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.

There is this very clear line in the sand. That line in the sand for the personal styling industry is 2020. It's what changes everything in terms of business models and growth and what actually works today right now.

There are so many factors that go into why 2020 in the pandemic completely changed the personal styling industry and growth in it. It's something I do not hear a lot of people talking about. It is so critical for every personal stylist to know whether they started before 2020 and they had been in the game for a long time or they launched in 2020 or after.

Because where you look both for advice about growth in your business and in terms of the comparison, which I don't really recommend, but you're going to do it anyway because you're a human being, where you compare yourself is critical for you to understand what the backstory is because I see a lot of stylists comparing themselves to other stylists that I actually know and saying, “Well, they did blah, blah, blah. They are doing X, Y, Z,” and their account has 10,000 followers or whatever.

But what they failed to know about those people is that they got their start on social media before the pandemic when it was a very different animal to get your business a lot more attention online.

If you're not aware a lot of things happened in the online space during and right after the pandemic that completely changed visibility for entrepreneurs, the way that Apple and the Facebook issues of running ads and the data problems and the fact that all of a sudden you couldn't just access so much information about people online in order to target ads at them, that completely changed the game.

People were able to grow their accounts much cheaper. Ads were not as much money as they are now. Reach was very different on platforms like Instagram, for example. TikTok wasn't even a thing. A lot of people weren't using Pinterest the way lots of people are now, just to grow other social media accounts.

A lot of the tactics that got people to large accounts don't get you to large accounts now. In fact, many of the people that I work with who have large accounts are struggling to sell on those accounts because consumer behavior is so different. They used to be able to throw up a few slides and get sales.

But consumers are different. The way that people understand the personal styling industry is different. Without that knowledge, you don't really have a good litmus test for where you are getting your information and your business plans.

That's why this is so important. I want you to be armed with the information you need to evaluate what tactics, what business models, and what strategies are actually going to work today versus what got other people to certain places before.

I know that it is frustrating for people that are much more established because the way that we were able to market has changed so much that a lot of stylists have told me who have been around for 10 years or I had stylists who have been in the game for 20 years, the things they could do to generate income and to get attention for their offers don't work anymore. They're very confused. I see stylists either continuing to do the thing that doesn't work or just not showing up at all online.

That is problematic because these stylists have so much, especially the really seasoned ones, to add to the conversation, to give to their clients to change their lives. But they are so overwhelmed with the changes and so unclear of where to even look to answer the questions about how the industry has changed, that it's like, “Why even bother?” is what a stylist said to me the other day. “Why even bother? I don't even know where to look.”

I spend a lot of time in the Income Accelerator talking about why you need to focus on certain things in a certain order in order to grow your business. A lot of it has to do with understanding your audience in a way that puts you in control and not the algorithm in control.

If you are someone who is really, really drawn to numbers—which don't get me wrong, visibility and numbers matter—but you can have a million-dollar day with 300 people on your Instagram account or 300 people in the room. You can make $100,000 with 400 followers.

I know because I did it on the styling consultancy account, and you can have 50,000 followers, 80,000 followers and not be able to sell a single styling package that's less than $1,000 because I see stylist in that position. So really what's important is to understand that while the landscape has changed—and I'm going to get into the specifics of that—you actually have more control now because it is a much more relationship-based consumer market.

Meaning that the people that are wanting personal styling services want a deeper relationship with you and with all businesses, quite frankly so you can't do a lot of the marketing tactics that worked before or that I even used to build my business the first time, but you don't really need as many tactics and strategies to remember the order in which you post things in, you don't have to keep all that junk in your head as much, but you do have to be willing to create the relationship, which for most stylists comes actually a lot more naturally than some of these other things that we were sold into.

I think that this is good news if you just understand that that is what's happening. I want to give you a little bit of insight into my background actually that I've never shared here, which is why I have such a deep love, appreciation, and understanding of this field that goes beyond me just being a personal stylist.

A long time ago, a million years ago in a land far, far away, I took a program called The Paid Stylist. It was the very first ever business course for personal stylists. I don't know if you guys know Marie Forleo and some old-school online business folks were really getting their start.

She did this thing called B-School. A lot of really big entrepreneurs right now came out of B-School. Marie Forleo taught people how to have online businesses and really taught educational content, content marketing, and that kind of stuff. Amy Porterfield is another person who comes out of that world.

The woman who created The Paid Stylist—I do not believe as of right now, it is a company that is still around—created an online business program for personal stylists, and taught us how to create a business.

She didn't really get into too much of the mechanics of styling, like color theory, and stuff like that, but she taught us how to do every aspect of a styling session, a shop session, and how to even set up our dressing rooms.

This woman was also a sales genius. I still use so many of the things she taught me about sales every single day. I just can't even really explain the debt that I have to her and what she gave me and what she gave, really the first generation of personal stylists that came out the gate with formalized businesses.

Tons of people were doing this on the side, but she was like, “You got to get an LLC and you got to get these bank accounts.” There was nobody talking about this in personal styling.

I had a full-time job. I was in PR and I was online every day trying to figure out how I was going to get out of this job, what I was going to do, how I was going to get out of there. It never occurred to me that personal styling was a job.

Somehow I found another stylist who she had teamed up with in her marketing. I went and did the program and then went and shadowed the stylist in New York for a weekend. It was a really cool experience. She was a pretty big stylist. I remember I went with her to style an MTV executive at Bergdorf in New York City. I was like, “Oh my gosh. This is crazy. Oh, this is a job. What?”

I did this online course and built my business and basically ended it in like eight weeks with a full business plan, packages, everything, and pretty much everybody that came out of that particular program had the same packages. But remember back then, Zoom was not an affordable option.

I did have clients in other cities, but they found me through SEO and I would fly there. I was having phone conversations for sales calls. Can you imagine? I can. I don't ever want to get on a phone again.

I built the business, did that, and then I did really well with the business plan. We all had the same services, but it didn't matter because nobody was really in the same city. We were all over the US. There weren't that many stylists.

Some of the services that were on those menus, I still see on people's personal styling services, websites. It's so fascinating to see some of the language that was used because the programs ended up also making websites for stylists. How much of that lives on and how much of a huge impact that particular business made on the industry, it’s just huge.

I went on to work for the company once I launched my business and I got it doing really well. I was hired to create the second level of the program to help stylists get to six figures.

During that time, I created—I mean, it's not the most genius thing in the world—but I created something called the Year of Style, which is basically a retainer program. How I know and can say so confidently that the changes in the industry are so sweeping from pre-pandemic and post-pandemic is that when I created that model for recurring revenue, memberships and stuff like that were very much not as common as they are now.

What I did was I taught stylists how to look at the niche they were in and target the niche so that they could find the right type of client for a recurring styling package all through the year.

That's just not everybody, but at that time, it was a lot more people because pre-pandemic, especially 15 years ago, people were going into the office all the time. If you targeted the working professional, you were probably going to do really, really well.

Because if you're in a major city, or even just a small city, there isn't that much competition and now you know that you could work with somebody pretty regularly in order to have a consistent income. You could sell them in packages over and over again.

You knew how long every service was going to take you because you were only able to shop for what was in the confines of the mall. You went to the store, and two and a half hours, you were done, for a season.

It was a very manageable thing to have a lot of clients on a retainer. Because those people were going into offices a lot, you did pretty well. By a retainer, I don't mean every month, I mean four times a year.

That was an appropriate amount of clothes. You could do the weekend, you could do going to work. People had a little bit more of a divide in their context because they weren't working from home. You had lawyers still wearing suits. Right now, that's not even the case in a lot of law firms.

There was a level of business dress versus business casual that was very much in play which meant that people's wardrobes were bigger. Now when I see people have these exact same services called your style on their service menu and they are in a market or they have a niche or a demographic that is not well served, it's not a surprise to me when I get on a phone call with them and they tell me their business model isn't working because I created that concept with this particular program.

It's just that name that is what I'm referring to. I'm not saying nobody ever did a retainer model. But again, it wasn't month to month. It was just basically four seasons. The world is different. The person who was the foundational client for the personal styling industry was that professional who was going into the office all the time and had a lot of different contexts of their life that they stressed separately because of formality level.

The world is not like that anymore. Right away, we had a huge change in how personal stylists who had really consistent income, like me, were able to get their business disability get taken away after the pandemic.

It happened to me as well. A lot of the clients that I had that were on a retainer—and I mean, more of a retainer retainer at that point—weren't going anywhere anymore.

We went down to much smaller packages and I lost $30,000 or $40,000 in a week during the pandemic. Eventually, a lot of those clients came back. But when they came back to me, I now was in a virtual model and I could see that their need was just less, and their expectations were different.

During the pandemic, they became far more savvy consumers of the styling space than they were pre-pandemic. These are my own clients because now they have time, they were on social media, TikTok was a thing, they were spending more time on Instagram, and these are even people in their 30s and 40s.

I even saw that my ride-or-die clients needed less clothes, so the business model that I had before didn't work. It wasn't as sustaining. I could have repeat clients, but it wasn't as much recurring revenue.

The context of their life was more collapsed, so they didn't need as many clothes. They could wear the same clothes across different parts of their life. And they were now very different in how they approached the styling experience. Not necessarily bad, just more educated, because everyone was at home baking bread and looking at social media.

This is true of everybody who is a consumer of personal styling services now. This is why I can say with such clarity that I know these differences because how I got my business back to six figures post-pandemic looked nothing like how I did it pre-pandemic. The only things that were the same were the internal systems and some of the client nurturing and internal selling I did to the stylish clients that I teach my stylist in my programs.

The way I marketed, I had to re-figure out again because people were telling stylists, “Oh, I'll help you get a six-figure business and I'll teach you the online model during COVID.” There was an explosion of people who started teaching personal stylists, which is why there was an increase in stylists in the market.

The problem is that they had never lived through a pandemic either. So a lot of those tactics that they were teaching them were still based on the pre-pandemic marketing landscape.

They were still based on being able to run ads at a price that was totally reasonable to get more followers, to get more eyeballs. Maybe they don't do it anymore, that's because it's not budget-friendly, but that does not account for the fact that that's how they got the majority of their business pre-pandemic.

I, like everybody, had to re-figure it out. When I see people that came out of a lot of those programs, they're working with very outdated models. An example of that that I have to correct pretty regularly is that they're saying a lot of people tell stylists to grow their business by going to retailers and trying to partner with them.

But the reality is people don't want to go to malls. Malls are trying to get people in them and stores are calling stylists to help them try to move their inventory, even businesses like Burberry and Gucci. I still have Carolina Herrera in New York.

They're calling me all the time. I'm not even a stylist anymore trying to get clients in. Now, that's a smart model in general, but they're calling stylists everywhere. For example, I have a client that lives in the Midwest, but has a contract with a retailer that is in Hawaii to sell clothes through them even though there's probably one in her town, this particular store. So stores are calling as many stylists as they can to try to move inventory even virtually like, “Hey, let me send you the links. You don't have to even come to the store anymore.”

They are desperate. So why would stylist be being told to go into retailers and create that relationship to get more sales? It doesn't make any sense. In fact, the power is the opposite way. I think that one of the things that is really missed is that a lot of the tactics to get clients don't work anymore.

You used to be able to be an in-person stylist and not really have to have more than just a basic website. That ain't going to work anymore because even if you're an in-person stylist, people that are potentially hiring you are hiring you and looking at you in their town and some stylist that's virtual.

Now your comparison is bigger between you and them. Now you can't just price for your little town, you have to price to be virtual and competitive in the virtual space, whether you are or not. Most stylists that went hybrid in-person and virtual don't have the virtual marketing skills to build the way that they need to because it's just not the same. The same things are not going to get you there as they do getting clients in person.

It is harder to get, for example, people to refer you when you have a client base that doesn't go into the office. That's another reason why it was easier pre-pandemic because people were really able to be like, “Oh, you like my outfit? I have a stylist, blah, blah, at the office.” What are they going to say? Like, “I like your shirt on Zoom.” I mean, the likelihood that those types of bump-into-you conversations happen is just less in environments where people have the income to do that.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm not saying people don't go out and say that. I'm saying that the established stylist's bread and butter, that working professional that went into the office all the time, has now been cut drastically, and with it their opportunity for more word of mouth.

That's a little bit of a picture of the styling industry and why it's changed. I want to get into some of the broader themes that have happened in the online space so you can see what this looks like.

Like I said, during the pandemic, I had clients that came back to me and I noticed they were much savvier than they were before. That is because the online space and our relationship to personal style have changed since the pandemic.

Because now when you're in isolation and you go from dressing for the particular context of our lives, which was very common, it's like, where you work tends to dictate how you dress, your formality level, well, now a lot of those contexts have been taken away. So people for the first time are feeling, during the pandemic, lost. Their relationship with their style completely changes when it's just them thinking about them and what they like.

With the reality that somebody may not see you in a day when you work from home, all of a sudden, the way you pick out an outfit, the way you think about your style is completely based on you and how you feel and how you want to feel.

Most people don't have the skills to do that. So personal style becomes more personal. There are a lot of other cultural things that happened during the pandemic that really highlight the fact that we now live in a society where individualism and expression of self are paramount, particularly in American and Western society.

Now we knew that before, but there are just specific little things that pop up that change that. You have more people that go into entrepreneurship. You have more people that want to build their own business. All of these things spike.

It's this idea like, “I can go it alone. I can have my own world and create it”. With it, obviously, style is an important part. That means that the online space becomes a place where you have TikTok, you have all these other people that are “regular people” and stylists and other folks being able to reach huge groups of people that are not in their world.

They're not even running ads to get to them. We had to do it on Facebook and influence the conversation they're having about style. I think a lot of the conversations that we're having about personal style were much more expert-based pre-pandemic.

Now post-pandemic you see so many more just regular folks hopping on, for example, TikTok. That's a really big platform for this type of thing and saying, “Oh my gosh, I'm 40 and I don't know what to wear. What are 40-year-olds wearing out of the house? What are 60-year-olds wearing out of the house?” Now you have this peer-to-peer conversation around style that was not happening in the same way because their video content just encourages that more.

Stylists are important, but they now have the competition, not necessarily what a lot of stylists think of, “Oh, it's influencers that are a competition.” Yes and no, because the person that's just clicking all those links eventually is hopefully going to be like, “You know what, this is not creating a cohesive style.”

Actually, that could lead more people to personal stylists because there's a plan and cohesion and a sense of one-to-one attention that you obviously aren't getting when you're shopping from influencers.

But the real issue, the real thing that's the competition is for attention. Yes, of course, some of it is influencers, but it's also regular folks giving other regular folks that they have never met before, not their friends, not their college friends when they go for a reunion, style advice.

This is what so many stylists are missing. This is why if you do not have a personal relationship with your audience, you will lose them because they have a million other places that feel super, super safe, and where they feel super, super, super seen.

This is why this idea of niching, which has always been a smart idea for entrepreneurs, it's not special, unique, or different to personal styling, it becomes paramount after the pandemic.

Because this idea of individuality and how the person is served is directly related to the fact that now people, even if it's more of a transactional model, are approaching style, and more people are approaching style from more of a transformational position.

You have the rise of people like Allison Bornstein, who I know a lot of stylists admire, as do I, becoming the norm in people's homes of, “Oh, there's this woman. She's a stylist. She has a three-word method.” People are using that.

Now, that three-word method and other methods like it were not super uncommon in styling books before the pandemic. People had heard of this, I had read many books about that. But her ability to take a style language and give it to people and have normal people be like, “Oh, I can access this even if I think I've had a style” completely changes the game.

Now personal styling just become far more understood and more accepted in the broader world and nobody really thinks it's just for celebrities anymore. They may wonder if they can afford it, but that's a different conversation.

All of a sudden now you have a savvier consumer, 100%, and you most importantly have a lot more of a fight for people's attention. The second thing that happens in the marketing landscape is that people have higher expectations of brands and businesses that they buy from, particularly if it's personal.

A 2020 survey from Accenture found that 62% of consumers want the companies they buy from to take a stand on current and broadly relevant issues of sustainability, transparency, and fair employment practices.

Now, obviously, many of you don't employ anyone, so that's not really relevant. But it speaks to the fact that we saw this in many different places, that some businesses that were not being run in a way that people felt aligned with their values were called into question.

We're talking all kinds of businesses. You started to see brands trying to create communities. You saw really big brands like Glossier and other really big makeup businesses, all of a sudden encouraging communities in a different way, having memberships basically, most of them are free though for their consumers.

That was really genius because it was a way of getting market research because now all of a sudden, ads are more expensive to run on social media. All of these things completely changed the way big, big brands, including retailers, are starting to market.

Again, that becomes the norm and the expectation, that if your toothbrush brand is out here with a community trying to understand people, trying to create a culture and a language around their particular product, then obviously something as personal as styling is going to have to follow suit if it's going to survive.

All of a sudden, we have a 10% drop in 2020 of consumers' belief in advertising. We have a much more skeptical buyer across the board. I think lots of us can see that in ourselves.

What I see how it directly affects the personal styling industry is that, again, you could be a local stylist, but you are now being shopped against the virtual styling market and price comparisons are happening far more greatly than they ever were before. I'm getting SOS calls with my one-to-one clients who are saying things like, “I'm on these calls and everybody's interviewing me and five other stylists.”

This is crazy. I've had multiple stylists say that they had people who were talking to Allison Bornstein and then came to them because she only does a smaller package or whatever.

These names and people understand and have gone through even multiple styling programs sometimes after they try to figure it out themselves and then they go to a one-to-one stylist, that's not uncommon anymore.

Again, attention is being grabbed in multiple places and you have a more skeptical buyer, which means you have a longer conversion timeline. Let's talk about that. When you have a more skeptical buyer, even a more educated buyer, skeptical sounds negative and it's not necessarily negative because I actually see that more people are really committed to figuring out their style, which is why the fact that they've gone through multiple programs and different stylists or whatever is them being really committed to this.

Style matters more. You don't have to convince people as much that it matters, but you also can't put out generic types of content and expect that people haven't heard that before or that it's going to grab their hearts in their minds because they're just way smarter.

Lots of stylists that have been around for a while are struggling with their marketing because they can't just put up a few slides and sell their service anymore or their program. It just doesn't work. They're like, “What is going on? I used to post an inspirational quote and 50 people would talk about how great it was and now I can't even get a like.”

Well, it's because people are just way smarter. Normal people started to buy more things online and they got savvy to online marketing and now they're just not that impressed with us.

Fair enough. Because the bigger the consumer base gets, the more people that understand styling and understand that it's possible for them to have a stylist, which is far greater than it ever has been before, means that you can be basically as niche as you want and somebody will hire you. Probably lots of people.

Because people are expecting that their identity is showing up in your marketing so that it reaches them. That's why I am talking to stylists day in and day out in my Income Accelerator Program and in my alumni programs about the fact that you absolutely have to have a business model that appears and is a direct reflection of your consumer.

You cannot just have a whole bunch of services up on your website that don't explain how the end result gets that exact psychographic and demographic results that they're looking for. They're not the same.

The person who's going into an office and is a burnt-out mother of three, as I talked about in an earlier episode, who wants to connect with her style because she feels like she's got nothing for herself anymore, is not the same woman as another woman with the same demographics that is probably burnt out too, but she's really just focusing on getting to the next phase of her career, and her style has to speak to that more than anything else in her life for her to consider the personal styling relationship a success.

If you're not able to say that on your services page, if you're not able to say, “Hey, here's the deal, I'm going to get you this result if you're at this place in your styling journey”—which is another conversation—more people are at different phases of finding their style than ever before.

There are lots of people that hire stylists that are actually not bad with style and are pretty educated and no brands, like to shop but they don't have the time. This is an underserved market and under-marketed to market, for lack of a better way of saying it, the stylists don't tap into enough.

We tend to go for the common client of like, “Oh, you don't know what to wear. You're overwhelmed with your style. It's not defined.” Tons of people have very defined styles and don't have the time to shop. I would be one of them now. I finally get that person on a deeper level.

That is someone who will pay a lot of money because they have a lot of resources because their time is going to create more money. You're going to get people at different phases of the journey. Not everybody is going to feel like, “Oh, I don't know how to make outfits out of this.”

Some people are, some people aren't. Some people aren't going to have a defined style. Some people are. Your packages really have to explain how they serve the person on that journey. When they do, the conversion is just as fast and just as easy as it was, pre-2020 when the consumer was less educated.

Everything you need to create the packages that are super easy to sell and the marketing that you need to really attract people and to convert them exists, you just have to make sure you're using the right model to do that, one that's updated, one that actually is rooted in the reality, particularly in the personal styling industry.

I think this is true everywhere, but I really think that the pandemic, because people weren't getting dressed, because they were stuck in the house, because things really changed specifically with retailers, specifically with the way that people started to look at their clothes and how they became so lost in their dressing because the context of work and going somewhere was taken away from them.

When you look at all of this this way, now how you build that business, how you talk about the business, how you you relate to people on social media, the types of ways you're targeting people that are ideal clients is absolutely based in the social aspect of social media.

Now we have places like Instagram changing their metrics and their visibility to you'll get more reach if your posts are being sent to a lot of people. It's not likes anymore. It used to be, but it's not.

If you are just creating content that is good enough and is getting likes, you will lose your momentum because your stuff will be shown to less people and then you're not going to grow.

When you get this picture, all of a sudden you have the keys to your next level. I want to talk about what really does work in the particular landscape we have now. I think the first thing that you really want to remember is that you are building a brand that is selling an image because you're helping people with their image.

I see a lot of stylists who aren't really investing in their branding. They don't have professional headshots. Once you're moving to paid clients outside of your friends and family, you really need to do that unless you're really good at visuals and branding.

There are some stylists who used to work with people that were personal brands so they have a pretty good idea of how to be scrappy with their marketing, but you need a real headshot. Period. End of sentence. That's just that.

If you are saying things like, “You have to invest in yourself. You deserve to invest in yourself,” and your branding is not up to the standards of people who want to invest in themselves, who do no quality, who do no design, then you don't really stand a chance.

As the consumer gets more educated in the style space, they also become more educated just visually on what looks expensive and what doesn't. You have to consider that an important resource if you want to be taken seriously.

The next one is that you cannot position yourself as a commodity anymore. You cannot position yourself as someone who just as general styling tips, just as general tricks, just has a 20-thing checklist for your closet edit freebie, those things aren't going to work. Are people going to pay attention? Are you going to get likes? You're going to get options? Yes, but they will not convert the consumer at all.

You're basically just creating content to create content and then you start to feel why isn't anything going anywhere and then you may give up, which is what I see a lot. I want to stop you from that.

When you create a business that looks like a commodity, it means that I can Google what you're putting up and I can find 90 other examples of that on Pinterest. It means that you have the same opt-in as everybody else.

A closet editing opt-in, which I had back in the day, is not going to cut it anymore. It's just not. You have to show someone that you can get them one step closer to what they want and they have to be able to get a result from a freebie.

Free content is more expensive in the sense that it takes a stylist absolutely creating more original content and having to do the behind-the-scenes work to do that, which I think is fun if I'm being transparent here.

I teach my stylist in the Income Accelerator how to create content. Basically, we're all talking about some of the same things. Do you want to talk about color? Cool. There are ways you can talk about things that we've all said before that make it sound new and interesting and also position you as an expert.

There are ways that you can get in front of other people's audiences and never have to spend money on an ad. The other thing that changes the game for a lot of stylists is that SEO becomes harder and more expensive to get because now AI has shot to the top of the list on Google.

Your ability to create interesting content and to be able to say the things that maybe everyone's saying in a new way from a new perspective is the thing that gets you out of the algorithm. It gets you out of having to worry about those things.

Sure, could you spend all day creating Reels? You can. I'm not saying you shouldn't. I'm just saying even if you are creating a Reel, but the content is very general and it's the same quote from DVF over and over again, it's not going to convert. It doesn't matter what trending sound you put on it because people are bored.

When I say the stylists have to fall back in love with their business, I really think that's an important part of it. Fall back in love with your branding. Fall back in love with what you're seeing. Fall back in love with or change the perspective that you had on personal styling when you started.

The more creatively excited and enthusiastic you are, the better your content is, the better your clients are going to be, the better your marketing is going to be. Those are not hard things to do, but there are things that will make the difference more than figuring out some hashtag strategy.

Because I'm guessing there are people on your accounts right now that haven't been converted but they're watching and you're just a few posts away from them converting when you start to stop doing the tactics and start really building the relationship.

People really want to know what your values are as a stylist. They want to know what it means when you say, “People deserve to look good. You deserve to feel good.” People don't know what they deserve if they've never experienced it before.

Telling someone you deserve to look good is saying you deserve to go to Mars. It doesn't make any sense if they don't think they ever looked good. People more than ever need to understand how to trust themselves.

In order to be let into their world to show them how to trust themselves in the arena of personal styling, you have to give them something to trust in you, which means we've got to go beyond some of the content out there.

It's also why inconsistency is so deeply problematic in the online space right now because people are watching. People are watching to notice, like, “Where has she been? What is going on?”

I think that we forget that because we think that just because no one's saying anything, no one's watching. I don't think that that means people are judging you. I just mean that people are doing the unconscious mental calculation of, “Is this someone that's safe enough to put my image in their hands if they're not even showing up on Instagram Stories regularly?” or, “They say they're going to be in my inbox every week and then they're not.”

Those are the types of things that are really, really important for you to look at. It's something I have a lot of conversations with stylists is like, “What is actually sustainable? What is actually possible for you to keep up with?” Because I care more about you keeping your word than I do about you being everywhere all the time.

That's not going to work. Because as soon as you get busy again, you're not going to be able to maintain that. What is the marketing schedule that you can actually do? Then I show them in Income Accelerator how to post on a busy week, what to post on a not-so-busy week, and what to post when you're in the rhythm of your business, you're serving clients, you're doing those things, but you still can't keep your head down completely because you need to generate more income.

If you are interested in learning more about a business model that is going to help you in the current climate, we're opening the doors back up for Income Accelerator. I've had every client in the program raise their prices. Pretty much all of them have sold their new packages at their higher prices because of the things I'm teaching them without very much heavy lifting in their marketing.

It's just been so inspiring to see stylists really building businesses for what the world needs and wants now. I think it's a really exciting time to be a stylist. I want you to have the tools to capitalize on that excitement.

If you're interested, definitely hop on the waitlist in the show notes or DM me on Instagram and let me know what your thoughts are. If you're interested in joining or you have questions, we can definitely see if it's a good fit for you. It's a very small program. Two seats of the 10 have already been sold. Reach out if you're interested for the September cohort and I will talk to you next time.

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.