this type of client, you're going to do really, really well and you're actually going to stand out because lots of stylists are just conflating their marketing types right now and it's not doing what it could for the marketplace. It's not being super clear and direct to people that want a super clear and direct personal styling answer.

Some things to think about. I hope that this was helpful and I will chat with you in the next episode about transformational personal styling.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me. It turns out that social proof is actually pretty important. So if you could help me out, I'd so appreciate it. If you just had a quick free moment and could leave me a rating or review on the podcast app, that would be killer. And even better, if you wanted to share this episode on Instagram and tag me, that would totally make my day and it would bring so much more awareness to the podcast and would help other stylists just like you who are looking to build lucrative styling business because the better each of us does, the better all of us do. Thanks for hanging out with me and I'll chat with you next time.