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.

This is the third installment of our discussion about transactional personal styling and transformational personal styling. So if you didn't catch the last two episodes on these topics, go ahead and listen to episode two of this podcast and episode seven, the one right before this episode in order to get a lay of the land and a sense of what I'm talking about here.

To be clear, these terms, transactional and transformational, and the way that I'm using them is to describe the relationship between the client and the stylist, not necessarily the outcome of the styling experience or the inherent value of the styling service to a styling client.

Each of these approaches to personal styling just calls in a different type of client. When we're conscious and intentional about how we market our services and how we create styling services, then we have the opportunity to be fully in control of the type of client that we call in.

But in order to be conscious and intentional in how you are presenting yourself as a stylist and your services, you need to be aware of the differences and the approaches to styling so that you can be aware and think about what's right for you.

Today we're going to kick off our chat talking about transformational personal styling. In the last episode, I went into depth about transactional personal styling, the strength of that particular approach to styling, and who it's best for. Then this one we're going to do the same thing for transformational personal styling.

Again, I want to remind you, as I did in the other episodes, that these two different ways of talking about styling are approaches to the leadership and development world that I discovered in my research as I was trying to think about how to explain the patterns I was seeing both in my own business as a stylist back before I closed my business and in the conversations I'm having with my styling clients or my clients who are stylists.

So funny now that I'm coaching stylists, I tend to say styling clients, even though I mean clients that are stylists. I guess old habits die hard. But when I talk to other personal stylists and I coach them and we're working on their business, I notice that often the biggest reason why they're not super happy with their results isn't because they're not doing well financially or otherwise, but because they are not totally clear on how and why they're getting the client that they are.

It's usually a result of the marketing that they're doing, the services that they have, and the way that they're talking about personal styling. That's why I went on the hunt to figure out how do I define these patterns so that we can really be honest about the fact that there is more than one type of personal stylist out there and there's more than one type of personal styling client.

Are there more than these two? Potentially. But I think these two are the really, really, really common overall themes that I see with stylists and their clients and I think these two concepts of transactional and transformational really encapsulate, I would say 90%, 95% of what I see and why I see things either going really well for a stylist or going off the rails in terms of the client experience.

That's how we got here. I found these terms in the leadership development world. I want to talk you through how transformational leadership is defined in those spaces and how it relates to being a transformational personal stylist.

Transformational leaders are able to inspire followers to change their expectations, to change their perceptions, and to motivate them to work towards a common goal. Both people go into the conversation with an understanding of the other person's perspective and they outwardly show that they take that perspective into account.

It requires a conscious effort to earn and build a transformational relationship. This is why it's so important to think about what are you saying in your marketing. How are you explaining the outcomes that your clients have?

Because when you begin to talk about your personal styling client experiences outside of just “This is the outfit she was wearing before and this is the outfit she was wearing after,” you're going to start to train a potential client to think about and change their expectations and their perceptions of the personal styling experience in order to prepare them to be motivated to work with you.

In order to prepare them to come into the styling experience as a partner, this is why you really want to think about your process at every step of the styling experience because it's either leading the person to be more of a partner in the process or to make it more transactional.

I'm not saying that in a transactional personal styling container, the person is adversarial, not helpful, or don't give you what you need. But because like I spoke about in the last episode, it tends to be predicated, the success of that experience tends to be predicated on the swiftness and the quickness of the result versus the depth of the experience so there's just a different level of partnership that is required for a longer styling service for everybody to stay on track, stay on the same page, and be able to get the client where they want to go.

Now, I want to be clear again, as I was in the past episodes, it doesn't matter if you're doing styling online, virtually, or in person, both types of services exist and both types of services and clients have a different way of looking at the experience. The service is different and the actual client experience is different.

It doesn't really matter if you're online or in person. I will say that if you are online and you want a more transformational type of relationship, the longer that container takes to finish and close up and give the client the end result and off-board them, the longer that is, the more work you have to do to keep the client engaged.

It's really hard to do that in a transactional relationship because you potentially haven't really gotten the client’s buy-in in full partnership if you're dealing with a more transactional process and you're promising things like speed, you're going to end up losing the client much more quickly, which is why talking about your services, not in terms of speed of delivery if you want a deeper styling container is going to be really important for attracting the right client.

What's really important is that the transformational relationship is something that starts before you ever sign the client. That's why I say that your marketing specifically in this type of styling relationship needs to begin to work on the expectations and the perception of the experience before you ever get on the sales call with the client because they're going to be set up for this experience based on the way you talk about it.

When I was looking into this world of leadership, some of the things I thought were really interesting about transformational leadership is that, unlike transactional leadership, it does require the stylist to be able to keep the styling client motivated and engaged more so than a transactional.

In my last episode, I talked about how Bill Gates was an example of a transactional leadership style. Still got a lot done, still made a huge difference on the world. It's not like he didn't have an impact, it's just that he and that type of style requires somebody that's more self-motivated and self-led.

Now that doesn't mean that the transformational styling client isn't motivated, isn't high achieving, and doesn't get results in their life. It's just that less people have an experience of understanding what it means to have your inner world and your outer world match through your style. They can't really be self-motivated because they don't actually know what it means. They don't actually know what steps to take.

Most people, when you're just trying to do a transaction and you want to just, say, update somebody's closet for spring, you're not going into the inner workings of the way that they think about themselves and they want to project, everybody knows how to shop. That person understands, they've done it before, they get it, and of course, the transformational client does too, but they don't understand the process necessarily to make the result of that shopping or the result of that styling session be a reflection of their inner world.

That's really what transformational styling is getting at. I think it's really important to note, as I talked about in episode two about this topic, that this has not been the way that people have approached style forever and ever. Has style always been about signaling? 1000%.

Has it always been about identity and reflecting that identity in the world? Not really because before, even like 50 years ago, 60 years ago, so much of the way society was built and the way that we thought about personhood and individuality was based on the stratification of economics and society, this idea of the white picket fence, the nuclear family, and all of this being the ultimate like “You've made it” in life is not really how the world works anymore and there are so many different ways of being successful.

So outwardly signaling that is just more complicated, and what the person wants to express in the world, their idea of what success is, and their idea of self-expression, it's just so different. It's just a different way of looking at it, which means most of us don't have a way of really understanding the way our style fits into that and so the stylist process has to really account for that.

It has to take the person through it. It has to be based in a lot more of, I think, the psychological findings that we have. There's a lot of data and information around the psychology of style, but so few of it, or almost none of it, have gotten into the actual ways that stylists deliver their process.

That's really what I look at as the transformational personal styling world's job. That's what I think about when I create programs and when I work with clients is like, “If this is what the stylist wants, if they want to create this in-depth styling experience where the person is really like looking internally and they're not therapists, which most of the people I work with don't have a therapy background, then how do you do that in a way that's ethical and appropriate?”

Because it's really not your job as a stylist to behave as a therapist. Though I hear many stylists bragging like, "Oh, I act like a therapist to my clients." I get it if you mean that the same way that a hairdresser says it because we will get in the chair and they talk, I understand the joking part of it.

But if you're really trying to solve this person's body image issues, relationship with their money, and those things, it's not your place to "solve it." What you want is a process that takes the person through it for them to see what's theirs to own, not what's yours to fix.

Without a really clear process of style discovery and just a really clear onboarding, offboarding, excellent communication with the client, and this is true for any type of stylist, you are putting it up to chance that any of your particular habits that go towards therapizing clients or being codependent and all the things we all deal with as human beings, without those types of processes in place and without those types of clear cut ways of taking a client through the style discovery process, particularly if it goes in-depth, without that, you don't have guardrails on yourself and your own behavior to make sure it doesn't turn into a therapy session to make it clear to the client in the kindest way possible from the minute this interaction starts that you're not their therapist, you're their coach, you're their guide, you're their stylist, but you are not their therapist.

I want you to think of yourself as a guide through this process, not as somebody that's there to, again, be their therapist, whether you mean that jokingly or not, because it's just not your place. It's also just not going to give your client the biggest level of transformation.

Transformation comes from an internal looking at ourselves, and in order to get an authentic and true reflection of that, you can't give it to a client. You can't. That's why it's not accurate for people that say, a stylist like, "Oh, I get to start really fast, but we also weren't really deep." Those two things don't work together because that's not the same client.

Who is the transformational styling client and what do transformational styling services look like so that we can wrap our mind around this instead of just having it be like sound bites that we throw out in our marketing without it being based in anything real?

The transformational styling service looks like services that are developed for a specific niche of people and include opportunities for the client to reflect again and partner with the stylist.

In order for something to be the most transformational experience and in order to get the buy-in, and this is the most important part, the buy-in that this type of relationship requires transformational styling, you need to have a niche.

Now the niche can look a lot of different ways. I think this is another topic I should probably save for another episode too. So many people misunderstand what I mean when I talk about niches and styling.

They think I mean like the person's 36, they have a dog, they have two kids. Irrelevant. I mean, maybe that could give you a little bit of help, but it's certainly not because you can have two people with the exact same demographics and that same information, but their psychographics are so radically different. What they expect out of the styling process is so radically different that you basically have the most useless niche information ever if you don't include the psychographics.

I would rather you have an entire service built on the psychographics because it would tell me more about the right way to deliver that styling service for that person than if you just know their age, how much money they make, or if they're busy professionals because that does not dictate the way that they look at the styling experience or their expectations from it. Their psychographics do.

When I say a niche, it could be for working moms, but it would have to be for working moms that are really looking to do the internal discovery work in this example for transformational styling.

Knowing what the lifestyle factors are of that client can help you understand the service delivery model. Would it be better for it to be online? Would it be better for it to be a group? Would it be better just based on their needs? But what it's not going to do in any way is dictate your specific style of discovery process and the depth of which you're going with the client.

It just might be that the way that that is delivered will look different. But this is why having a niche is important because when you have a niche and it's speaking to the psychographics and potentially some of the demographics of the client you want to work with, you start to get buy-in so much faster in your marketing.

You start to be able to train that person to be like, “Hey, listen, I get your life because you're niched enough to actually be talking to a specific type of person. My services are for you. Let me show you how and why based on how you talk about your services.”

When that happens, by the time that person gets to a sales call with you, they have a different level of buy-in because they feel like you are for them. If you're not talking like that, if you're not willing to niche, you can still do really well, but you will take longer to get full buy-in from a client and you might get price-shocked because quite honestly, lots of people are talking about styling this way because most people are not brave enough to go all in.

That's why I'm so proud of the clients I work with. It is a non-negotiable that they have to start refining who they're talking to if they want to be successful because my job is to make you successful.

I have worked with stylists that have huge, huge followings and that doesn't necessarily sell them. Even in those cases, we have to really work on making sure that we're signaling that you get the person that's ideal within those audiences. Otherwise, nobody signs up and they're watching, they're consuming, they're saving your content, they're telling you thanks for the free tips, but they're not converting.

That's true of any type of styling you do, but it's really true in transformational styling. Transformational styling services typically have a main package, like a signature service that gets the client the full result, all the bells and whistles. They tend to not be one-off services, but the service menu may look like different steps of the process broken up.

Maybe you have your biggest package at the top—again, there are multiple ways to structure this. I'm just going to give you an example. It doesn't mean it's the only example—you may have a signature package but you know your client so well that you know that at different steps of their journey to becoming the person that wants the biggest package, they may need things along the way to get them there. So you break apart your biggest service so that they have almost like a step ladder into your biggest one.

This is just one way of handling the transformational client, but at the very end of the day, and the most important thing I'm saying here is that if you have a one-off styling service, in order to give them a bite of the bigger, larger transformation, it's not siloed, it's not its own random closet edit that's over here, each step they could continue to take in your service menu will bring them closer to the highest possible delivery of the service, so the full transformation.

The reason why that matters is because it allows you to keep a client longer. There are other ways to do this as well. But this is an example of why it's not a one-off service because it could be taken as a one-off service and the client will get a result that's appropriate to the level of package that they're in. But it's not thought of as like you just walk into the mall and shop for someone you just met.

It's not like they're not allowed to enter into the styling process at any point. The stylist is deciding, “If you want to work with me on a lower-priced package with less of my time involved, this is where it's appropriate for you to enter. This is the service that I created because I am here for a transformation,” which means you can give somebody a small transformation, a medium transformation, and a high-level transformation based on your services, your packages, your expertise, and who you're talking to.

But it doesn't mean they get to choose their own adventure, and that is the biggest difference between transactional services in styling and transformational services in styling.

In transactional, the client can choose your own adventure, it's very client-led, they come to the stylist, they say potentially, “Here are the things that I need,” or it's very prescriptive, the stylist gives them their colors and their body shape, but there's nothing deeper going on there. Then they can come in with just styling, like just color analysis, they can come in with just body shape analysis, they get to decide, they get to choose their own adventure.

You don't get to choose your own adventure in the transformational styling experience. You get to choose the level of transformation you are ready for. The client gets to choose, I'm going to say it again, the client gets to choose the level of transformation they are ready for. Those are two very different ways of talking about styling.

You can choose any of my services, my styling services from my menu and put them together however you want, transactional. You can choose the level of transformation you want from me and from my particular expertise, transformational.

The most important thing here about the relationship between the client, the stylist, and the service menu is that if you notice the way that I'm speaking about it, it requires trust and understanding on both sides of the fence, from the stylist and from the client.

That is only built through the stylist's marketing from that framework. The idea of “You have so many clothes and nothing to wear, let me make you 50 outfits” without talking about the inner transformation, that marketing ain't going to sell a transformational personal styling service.

Who are the people that are looking for this type of service and how can you market to them? Well, this client is not leading with them, and their personality being busy. Might they be busy? 1000%. We're all busy. But it is not the defining aspect of their experience that they're bringing to the personal styling world.

I've worked with people that were presidential advisors that acted like they were the busiest human beings in the world and I've worked with people in that world who were very like, “This is just as important as prepping President Obama for his next debate.” Literally, that's their energy. Like, “This is important and I will make time for it,” versus “I'm so busy. I'm just going to have to squeeze this in.” That is not the energy of a personal styling client who wants a transformation.

I am again not saying they may not have to move some things around or that they're not busy. Again, my toddler is busy. Everyone's freaking busy, especially in their own mind, but that's not where that client likes to live in terms of their identity.

Another aspect of this type of client, and it's not a definitive thing like they have to have this, but it will make your life a lot easier. It's just like a side note. If you are calling in someone that wants a deep transformation, they want their inner world, their outer world to match based on what's hanging in their closet and you have a pretty in-depth process that takes people to the steps, you want to make sure you're calling in people that are already relatively self-aware.

Again, you're not their therapist, so they have to be people that already have a pretty well-developed sense of themselves so that there's something to actually look into. This cannot be their first experience looking at themselves.

Clothes are powerful, and they can do a lot for you, but unless you have a six-month or a one-year program, which you may have, you can totally have that program, maybe you could do that in a group program, but if you're doing a one-to-one experience and you need to take more than one client a month, which you should need to, we'll talk about that in a different episode, you should not have one client a month, I don't care how big your packages are, it can set you up for a serious marketing problem down the road, you need to have a few clients a month to keep your business healthy, regardless of what you're charging so that no one client becomes the most important.

That's a critical piece of this. In order for that to happen, you really need to make sure that the client is not a newbie at this idea of looking at themselves because you just cannot do the level of work you need to do in a feasible amount of time.

Speaking to someone that is relatively self-aware is going to be an important part of your marketing plan. This particular client is excited about the experience because they see the styling experience as a larger investment, not just into their clothes, but into getting to know themselves on a deeper level into their future self.

This is an ongoing process that they see unfolding in terms of their own development and identity. They're excited about the clothes, but they're excited about the clothes as a vehicle through which they're getting to know themselves. That is not a client who cares a lot about trends.

If you're trying to get this type of client and you're talking about like mob lifestyle or stealth wealth, you're not going to get them because that's not where their brain is. This client isn't necessarily looking for strict rules or guidelines, but they're open to them.

They could function in the personal styling experience without a list of colors and body shape silhouettes that work for them, they could, they could still do the work and get a result, but they may get an even better result with those things, for example.

Again, to differentiate that experience from a transactional experience, if you do color analysis and you do body shape analysis, it then has to go another level and you have to be like, “Okay, these are the things that ‘objectively’ work on you. What works based on what you want to project in the world? Then we're taking it a step further.”

This client is open to you having processes, guidelines, rules, or whatever, but they don't need them. They are really interested in the overall like, “How is this getting me closer every step of the process?” whatever you say as the expert, “How is this getting me closer to understanding myself?” and whether that includes those things or not isn't really relevant to them. If that's what you're trained in and you believe in, then you should absolutely have it in your service. It's just about going a step deeper.

This client is specifically not coming to the stylist just for shopping. That's really important because you'll see a lot of people going to personal stylists because they just want to get the shopping over with.

They may actually hate shopping, the transformational client, but that is not what they're focused on. Everything is not about the shopping. They are learners and this is the next piece that's super important.

This client, I would say 9 out of 10 times, wants to understand their style. They want to understand why the stylist is doing what they're doing. That can take a little extra time, which is why I'm saying time and quickness, I mean, they want you to be efficient for sure, don't waste these people's time, but that is not the selling point to them.

It's depth of understanding, it's depth of inner work, it's depth of self-reflection that is the real seller to this client. You want to make sure that if you want a transformational styling experience and that's what you want to provide, you have moments of educational components and insights built into your process.

So, what kind of marketing calls in this client? I touched on a few things as I was trying to give examples, but again, your content is going to be really rooted in mindset shifts, not in how-to content.

That's kind of behind us now anyways, just in terms of being an outdated way of getting new clients, but it's definitely a heavier load in terms of your marketing and messaging when you're in the transformational world. You're doing a lot more conversations about mindset shifts in order to get that client to decide that you're the good fit for them.

It's really about helping a potential styling client look at their style in a different way. You're going to play with different ways of doing that using examples of your past clients. That is going to help either initiate a client into your world more strongly or a potential client or repel them and you really want to be able to do that.

This is also about, in your marketing, making sure that you're dealing with a lot of the deeper sales objections versus the surface-level ones. How long is it going to take is, I guess, important, but it's more important in a transactional styling marketing world because, again, you're predicating the value of that experience on speed.

In this sense, it's about when is actually a good time to do this? What has to be going on in that client's life to make them a good fit? Which is why you got to start being more comfortable at this level of styling, which is why I say this is like a process. You don't just walk into the personal styling world in the transformational realm.

You just don't have the business experience to be there, let alone the styling experience. No shade to anyone. It takes some people longer than others, how long that takes depending on your business acumen, but most importantly, you have to be able to answer the deeper sales objections in your public content with a lot of skill, with a lot of comfort having the conversations that aren't super comfortable.

For example, you cannot handle a weight objection like, “Well, I'll just wait until I lose weight to hire you,” with a, “You shouldn't care what everybody else thinks.” That is a very hand-wavy superficial way of dealing with this particular client's deeper internal thing.

In fact, the better way to handle it is, of course, you don't want to waste your money right now if you're not the way you want to be so let me help you understand what kind of client is a good fit for this and which one isn’t.

One of the ways you talk about this is if you're somebody who said you're going to lose weight forever, like three years and you haven’t, don't wait anymore. Let's not kid each other. That's literally what you have to say in your marketing, not like “You deserve to feel good.” Okay, and? They're also thinking to themselves, “I'm going to put all this money into my wardrobe and then I'm not going to get anything out of it.”

You want to explain to them that when you go through a transformational styling process, you are doing something about getting closer and deeper and more into the relationship between your style and yourself, and that's not size-related.

You need to go into that realm of thinking to change their mindset more than what could feel good hand waving. This is why I'm saying transformational styling I view as like the top of the pinnacle, not because I think you can't get someone an incredible result, but because you as a stylist have to have a level of business acumen and ways of speaking to the client experience so that when the client gets into that container, your marketing and your client experience are aligned because more people than ever have worked with people online.

They're more familiar than ever than personal stylists. More and more stylists are saying they've worked with people who have worked with stylists before. People are savvier. You cannot have an experience that promises one thing and delivers another and get away with it anymore.

That's true of the entire world. That's true of online space in general and all types of businesses. Being able to deliver a transformational result and be present with the client in a deeper way, not letting that deviate you from your process, and being able to speak to the deeper messaging and marketing stuff that often gets in the way of somebody hiring you, being able to do that publicly, that's a skill.

Everybody can get there if they want to, but it's important to remember that. That's why this sits where it sits in the hierarchy that I'm talking about. Not because the people in transactional can't get people incredible results, but because you just don't need to do the level of public selling and public explanations about your process that you do in the transformational model. That's just different.

This type of styling client is really going to expect you to be like an expert in their world is the last piece I'm going to talk about. Your marketing needs to show that you understand their world, you understand where they hang out, you understand the people that are the power players, you understand if your niche is very related to this person's career or their type of career like you work with women who are creative entrepreneurs.

Who are the big players in their world? Who are the people that they're following? What are the books that they're reading? That's what I'm saying when I say you have to really become an expert in your client in the transformational world because you lose a lot of your credibility about saying that your services are “for them” if you don't have signifiers in your marketing that you understand their world.

That's another part of this that's a bit different than the transactional styling world. I want you to understand that when there is a mismatch between these things, you're going to feel like the client is rushing. The client isn't really getting anything out of it. They're not getting back to you in a timely manner.

Now that doesn't mean within 24 hours, people can still be busy in the transformational styling experience. But you're going to see that it's as important to them as it is to you. If you're not, then potentially it's that this person wanted a transaction, not a transformation. Or it could just mean that your process needs to be cleaned up and you're not communicating well.

It could be neither. But just as a side note, that's something to look at. You're not going to be talking about trends. If you are, you are probably going to call in a client that maybe isn't as interested in this way of working because that's a very different way of going about it.

If your prices are too low for the depth that you are promising, if people view it like, "Wait a sec, you're going to give me a whole transformation for less than $1,000?" that's another way that you could actually be getting people not hiring you because your prices and your marketing claims aren't making sense to them.

That's another thing I have to explain. Your prices aren't just about how much you take home. They're about the person's buy-in and their experience that's hiring you. It all works together, which is why you can't just come to a business coach or consultant and ask them what you should be charging without a bigger conversation about the kind of business you want to build and the kind of client that you want to attract.

A client, again, that has an over-emphasis on speed, probably is not a good fit for this kind of container. That might be someone that is not a good fit should they sign with you.

Another thing to understand is that the styling service format so the way you deliver the styling service, if it doesn't have depth, if it doesn’t have at least one entire session related to style discovery and really looking through and analyzing why clients like what they like, if that truly maps onto the overall projection that they want to create in the world, if you don't have that in your process and you're seeing that people at the end of it are lukewarm about their experience, it's probably because they expected that based on what you spoke about in your marketing.

Again, if you're going to promise a deep and lasting transformation, the service structure has to match it, which is why I'm not a fan of programs that tell stylists, "Here are the three services you have to have." This is like, A, everybody looks the same, and B, it's a very outdated way of doing business because the niching aspect is so important for the transformational level of styling because you have to understand their world and their psychographics.

Then your services should be a reflection of that. You just cannot say that that's the case of any integrity if you're just taking the same services and building businesses with that. There's no integrity in that.

I hope this is helpful. I'm going to be talking about this for sure more. But this is another delineation and distinction in the styling world I think stylists should know so that they can get the kind of clients they want and deliver the level of service and transformation that they truly, truly promised. Until next time, we will talk soon.

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.