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.

Welcome to a fresh episode of the podcast. Today we're tackling a really important topic, how to create a six-figure styling experience for your clients. So important because when you have a great client experience, it basically helps you be marketed by your clients for free.

I felt really strongly about having great client experiences for that reason. It also improves your retention, which means that you are not going to have to work as hard for new clients. We'll get into some interesting stats about that in a second.

Last, so many of you reached out and said that you have identified as a transformational stylist. So if you do, this is really important for you. It's important for all stylists, but one of the things psychologically that lots of us miss as stylists when we think of ourselves as transformational is that it's not just how good of a stylist we are or how sensitive we are to our clients, although those things are obviously important.

It's whether or not we are capable beyond the close of creating an experience in our business for our clients to have a transformation. If the soil is not good, you cannot try to plant new thoughts, new ideas, and new ways of looking at themselves in your client's mind because they're going to be so uncomfortable with their client experience.

They can't bloom into the person they're supposed to be if the experience of the styling service, the follow-up, the communication, the expectations, the boundaries—honestly, which most people need—are not there. It leaves the client in a place where they're a little unsure about you. When someone's a little unsure about you, they can't go in and do the deep work.

What's interesting is I have a very high repeat client rate. I'm just so fortunate and just love my clients so much. I can see that when the first time somebody works with me, they get a result, but they get a really deep result when they continue working with me because they are more comfortable. They're more safe feeling.

I've talked to many of you who have noticed that you really prefer a longer client experience because you know you can get okay results in a month but you can get even better in say three months or whatever that looks in your styling packages, whatever the length is you prefer to get the transformation you feel connected and committed to.

If you don't set up the client experience from the first minute someone hires you, and honestly, I would argue the sales call or even before that, if you don't create that experience, that's why on your marketing and in your social media and stuff, you have to build it like it's a relationship.

You cannot build it like I'm talking to the internet out there. It doesn't work that way because they are getting an impression and when they're experiencing you in your marketing and if you can speed that up, you should, so that you can then speed up the rate that they feel safe within the styling container when they hire you.

This is all connected. Like I've said a million times, your business is not a bunch of separate things, like your marketing over here, your services over there, whatever over here, your pricing, it is all connected.

Your sales conversation, completely connected to how you do business in general, completely connected to the experience you want that person to have, because that's the call that they decide if they're going to be truthful with you.

If you don't have sales skills, if you don't know how to run these things, you are creating an environment, I wish I could go back and tell myself this years ago, where you are not truly facilitating the level of transformation that you could.

When I look back now, I think, “I cannot believe that so many of the coaches and people that I hired didn't tell me how not being able to navigate a sales call drastically impacts how that client, even if they hire you, handles the environment of the coaching package or the styling package or whatever.”

It just does. They may still hire you, but they might not be as all in as they could be. So that's why these skills are so important because you can't be a great stylist without them.

I don't care how good your eye is, you cannot. People have a psychological landscape that we have to make suitable for the transformation of styling to take place. What are some of the signs, and why does this matter so, so much?

Some of the signs that I see that are really indicative of stylists not having the best client experience, and this doesn't mean people are complaining about you, as a matter of fact, what will happen is you will just hear from no one, it's likely the case that no one's like, "This was terrible blah, blah, blah,” and they might even be like, "Oh yeah, I like things," but the number one way you know that a client had a transformation isn't that they told you. It isn't their testimonial. It's that they came back.

I'm not saying you didn't get a transformation before if they don't come back. I'm saying that the one way you know you got it is if they come back. I think all of us know you need to work with a client more than once to truly get the depth of experience.

If you are a stylist, again, that wants to be transformational, you have to be in it for the long game. Doesn't mean your services all have to be a year, but it does mean that you need to create a client experience that helps usher in that possibility.

If you're in client experiences and you aren't seeing that 30% to 40% established clients coming back that I think is really what most and what most stylists I work with have, if you can't get yourself there, you're going to burn out really fast and your business too.

Client experience also just helps you have a better experience of your business because the probability of selling an existing client is 60% to 70%. Do you know how hard it is to get a new client from your marketing? If it's bad, 5% will have people that really pay attention to your marketing, really keep looking at it, really are interested in really digging a little bit deeper that they're going down to your feed from your stories or they're reading your blogs or listening to your podcast, 5% will actually convert.

On the high end, you have really potent marketing, 20% will. That's a big difference. If you can get 60% to 70% of the people you work with to say yes again, you just made your life a lot easier because if you have an average rate of converting new prospects, say you're 10%, then you still are not going to have a lot of business.

So why not tap into people that are excited to say yes? A statistic I recently saw in an article by SmallBizGenius was talking about how 65% of small businesses revenue is made up by existing clients.

Like what? 65%. I'm only saying 30% to 40% of yours and get your marketing right and tight. But that's how the majority of businesses that are doing really well are doing really well.

So client experience is not negotiable. What are the signs that we need to up our game here? Because as I said, people aren't usually going to tell you, you're just never going to hear from them.

The first one is client ghosting, but I mean clients, meaning they've signed and paid you and you're not hearing from them or it's taking them a really long time to get back to you.

Now, in a hundred percent of the cases, I cannot say that it is your client experience that's the problem. But if it happens to you pretty frequently, particularly as a virtual stylist, you have to get the systems in your business going. You have to start creating a persona that is like, “Here's how this experience is going to work. I'm going to give you a few chances, but if you're not going to get on board with me, we're going to have to have a face-to-face conversation or on-the-phone conversation about this.”

You cannot let people just go weeks without getting back to you and not create a boundary around that. This is why you should have a contract. It truly changes behavior.

So clients, they've signed, they've paid. You suspect it's because maybe they feel bad about something that happened or whatever and you're not going and addressing that and you have no way of doing that in your business right now, a system for that, that's probably part of your client experience falling off and not being where it should be.

If you have a really hard time following up with established clients and inviting them to work with you again, you could probably do some really easy things in your client experience in order to make that sale super easy. I teach that in my program Income Accelerator. I learned this lesson myself.

When I started creating an onboarding system that really encouraged people to work with me again, it really changed the game. Then I went and got sales skills and that changed the game even more. Those are the things that I think can always really be tightened up to make your client experience better.

The third one that I see a lot that is a really good indicator that we have some work to do on our client experience in our business is just having a lot of assumptions that we throw out very casually about our clients' interests.

If you feel like your established clients work with you, they had a good experience, but you are not comfortable or sure because they told you that they want to work with you again, if you're not comfortable reaching out and saying, “Hey, I'm booking for fall. Would love to work with you,” because you're in a position where you just assume if they wanted to they would, we have a client experience problem because you're not looking at your relationship with your client the right way. You're looking at it probably in a way that feels salesy in a gross way.

If you have a real relationship with your clients as a stylist, which you should, then you shouldn't feel weird about that reach out. If you feel good about your business and your services, and you feel like you get results, then you really shouldn't feel that way.

There's something to look at in your business either way. Maybe it's the systems or maybe it's that you don't feel as confident as you want to about your services, let alone your client experience.

If you make a lot of assumptions of if they wanted to, they would in terms of reaching out with your clients, that's probably something we need to look at with client experience.

If you feel lastly like your interactions with clients are incomplete, like you feel you end a service, but you don't have a way of gracefully following up, or you just don't really know how to end it, you don't know how to wrap it up, that's a big one I hear from stylists, even really established ones, they are like, “Everything's going fine in my business,” then on call six, they'll tell me, “Actually, I don't really know how to wrap up a client experience. Now that I see all this, I'm like, ‘Wow, I probably am losing a lot of money.’”

Let me tell you, you are. So let's just fix that because there's no need. If any of these resonate with you, you're just not alone. I didn't get this list from talking to one stylist. I've gotten it from being a stylist and talking to lots of them over the past couple of years.

But the good news is that really all you need to do is put some upfront time into your client experience. I think the more excited you are about your services, the easier it is to make a good client experience.

That's just an aside. If you're not excited about your services, it may be because you haven't worked with a certain target market that long and we still need to refine and all that's great. But you should know your target market so well that it's not hard for you to figure out ways to add in little surprises or make the experience better.

Don't keep changing your services. Try to make them better because you're going to end up in the same places before if you keep changing them. Because your client experience is such an important part of the health of your business, and also, do you just feel like an expert? It's so worth doing the work.

One of the things that are going to make a huge difference in your client experience is really looking at your systems, which I know again, every time I see systems, I feel like I'm saying the least sexy thing I could say to you and I'm trying to think of another way to say it, so I've used client experience, but not all of client experience is your systems.

I think that your client experience is made up of your sales skills, your marketing, your systems and how your services work, the energy you bring to your client interactions, that's why yourself concept I talked about in an earlier podcast episode is so, so important because if we're beating ourselves up a lot, there's an energy that comes with us with that.

It often leaks out even if we're not saying it around the client. Systems are so important because there's such a huge chunk of those things that are the client experience.

When you're busy or you're in a weird emotional place or you have stuff going on in your personal life, it can be hard to remember all of the touch points that make a great client experience because if you're doing a good one, it should have multiple. So you can just be overwhelmed, your head down, trying to get more clients or trying to deliver things to the clients you have.

When you have the system set up in your business that just do this for you, you don't have to worry about that. All this weight just kind of lifts and you have more mental space to deal with your business.

Systems are amazing because they help you stay on track when you have a lot going on. They're also going to create a sense of safety in your client experience because the person on the other end of that experiencing the system is like, "Wow, they thought of everything."

I recently had an onboarding experience with a VA company that I just hired, and it was such a great experience. I even have a client, I want to say a success manager, but we'll call that a concierge. She talks to the other VAs that I work with and that helps me and pitches in when I need a lecture help or explains things to me.

It's such a nice experience to have this onboarding call. I never would have expected that. I've never had that experience before. The touchpoints are really great and very responsive. We have a Slack channel we use.

Their energy is just happy. I love paying these people. I love it. That's what I want for you. Okay. Because I feel so safe to ask questions in this container with my virtual assistant firm.

I struggle with a lot of tech stuff. I know that if I ask them, I'm never going to be made to feel dumb and there's a way for me to ask that makes me not feel like I'm overstepping my bounds. You want to make all of that communication stuff super clear.

Do you expect clients to text you 24 hours a day? People will do it, not meaning to, but when you say, “You can only text me to the fore,” oddly, that boundary makes them feel safer than if you just let them do whatever they want, because when they do text you at three o'clock or whatever, they will know they're not making a bad impression in your mind.

That's what's so important about systems is that when we're really clear with people about what this experience is going to be like, they can behave relaxed because they know the expectations and we know the expectations.

Then if they don't behave in the way that we have laid out as the acceptable course of action, we have plenty of justification for saying, “Hey, this isn't a good fit in terminating the contract.”

This is why stylists struggle, you only have to have a few bad experiences with a client, a few bad experiences of somebody not paying you on time, or whatever before you start to think, “Maybe I need to make this better.”

We tend to think of it from what's happening to us in our business when we go towards systems and that's important. I want you to have a great relationship with your business but it's also important to remember what systems do for the people that we're helping, particularly because I've talked about before, it's vulnerable. It is a vulnerable experience for people. So I think that that is one thing to really think about too in this.

Another thing that's really cool is that when you have really good systems that are client-led and you have a really good client experience, you can ask for things like referrals and testimonials in a way that feels super clean and not weird.

When you fall off in your client communication and then you ask for something at the end, you're either not going to get as glowing a review or you may just get silence. For the whole health of your business, getting testimonials, getting referrals, getting that client to come back themselves, all of that, the fact that you need consistent clients to make your services better for other clients, all of it works together.

When you have systems as part of your client experience set up, you can find ways, I teach it in my program, to make the ask for certain things you need to continue to run your business well. Social proof, things like that. Testimonials, you can get it in a way that feels really good, and because the rest of your client experience was great, it's not hard for the client to have something to say.

That's part of it. Like, what do you want those testimonials to say? This is why your service is connected to every other part of your business, because if you can talk about that in your marketing, then basically your service just markets itself. That's why all of this type of thing is so interconnected and related, and why systems are so important.

The parts of the systems like collecting payment and making sure you have a way to have people sign contracts, in a big styling service, there should be between 10 and 12 touch points that a stylist should have. I'm averaging that with the bigger packages that I see.

We're doing everything from sales calls, style discovery, closet edit or review, shopping one to two shops, maybe more, whatever, styling session, lookbook, off-boarding, and if you have follow-up support in that, there could even be more.

But that's a lot of touchpoints, 10 to 12, on average. If that's the case, and you have more than one client, how are you going to not let processes fall off? Maybe you don't have processes at all for that very reason. But if you had them and you had them automated, it would change the game for you, for your peace of mind, and obviously for your business.

But the part, again, we don't see is the benefits to your clients are we find safety through consistency. When you have reliable processes, you can create that sense of security for your client, they can relax, they can go deeper into the experience.

It creates a sense of personalization. Your systems can allow you to demonstrate your attention to detail and your ability to expect in advance what your client is going to need because you know them so well.

It's going to enhance your communication, and it's going to enhance their communication when you have this kind of stuff handled. Because when someone can see that you're diligent but not overdoing it, which is what systems help you do, they help you reign in your people pleasing because you have to make them for everyone, who goes to the service, not just for certain people, and you shouldn't be changing your actions based on the client's behavior in your service.

That should be templated, and it should always work the same way. If a client makes a weird comment and you think they didn't like anything you pulled for them, you don't then email them.

If you're someone that's really driven by emotion and you go back and forth over “Should I send this email or not?” when you would send it to a client that didn't just make a weird comment at you in a dressing room, then you're someone that needs the space that systems will give you and that client experience will give you because you can be sure and much more confident that if you would send the email to every other client and not one that just snubbed you, then you're probably cutting quarters in other places that could then be enhancing that bad experience for a client and not even realize it. Because we don't realize it.

What are the elements that make really effective systems that are going to help you get around some of this and put in the boundaries for you and just make everything so much better in your business?

Number one, onboarding, onboarding, onboarding, onboarding. Contracts, always giving what's next information. Client prep emails, highlights about the way things are going to be working and expectations, how often they text you, what your communication policies are, any additional fees for re-polling clothes or what happens if they don't order in enough time with sizes, all of it.

When different calls are going to be, all your calls or all your appointments with clients should be booked on your calendar and theirs right after you take payment, all that's really important. Onboarding, so important.

Style discovery. Now I feel weird saying this but I have now talked to so many stylists through this podcast who don't have a style discovery process. They don't have a process of looking through inspiration, they don't have a way of helping give their client a language with style. That's a problem if you are transformational.

I think that anyone can do styling in a whole different set of ways, but forget styling for a second. From a business perspective, not having client discovery, not having a process where I, as the client, can share with you what's going on with me before we really get into the work so I can get where you're coming from is deeply problematic.

In style discovery, it’s not just a new client form. It's being able to see what your client thinks is edgy. It's being able to see the translation of what your client thinks is romantic with a twist or whatever.

You need to know what they code as their visual language when they're speaking to you and you can't do that without style discovery. That's something that I think is incredibly important. It also shows the client that you care about them, it's not just you putting your style on them.

If you feel like you need to prove like, “I don't make everybody look the same,” it shouldn't even be something you have to argue about in your marketing, because it should be like, “I have this process that I do X, Y, and Z in so that all of my clients get a different result, so that I am listening to you, so that I am blocked in on you,” that will take care of a lot of that messaging for the record, which is why I'm saying everything in your business is connected because if you could have a good style discovery process, your marketing just got better by that little point alone.

It also allows you when you have style discovery to set realistic expectations with clients to make them aware of their role in the process, that you're not a mind reader, but also that maybe their expectations are off because they have such different and strange types of style competing with each other.

It's not our job as stylists to have to guess everything, because we're not going to guess right so you might as well have a process that makes the client have to use their language to bring clarity to the process.

The next one that's super important in terms of what you should have for systems is just a communication email flow. You want to have a series of emails that drip out either because you use HoneyBook or something like that, or you can do canned emails in Gmail or whatever, that after every single touch point with the client, they know what's next.’

Until the day that you formally off-board them and tell them “We are now done,” you have to have all of that kind of communication just ready to rock and roll for every service no matter what.

You have to have, lastly, feedback loops. You have to have places in the actual process where you reach out outside of the one-on-one appointment where you give them a chance to share what's happening with them.

This is one that surprises people. I find that the better your relationships are with clients, the less this has to be formalized. I have really good relationships with my clients. I talk to them all the time, even when we're not in an active package, like they DM me, they send me stuff, they email me, they give me their feedback on podcasts.

I have such an incredible relationship with my established clients, even if they've only hired me for one package or one program or one $500 call that they did with me a while ago. Whatever that looks like, I have great relationships.

I ask for their feedback often in general, and I definitely ask for it. I have a whole part of a call that I use with my one-on-one clients where we're just learning about how they felt about the last call and where they are and are they overwhelmed, what do we have to handle before we go into new stuff.

I think all of that is incredibly important and you want to have specific touch points within your services that allow that interaction to happen that's outside of being in the dressing room or outside of the closet edit. They're just going to be in a better space for it.

Then on an ongoing basis, you want to have touchpoints where you're going back to establish clients, whether they're hiring you or not. I have a whole system in my Income Accelerator where I teach stylists how to continue to give value in a way that isn't overdoing it or whatever, but that encourages a client to hire you again, but also just keeps the relationship open between two people. It doesn't have to be for sales reasons.

The more you do that, it generally has a good sales end goal because people remember you and then if they don't need to work with you again, they will refer you. Those are some of the things you can really start working on now, get your onboarding right and tight, get your style discovery process dialed in and talk about in your marketing, have ongoing communication emails that roll out as you're delivering a styling service that say, “This is what's happening next, this is what's happening next.” That's really important.

Then lastly, create feedback loops outside of just what's happening next, what's happening next, have check-in emails or have check-in phone calls, have lunch with them, whatever it looks like based on the business you have, send them a DM, send them voice memos every quarter, send them a group established client newsletter, whatever it looks like, make sure that you're offering the opportunity for feedback in the container, in the styling container, but outside of it as well for the future, for future touchpoints with you. All of that's going to be key.

Some of the ways you can do this, if you like me are not a great systems person, is I hire people to set up my technology for me. I now have a VA and a company that works with me in bigger stuff than just that, but it's worth $1,000, $2,000 to get all this stuff handled.

I think that emails and stuff like that, you guys can write yourself, create a really great Canva template, all of these things that give you an Income Accelerator if you're interested, but make sure that you're at least having PDFs you reuse of how to prepare for like a closet edit and stuff like that. If you're not good at setting up the tech part, hire somebody to do it for you. It's worth every penny.

One of the ways you can get really good at this is document things. If you're a virtual stylist, go ahead and make sure that you're recording all of your virtual calls with styling clients.

Then you can even take it, get those videos transcribed, get the audio, get it transcribed, and then put it into ChatGPT or something and ask it to create a workflow for you and say, “Where would I put emails? How would I make this better?” Once you have all of those transcripts of all of the calls, say it's a closet edit, a shop and a style and do a call where you go over the shopping or something, you can take all of that and then ask AI to make a system for you in your business.

Or you could say, "Hey, I want to make systems in my business. Can you give me some prompts to give you information in order to have you write systems?" I'm a huge proponent of using AI and there is a limit because they're not stylists, AI has some really weird views of stylists so it may not be as deep, but it's definitely a good place to start.

The more you automate your request for feedback, the less personal it is. I think that's my last one is just make sure you're automating things that you tend to get emotional about and don't fall through on because we never know how somebody else is really experiencing us, we can only be responsible for our side of making the experience as good as we could.

There's going to be things that happen that make us feel a certain way, because we're people, but if you can get your systems to help support you in that, it is well worth it.

I use HoneyBook, highly recommend it. I know lots of people that love Dubsado. That was a little too complex for my brain, but yeah, there's so much great stuff out there. Even if you just start with booking software, so someone can just get on a sales call with you from an automatic link and you're not going back and forth with times, that's also part of a client experience. That's a great first step for you.

I hope this helped you implementing really strong systems to get a great client experience is such a key part of being a great stylist. I know everybody listening is a great stylist. Once we get this in our system, you're all going to be unstoppable, and that 30% to 40% repeat client rate will seem like obviously it's done, which is what I want for every single one of you. All right, I'll talk to you 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.