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.

All right, welcome back to another episode. Today, we are diving into a topic that I know many of you have thoughts, questions, feelings, and overwhelm about how to price your personal styling services.

So pricing is about so much more than slapping a number on your service. It really comes down to sure, math, this could be like a two-second podcast and I could just tell you to take the amount of money that you want to make and then divide it by the number of clients that you can best service in a year and there are your numbers.

But that's not really the whole picture. It's an important part of the picture, so if you haven't done that, you can start there. But pricing is really about understanding your true value as a personal stylist and then creating strategies in your marketing, in your messaging, and in your client experience that reflect that value.

I think that this idea of pricing what you're worth or pricing for value is really confusing and arbitrary because we don't know what we're supposed to be looking at would do the equation of value.

What your worth is weird because that makes it sound like it's your self-esteem or your value as a person and it's not. What we're really going to talk about is that you get to create an experience that starts before somebody hires you that reflects the actual value.

You are in control of this. Remember, you are not just selling your time. You're selling your expertise, your eye, your taste, and your ability to transform your client's lives. In the next 30 minutes, we're going to explore the psychology of pricing. We're going to talk about how we move behind an hourly rate, but also an hourly rate mentality. Because I see lots of stylists out here with packages that are in an hourly-rate mentality.

We're going to tackle some of the mindset issues that really hold stylists back from charging what they're truly capable of charging and what actually will get their client the greatest transformation because that actually does factor in with the price that the results your clients get often are the result of how much they pay and that's not something we always think about when we're doing the equation from our side as a stylist.

The last thing we're definitely going to address on this that you definitely want to stay locked in for is the misconceptions about imposter syndrome and how that relates to your feelings about your pricing.

I'm going to hold your hand when I tell you that one but you have to hear it because it's a huge misconception that I hear from stylists and we're going to address that. This conversation is really for the established stylist, the person who's outside of their friends and family group and working with people that are strangers and that because if you're still in the period of working with people you know and you're in an hourly kind of formula, that's fine.

I think that that's what you should be doing to get your sea legs as a stylist, get your process down, and get your closet edits to less than three hours because that's what they should be. Just really streamlining how you work as a stylist. Then we can talk about packages. This assumption in this conversation is that you're at least past that point. So let's get into the nitty-gritty of pricing strategies.

I often get asked, “Can you just give me a simple formula for pricing my services?” or “What does the average stylist charge for X, Y, and Z?” You know what, I could. I could. I see enough stylists from around the country. I see enough niches. But if you don't have a niche and you don't have a very clear sense of who you're talking to, I can't do that.

That's number one because the pricing formula is relevant to the perception of the service and the service is only perceived by people based on their identity. So if you don't have an identity that's clear for your client, there's not much anyone can do.

But I can tell you that if you are pricing by your feelings or you know the number that you should be charging in order to make your financial goals and you are feeling afraid or you're not doing it, it's probably because there is more than just math to the equation and more to just helping you understand what is valuable.

The fundamental truth in human behavior that we all need to understand when it comes to pricing is that you can put your feelings to the side and remember this: People who pay, pay attention.

Think about it for yourself. If you invest a significant amount in something, whether it's a course, a product, a service, or an outfit, you're likely to take better care of it, to take it more seriously, and to be looking for what you're going to get out of it more if it costs whatever that price is to you a significant amount of money.

I'm going to use this pause to say something in this moment, which is if you don't look at things that way, if you're looking at things not from what you're getting out of your investment, but from what you can save, you're going to get that in your business. You're going to reflect that in your clients.

You're not going to be able to set yourself up to create the services that people are excited to invest in, not once, but over and over again for a really long client life cycle, because the way you view the world, in the way you view saving money and investments and getting everything on sale and price shopping people is going to get in the way of your ability to see value.

The issue with discounts and, as we all know, a stylist with sales and people going nuts with sales and clothes is that they don't value those things. So when they look at them, they inherently don't see what's possible for it because they've already assigned a low value to it when it's on sale, which is why it's great advice when I hear you guys saying things like if you wouldn't pay double for it, don't buy it.

Because now you have to look at that item through the value lens. What am I going to get from it? How is it going to expand me? What is it going to look like every day when I get to show up in this piece of clothes?

Well, that's also true when you are investing in your business. You just have no integrity. None of us do if we tell people to invest in us and our service if we don't invest in ourselves and our business. It's totally out of integrity and it's no surprise when I see stylists struggling from that point of view.

The same is true for your clients. When they invest in your styling services, they're more likely to be committed to the process, to look for what's going right to truly value the transformation you're offering when the price tag feels like a little bit of a stretch.

Now we can't know exactly what everybody's stretch number is but we can know that if it feels safe to us, it's probably not the right number. If you don't feel like you want to throw up a little when you first say the number, it's probably not the right number.

What's so interesting is that just because something is a higher price, people automatically perceive it as more valuable. Now, it's not enough to just throw your price around the internet but if you think about it this way, if you look about like a luxury brand like Chanel, why do they charge thousands of dollars for a handbag?

It's not just the materials or the craftsmanship. It's the story. It's the brand. It's the experience. Most importantly, here's the part I really want you to hear, it's the identity that somebody steps into when they buy that bag.

They're buying a whole world, a lifestyle, a statement, in social currency when someone buys a Chanel bag. Now, you may not agree with that, but you know that's how the world at large views it.

I'm not saying you need to price your services like a Chanel bag, if they're $9,000, that's how much your services should cost. But what I am saying is that you need to think about the whole experience that you're offering your clients and it starts in your marketing.

What is the story of your brand? What is the transformation you're promising? When you think about your services in this way, it becomes much easier to justify the price because the transformation you're promising should be rooted in you knowing the person, the identity, the niche you want to work with so much that you care about them more than any other stylist that has that niche.

The person that cares the most wins. The person whose marketing that reflects that the most wins and the person who can do that and create a story around their experience like Chanel that allows the person before they buy from you to imagine they get to step into an identity when they hire you is the one that doesn't get a price shot. That's how this works.

Because you can't just create the price tag and expect that that's going to be it. You can't just change your Instagram bio to say, “Oh, I have this niche. Now my prices are up because I heard that working professionals will pay more.” It has to go together because if Chanel didn't have the story, they couldn't warrant the price.

When you transition from a packaged-based pricing situation in your business, you have to remember that, yes, you are taking an average hourly rate and putting it into a larger multi-part service price, which then obviously is more than $150 an hour. It's probably $2,500 for the package.

We're doing more than that when we create a package. This is where I see a lot of stylists really struggling, is that they know that they're earning more, but they're still technically selling their time. You really should be selling outcomes, transformations, and experiences.

This is where a lot of styles stumble, they price their packages on their easiest and their most straightforward client, which is a huge mistake. You really want to be thinking about first, if you are going to just try to get a ballpark amount of money, I would argue that after you kind of get your skills down as a stylist that's doing hourly, you then want to work not necessarily on like the package, like just shove it all together and put a big price on it, I mean you can do that but I wouldn't price it based on the client that is your easiest one and then do your services that way, like do your price for that bigger package that way.

You really want to take the client that took you the longest to complete it. Think about how long that person took you to do every aspect of the closet edit, the shop, the re-shop, the [inaudible], the styling outfits, the after-text service, whatever that looks like.

Then I want you to take how many hours it takes to do the hardest person and the easiest person. I want you to average that. That is the amount of hours I want you to look at. Not the person that you could look into their eyes and read their thoughts. That's your easiest client. That is going to be a big mistake.

It's also going to get your prices a little bit more based on the reality of what it's going to take you for masses of people. Because that's what we're really pricing on. The thing about pricing is that, yes, it is loosely, you could argue it's this series of hours put together into one big package when you're doing bigger packages. But really what it is, is it's about the all of the time, the experience, and the cultivation of knowledge and the simple tips and tricks that you think are no big deal but that blow a client's mind like, “Oh, if there are gaps in your jeans, you should probably go to the tailor.”

What you're actually charging for when you do a package is all of the wisdom you got in your hourly. We forget that and we kind of feel like, “Well, I can get this done for you in eight hours.” That's not a transformation. I'm not saying it won't take eight hours. I'm not saying you should waste people's time.

But the more you focus on that and the more you justify the price with “Well, you get nine different appointments with me and blah, blah, blah,” that's not what they're there for. I'm hiring you to be an expert when I'm hiring you as a package and you need to start thinking differently about that because I, for example, have an interior designer that I work with who actually was a client and now she works virtually for me in different parts of my home.

I don't pay her for how many hours it takes her to create the concept. Especially if she can do it faster, that's even better for me. I pay her for all the time she worked on other units like mine that have a lot of light, but that makes it really hard, for example, for me not to look into my computer screen and not see a glare.

I need to make sure the computer's on the right side of the office so that I get good light, but also I can actually see my screen. Also my husband has this really ugly, what do you call it, Peloton that's in my office that I have to figure out how to get around that she's going to help me figure out how to make the room look cool in my office while I still have a Peloton here.

I am paying her for all the years of experience, not for however many hours. If it takes her three minutes to figure that out, it's valuable to me because I know what time she put in to get to the place where she could fix that problem for me, and it would have taken me years.

I don't care what her hourly price is. I say to her, “What's the price?” If it takes her however long it takes her, I don't care. That's how you need to think. It's hard to think that way if you don't invest in other professionals.

That's how I got to be really, really comfortable with my services and my pricing and also understood my services, my systems, and all of that a lot better. is when you hire people, if you're just like in your own business being really cheap and not hiring people and not trying to grow your own experience as a client, you are going to struggle for a long time. It will also show up in your business in terms of the type of clients that we attract.

You have to remember the same is true of you. Someone is paying you for the amount of time that it takes you, they're paying you for all of the time that you had to put in as a stylist to get them the results that you get in however many sessions it takes.

That's why it's way more realistic for most stylists to do the average of their hardest and their easiest clients when they're pricing things in terms of the hours or even laying out the timeline expectations because it's a much more accurate view of what you're going to see in the market.

Speaking of the market, another really common pitfall is not accounting for different markets in your pricing. So in-person and online markets can be very different price points.

A service can cost $100 in a small town and three times that in a major city or in the online space so you really need to know, you need to be working with people that understand that. You need to make sure that the way that you're marketing the service, if you're doing it to both local and virtual, depending on where you are, is coherent, that the messaging you're using to people on your Instagram account, for example, can hit the person in your town that might be a good candidate but also can hit someone in LA if you're in Kansas or something. Do you know what I'm saying?

This is really important that we are not just basing off of what we're experiencing in our small world and really thinking about the bigger confines of our niche and what people in other markets might be looking for.

There are a lot of ways I show stylists how to do this in my Income Accelerator program because market research is not that hard. You don't even need to have had the client. There are spaces and places you could go if people are dying to tell you what they think of these things and then you can kind of make your messaging match.

But your pricing, and we’re talking about with the Chanel bag, it has to be a reflection of the messaging that you have. If you're messaging to your small town in your Instagram marketing, then there's going to be a rapid disconnect in the consumer's mind between the price of your styling service and your messaging.

That's really important that people don't tell stylists when they say, “Oh, you have all these opportunities to go online and make a million dollars.” I mean, yes, and they're not the same way of marketing. They're not the same tools.

If you don't have that, then they're giving people a false expectation of what it looks to just go online because it is a bit harder and the process can take longer. You really have to be a lot more sure of what you're doing.

Now for a chat about valuing your expertise. I get it. I get that this is really weird and hard and strange to even talk about because you only know you. Honestly, if I'm being honest, one of the ways that this becomes valuable is that it just makes you have a higher self-esteem when you learn to do this.

I don't know why people don’t talk about this in the business world enough, but so often when we are uncomfortable with other people's rates and other people valuing themselves professionally, it's because we're just coming from a genuine self-esteem problem.

It's true. Maybe we're codependent and we need other people to validate us. So that comes across in our relationship with our client. There's so much self-work that goes into being a premium-charging brand.

That's not the same as mindset work. Mindset work is part of it, but you got to do the thing, then you have to think a thought about what you just did and it has to match up to a reality in order for the mindset stuff to really work. You can't just be thinking thoughts on your own.

When you start out and you're working with friends and family, you can often get a better sense of how good you are and that is true because they're excited and you also have a shorthand with them so you can guess things.

But a lot of stylists don't go too far beyond their friends and family when they “open a business,” start a website, and make investments. I would really caution people listening that that's not a good idea.

You want to get a couple of layers outside of your friends and family before you “make” this thing official, before you're getting an EIN and setting up tax IDs, I want you to go a couple of people out because you're not going to feel the confidence you need and the sturdiness of self-assuredness you need to start to charge more, hourly, package, or whatever because you don't have the skills.

When you transition to package-based pricing, you have to be able to think of all the ways you help people that don't already value you. You have to be able to think, and this is true of the stylists that are very, very established, they don't have conversations with their existing clients after they finish that help them understand the outcome, the transformation, the experiences that go beyond, “I got a lot of compliments today and I feel more confident.”

I need more from you and from your marketing to understand the real value. That is the top-level value. That is not the real value. This is where a lot of stylists stumble because when they are transitioning to a package price, they just think that the same old things that sold the hourly or the promises have to stay the same.

But they don't. In fact, that's why it becomes so hard to sell a bigger package is because the expectation of a larger package is actually easy to sell because all you gotta do is ask the client that already made that investment and interview them properly and you will get the answer you need.

But most stylists stop the engagement too early because they're used to the hourly model. The thing about the hourly model is that it lets the client be in control. I don't care what anyone tells me. It lets the client be in control.

You can't get to a next level of expertise if you're not packaging things in a way that is showcasing your expertise. That means you may have to put in more touch points with the client so that you can understand the real value of what they're experiencing at different points and then at the end.

This is why client and relational-based selling is so important, client-led selling, client-led services, because you don't feel weird or gross doing that, it's part of the service experience.

When you start to price based on this idea that you are delivering your service, talking to a client, going back and making a better for the next client, and doing that over and over again, and not changing your services every single time, you feel like you can't sell something, instead, you think, “Okay, if I'm not able to sell this to people who have never even experienced it yet, then I probably have a marketing problem,” you need to stay with things long enough to make it better. That's how you get more confident about your pricing. That's how you get to value-based pricing.

I stayed with one service for a year because I wanted to be good. It started, I think I sold that service, it started at like $2,500 or $3,000 and then I still saw that service and I've made it better and better and better over years, it has more assets, it has more touch points, it has more access to me, it has all different things and it's almost $10,000 now.

It's the same but it's not the same. It's definitely more than a $10,000 experience and it was more than a $2,500 experience when I started out in this business. I couldn't justify $10,000 until I put 30 people through it because I know that every time I touch that service, I went back into it, I did my onboarding and my offering, I made it better and better. It's also how my marketing got better because they're all connected in your business.

The good news is that you have all the things that you need to work on and improve these things. A huge thing that gets in the way of style is seeing what they have in their business that they can use and make everything better is number one, focusing on the things that didn't work or focusing on the people who don't reply to you or whatever, instead of focusing on what could I do with my systems, my client experience from getting better outcomes?

Because you're still going to have people that are miserable. There are miserable people and that's on them. But if you're committed to doing better every single time, then you don't have to worry about that or take it as personally.

We have to be active participants in the experiences that we create for people because that's what we're creating. We are not creating outfits. We're not creating confidence. We are creating experiences that people get to see themselves differently in.

That doesn't happen when you sit at your computer and make up a service because you couldn't sell your old one. That happens by you learning how to sell because selling is part of the experience. It's the identity we talked about with Chanel that people get to step into.

That's how important your messaging is. It is the thing that gets them in the identity of someone who is your best styling a client. That's what your marketing should be doing. What happens often is that we get stuck in this idea that we have imposter syndrome and now I'm going to hold both of your hands when it comes to our pricing.

But here's the thing, what many stylists call impostor syndrome is not impostor syndrome. True impostor syndrome is when you've mastered something, you have evidence that you've mastered it, you've had conversations that people have reflected back to you that you've mastered it and you still feel like a fraud.

Most stylists are experiencing a lack of business skills. That is why they don't feel like what they're charging, they are worth. They don't have the skills because they don't take action to get them or they do take action to get it, then they don't put in the work it takes to get the result.

But the good news is if you work on these three things, you will not have any sense of imposter syndrome unless you go through all these things, perfect them, you get the feedback that it's amazing, people tell you how incredible it is. I'm not just talking about a bad day. I mean, if every single day you think, “I don't know if my services get results for people,” and you can't go back to evidence that someone telling you that it does and what those actually look like, you don't have imposter syndrome.

If you do get those things and it's more than just a bad day, you might have imposter syndrome. That's something to think about that we hide behind labels of things when really there's some work for us to do.

The first one is perfecting your service delivery like I've talked about, you have to develop the systems, you have to streamline your process, you have to create amazing onboarding and offboarding experiences for your clients that start in your marketing, that start with them having something to step into.

If you do not perfect your service delivery, you will wonder if what you're charging is too much or if it's warranted because people fall off. Your systems are another way of taking care of people. If you don't think of it that way, then you're probably not looking at the right places in your business to create a killer client experience.

The second thing you need to really work on is understanding how to articulate your client results. You can't focus on surface-level outcomes like they got compliments. We got to dig deeper.

If you show me a screenshot in your marketing of people saying they got compliments, and I don't know if that person felt good before they got the compliment, I have no way of knowing that your styling was a success.

We tell our clients that we shouldn't listen to what other people say, and then we show marketing that absolutely contradicts that. We give stats at our marketing, like, “It only takes eight seconds for somebody to form an impression of you.” That's fine. But do you believe that that's what people should be taking action from, from what other people think of them?

Maybe you do because I actually think there's a place for that, especially if you work with personal brands. I want to know what people think about me as a personal brand if I have a styling client because I want to be able to manipulate that.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that. That's what everyone can do. But I think different people have different buy-in to that when you're a business owner, it's different, I think, but that's just my opinion.

The point is if we're not able to understand what that person has more access to after they work with you because of the confidence, because they understand themselves more, or because of a whole variety of things, because you touch their life, your service, and your process taught them something, if I can't see that, I don't care how many compliments your client got, because maybe they're the same person as they were before, hoping that gym and accounting makes them feel good in their blouse when they don't even know if they like their blouse because they're so busy with the compliments.

Did you transform that person? You might have. Your screenshot with compliments telling me that they got compliments might have been a sign that they transformed but maybe not. I don't know. It depends on what the experience was before.

You have to have conversations with people to know that. You have to ask the right questions in your offboarding. You have to incentivize people giving you feedback. That's how you don't have to deal with imposter syndrome with your prices is when you can say this with absolute clarity.

I can say that every client, except for three, has made their money back from working with me within the time that they worked with me, most of them multiple times over. I don't promise that result but I say it with a lot of confidence because I have clients on my podcast that say it and it's news to me when I hear it.

I have these conversations, off podcasts too, but that's how you hear about it. That's how you know, “Oh, okay, wow. They made their money back.” That's not the only thing they made that they don't tell you often is how easy it was to close the sale that made the money back, that's more important.

That's why I have conversations that go, “Well, okay, and then what? Then what?” You can get that too. Actually, you can record client conversations like I do on a podcast and use it. You don't need a podcast. Why? You don't need a podcast. You get to do it however feels good to you and however feels most natural with your clients, but you need to do it.

Most people won't. Five of you that take action on that, you're already ahead of the game in terms of differentiating yourself. Then the last thing you have to do is you have to be consistent in marketing your services, because if you don't, you won't be able to get to the point where you feel comfortable charging more and more and know unshakably, clearly in your core that it’s worth it, that it's worth those prices.

Because if you don't market, you can't get new clients, you can't refine it and you can't make it better. Sure, you can up your prices. But when you up your prices at a certain point, for example, you have to have new messaging. You have to have new marketing.

You have to go even deeper into the transformation that's internal because that's what high-value clients want from high-value experience. They're not looking for the outfits and the number of outfits and the number of service time. They're looking for proximity to a new identity.

When I spent $50,000 on sales coaches, I didn't do it because I wanted them to give me every single piece of the framework. I do have that and that's great. I want a proximity to people who thought that $50,000 was no big deal. It's way more than that. It's millions of dollars.

Most of the people in my mastermind have spent so much money that $50,000 is what difference does it make? That's how much money they generate. Because those are the kinds of results they get. Because that's the kind of people they are.

That's what I spent $50,000 for because I knew that if I practiced the skill of sales, I would turn into a different person. That's what I paid $50,000 for because nothing is more valuable to me than time.

I can always make more money. But jumping timelines to become a person who thinks $50,000 is not a big deal, yeah, I'd pay for that many times over and it would be worth it.

As we wrap up, I'm going to leave you with this thought. Pricing isn't about just making money. It's about creating a sustainable business that allows you to be fully present with your clients so that you can deliver the transformative experience they're looking for and that they are looking at your marketing for.

You cannot be afraid of self-doubt. You have to use it for growth as an opportunity to level up your skills as a business owner to feel true confidence. The more you invest in yourself in your business, the more value you'll be able to provide your clients because you will see value everywhere and you will take that and you will insert it into your process and you will get better and better and better.

The more comfortable you become with charging prices that reflect your real value, the more you behave with that value in the world, even outside of your business. You are not just a stylist. You are a problem solver. You are a life changer. You are a trusted confidant. You are a trusted advisor in the lives of the right clients.

You need to build services and a business that reflect that. You will never have imposter syndrome again because you will be looking for how you get better all the time. You will insert that into your business and you will feel like an expert.

Price your services accordingly. Price your services to give everybody involved the best transformation possible. Because people who pay, pay attention. I'll talk to you in our next episode.

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.