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.

Okay, today we're going to tackle a really critical topic for any personal stylist, especially if you're looking to build a roster of really, really great established clients. Now, this can take some time, so please be patient with yourself. I told the stylist this week, it can take about two years to get to the 30% to 40% repeat client rate that I talk a lot about on here.

But when you are consistently attracting 80% or 90% of the time the right clients, you can get yourself there so much faster. So let's talk about why this is important and all the things you can be completely in control of today to get yourself the right type of clients and have you booked with people that you actually are excited to style.

So we've all been there. We've dealt with clients who are just not on the same page and maybe they're the kind of client who's consistently trying to cut corners in your process or they're unresponsive to your emails, your texts, your communication, or they're over communicative and they're texting you at 10 o 'clock at night about things that don't matter, whatever it is, it can be super frustrating, and it can really drain the joy of being a stylist.

But it's also really normal to experience having not ideal clients. It doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong, but there definitely are things you can do to get more of the right type of clients.

So what are those strategies and how can we help people that are in our world now that may be interested in working with us, how can we shape them into dream clients? Because you actually can do that and I'm going to tell you exactly how.

We're going to explore the three powerful mechanisms that you can use, again, today, tomorrow, right away, you don't need anything fancy for this to start attracting clients that are going to be right fit for you. What's interesting about these methods is that you are fully in control of them, which means that even if the same person came to you, but they never experienced you behaving in these ways, they might not act as an ideal client, which shows us how much power we have in our own business.

It's easy when things aren't going the way we want to, to feel like nothing's going right, there's nothing I can do, but often it's just because we have a blind spot and we have some skills, like I've talked about before, that we need to be able to build in order to put the things into our business that are going to put us fully in control of attracting the right clients, having consistent income, marketing in a way that actually gets us what we want.

Here are the three things that are going to help you elevate the type of clients you attract and keep them, the types of clients that you want to work with because it's not just about attracting clients, everyone's on their best behavior in the beginning of a styling engagement, but keeping them ideal clients throughout the process is critical too, to get you to that ideal 30% to 40% repeat client rate that I talk about.

Mechanism number one: crafting your marketing message in a way that elicits ideal client behavior. This is absolutely magical. Your marketing messaging can really act as a magnetizing tool for getting the type of clients that you want consistently, but you have to know some really important critical details about what your messaging has to include in order to get that outcome.

So many stylists, no matter how long they've been doing this, are marketing from this like, "Oh, I had a good idea," or “I wasn't inspired this week,” you need a strategy. I know I'm a broken record, but there's a reason because you've heard other people on this podcast talk about how when you collect a lot of different random marketing tools but you don't have a strategy that helps you wake up every day and know what you're going to say—Kristen talked about this on an earlier episode—it could be really hard to know if what you're doing is effective or not.

The most important part of your marketing being effective is you knowing that it's effective, of you knowing that even when everyone isn’t clapping, you are on a 30, 60, 90-day plan that's going to eventually result in things tipping in your favor for all the effort you're putting into your marketing.

Because marketing is the first place, most people experience your brand. Even if they do a Google search or something and they find you through SEO, they're usually going to cross-check you with your social media or they're going to get on your newsletter or they're going to take some sort of an action.

So you want to make sure that that first impression, that first experience with your brand sets you both up in a way that if they decide to become your client, they are clear what they are getting to and what kind of expectations are going to be placed on both parties from the beginning.

This doesn't have to be weird or really strong or really aggressive messaging, but in a lot of ways, one of the things that surprise people when they do my Income Accelerator Program and we go through the different modules is I talk about how the client experience starts before they ever sign with you and that the way that you take care of your clients extends all the way in your marketing, it's not just once they've signed the contract and paid you.

When you can start thinking of your messaging and your marketing as a way of taking care of future clients, it really does change the tone and the experience of your marketing from a buyer perspective.

The other thing that's really critical to know about your marketing is that the more consistently you're putting out strong and focused messaging, the faster you're going to see people getting on sales calls with you that are a really good fit and are looking to be a partner with you in the styling process.

I have a stylist I was talking to this week, talking about how she thinks it's about a year from what she's gathered between when somebody finds her and when they sign with her. She asked me if that was just the norm for the industry.

I think it's really amazing actually that she even knew that number. Most people I don't think know how long averages are. You really want to make sure you have a good way of finding out where people are finding you and we're going to talk about sales calls in a second, but conducting sales calls in a way that even if someone doesn't hire you, you can get this information to run your business effectively.

But when you market and use messaging in a way that is really reinforcing the identity of your ideal client, which is something I do all the time on here, quite honestly, and I think that's what all good messaging does is it either attracts the right people or it gets rid of other people, when you do that, you don't have to wait a year.

I'm not saying that this stylist was doing anything wrong. She actually has incredible marketing, but when you look at marketing from a sales-driven place and not just as a place of like, "Oh, people like what you're doing. They're liking your content. You have high numbers," but you're looking at it as a mechanism and a tool for your business, a mechanism and a tool for sales because you can't create a transformation for your clients, you can't make an impact as a stylist if you're not selling. That's just not how it works.

It's not that the stylist was a bad marketer. Like I said, she's probably one of the better marketers out there that I experienced as a stylist. But what I will say is that it was good, it just wasn't an effective sales process. It wasn't an effective sales tool to get people to know yes or no faster. So the key here if you want to get people there faster is to weave your values and the characteristics of your ideal client into your content every single day.

This is going to help paint a picture of what it's like to work with you in terms that people actually understand and are going to take action to buy. The number one thing that people miss when it comes to marketing their personal styling business is when you tell me about how the closet edit takes two hours and you get this, this, and this, and then I put all of your hangers back in a certain way, that I guess does paint a picture but it doesn't paint a picture in a way that gets me to take action.

It takes me to a place in my brain where I'm basically thinking about “Well, is that what I want? How would that work for me? My closet isn't that great,” you put people into a place in their head that is fact-gathering, fact-finding.

When you do that, you take them away from the part of their brain that is looking to buy, which is emotional. This is some stuff I go over in great detail with my marketing and sales mini-mind and a little bit in the Income Accelerator.

What I have learned in the past couple of years is that your messaging when you do educational or giving people tips and tricks, it's not that it's bad or it's wrong, it's that I used to definitely think that was value. That was proving to people how good I was as a stylist or how generous I was with what I was giving away my information.

But all that it was doing was delaying them buying from me because, at the end of the day, people that want to hire personal stylists don't need to know how to do it themselves. They need to know that you or the former me is the right person for them and that is an emotional decision.

Stylists waste airtime with tutorials and stuff like that frequently when most people only see 50% at most to 60% of your content, if you're doing a lot of content around that kind of stuff, you're not crafting messages that are helping them decide if you are the right person for them or if they're ready to buy.

So when you weave in the values and the characteristics of your ideal client into your content, it speeds up the process faster because even if you're doing that within an educational tutorial or something, you are still signaling, "Hey, you're for me," or, "Hey, you're not for me," within that content.

There are always ways to make your content, any type of content, really more effective, but there are certain aspects of content that have to be present for people to buy, and definitely calling out these values that you have and the expectations that you have of the type of people that work with you is critical.

You can do this in a way that's super undetectable. It doesn't have to be something where you're like, "I only work with people that answer their phone." We're not saying any kind of statements like that. You could say something like, let's say that you value open communication with your clients as a stylist. I don't know a client. I don't have a stylist client that doesn't want that from their clients. Okay, let me start this whole process from the top.

For example, let's say that you, as most stylists do, value open communication with your styling clients. You want them to come to you. You want them to tell you if they do or don't like something.

You want the kind of person that isn't going to just clam up and not say anything and then ghost you, obviously. So, most of us want that. One way you could do it, I'm going to give you one example of how I would do that, you could share a story that went something like this.

I recently worked with a client who reached out to discuss a concern that she had about a social dynamic for an upcoming event that we were styling her for. Because she was so proactive in her communication, we were able to adjust her shopping plan and find the perfect outfit that made her feel as confident as possible and she was ready to shine despite tricky dynamics at this event.

So lots of people might think, “Oh, I'm just styling people for certain types of events and I'm asking about the events, but I also want to know how does my client feel going into these events? How does she want to feel? What are the things that could throw her off her game? Then I'm going to talk to her about making sure that the outfit we're creating for her helps her feel her best, not just in general, but in that specific circumstances with the psychology that she's going into that event with.”

See how the way I just talked about that made it clear that I was a partner with her. I also made it clear why I need that kind of open communication. Because some people, just to be honest, when they go to an expert or when they go to somebody for help, they hold a lot back.

I can tell you now, even in this business, as a business consultant working with stylists, there's a lot of times I've worked with someone for six or eight weeks, and then all of a sudden it comes out that something major was going on in the background, and clearly it impacted their behavior. I can see that retrospectively.

There have been times when I've really had to change my onboarding or my offboarding or certain aspects of my process to make sure that I'm making clear what kind of communication is acceptable in the space so that I can help my client get the most.

A lot of people don't want to be rude, or a lot of people, when they deal with difficult stuff, they clam up, or they don't say anything. It's really important for us to make it clear, yes, in our one-to-one container, and I want to talk about that in a second, but in your messaging, you can use examples where a client came to you and shared something with you, and it changed and altered the outcome in a way that made it better for everybody involved.

Because one of the things that's important, and I wanted to say this right now, is that if you say you value communication, you also have to show that at every single stage of a client's touch point. You have to show that if a client DMs you or a potential client, you have to be someone who answers your emails promptly. You have to think about what are the messages that you're creating and are you being congruent with that in your values and your behavior.

So if you're saying you want your clients to be consistent but you're not consistently showing up on social media, maybe avoid that messaging because people can sense that. You just want to be careful in the things that you're sharing to make sure your actions are aligned with your messaging.

But if they are, it will completely change the game in terms of how fast people will be willing to sign up with you because other people are going to look at that messaging and think, “Oh, I also value communication. It's really important to me that I work with experts that value it too. That's a really good example of how she takes care of her clients by being open and making sure that she understands all of the elements that go into how her client experiences getting dressed for an event.”

Okay, now that we've talked about how you can signal behaviors that we want your ideal client to possess, like being open communicators, let's talk about some of the specific traits you might also want to highlight in your marketing to call in more dream styling clients.

Readiness to invest in expert advice, willingness to be an active partner in the styling process. You want clients that are interested and be like, “I don't know, you tell me. I don't know, you tell me,” or “I don't like that” with no feedback as to why they don't like a piece that you pulled.

Openness to try new things with a slow understanding that they can always return things. One of my favorite things I used to say to clients was, “You can keep the tags on, we can try it different ways, we don't have to panic, it's just clothes, body acceptance.”

This is a big one. A lot of stylists, I completely understand why I absolutely did this and you can literally go back to old podcasts that I did, I'm actually going to be critiquing them in an upcoming season, and I can see the connection between how I was talking about body image issues and the kind of client I was calling it.

So one of the things I think as stylists, we think that we need to do is be super honest, which I agree we do, about body image stuff, and I've seen a lot of stylists do some incredibly great social media posts recently about their own experience with body image and how that impacted their own style journey or how it still impacts their style journey in a way that's really, really empowering.

What you really want to be doing to call in the right client and also be a real person and acknowledge the body acceptance and body image things clearly get in the way of style is to speak to the person who isn't necessarily 100% confident all the time, I don't know who that person is, but the person who understands that they could still have body image or acceptance stuff in the background, but they're not going to let it hold them back.

They may not be at their ideal weight, but that is not going to be the thing that stops them from showing up, instead of staying with the person who is deep in the body image head trash every day.

It's the difference between talking to somebody in your marketing that has a couple bad body image days and the person who lives there full time. I definitely did not understand the difference in my marketing for a lot of my career as a stylist because I was so concerned with being sensitive to the body image aspect of the work, because I found that it was a thing that kept my clients back the most, more than budget, more than other people's perception, though I'm sure we could argue that these things are connected, but people's obsession with their arms, or their butt, or their thighs, or the weight that they've never been able to lose was the thing that I often felt like people weren't saying, but secretly wanted me to fix.

It felt like something that as someone that has had, like all women, her own body image stuff, I just felt like I couldn't get a handle on this for so long. As soon as I started to realize, I would say in the last three to five years of my career as a stylist that the way to handle it, again, I realized it but that doesn't mean that my marketing and my messaging was always super clear, I would say it was really in the last three years that I got this right, but it was super, super, super clear to me that so many people either expect that they're going to have zero body image issues after they work with a stylist or that something's going to magically happen in the work together where that arms that they can never accept or go out in the summer uncovered is just going to clear up after they work with a stylist.

When I understood that that was not what I should be aiming for, and I also shouldn't be aiming for a client that was completely all systems go and felt good about their body every single day, I was able to play in the nuance in my marketing a little bit more.

I think we can get really, really rigid as stylists, and what you really want to do is be able to speak to the nuance in your marketing, particularly around body image issues, by being clear. You don't have to have 100% good body days or good body image days every single day to work with me. But you do have to be in a place in your life where that’s not going to hold you back anymore.

Your marketing as a stylist has to show you behaving in the same way. This is where everything changes in terms of calling in the right person. So if you’re saying you feel like nothing looks good on you because of your body and you, as a stylist, are trying to say in your marketing, “No, it's not your body. No, it's not your body,” that's probably too far away from the point that your ideal client needs to be on the buyer journey in order to be a good client for you.

When you're talking about the problems that a client could have, you want to make sure that you're not saying they never exist or you're not ignoring them, you're saying they're not the things that are going to hold you back. I'm using body image because I think that's just such a common one and I've actually seen some excellent, excellent posts by a few different clients of mine recently on this topic that I just feel like they nailed it.

So it's front of mind. It's also the thing that I remember being the most anxious about as a stylist and feeling like it held the work back the most, but there are a million other ways. There are some people that worry more about what other people think of them, or there are people that worry more about the budget.

I actually think whatever your concerns are as a person tend to be the thing that your audience reflects back to you. I had a lot of body image stuff, and so I can imagine that it wasn't wild energetically. I called in people because it was one of my lessons, and I mean, this is kind of woo-woo.

If this is a departure from how I typically talk on the podcast, this might surprise you, but I see that clients that really struggle with finances or with investing in themselves tend to get clients that struggle with investing in themselves.

I tend to notice that clients that are pretty poor communicators tend to struggle with people that are poor communicators. There is a connection, I think, often. Even if it's something as nuanced as body image, sometimes it's in the way we speak. Sometimes it's how much we emphasize these things. I emphasized body image a lot because I thought that I was working through it with my audience, and I think I was wrong.

I'm just going to be honest, we get things wrong. In this case, I probably got it wrong very publicly because I had a podcast. It's something I've talked about quite a bit with my podcast editor, going back and looking at those things, but it's okay. You can shift the conversation. You can start to rewrite it.

All you have to do, you don't even have to acknowledge it by the way, I want to be clear on that. If you've been saying things that you think of maybe calling in the wrong person, you stop today and you start fresh. You don't call it out, you don't make a big deal about it, you just go forward.

You're allowed to grow, your marketing's allowed to evolve, and your client base is allowed to evolve. Period. It might take a little while to start calling in the right person. Remember, we're talking 30, 60, usually around 90 days, I see clients, it just tips. So just something for you to be aware of.

Let's talk about how this second mechanism can help you call in dream clients and it's the discovery call and the sales process. This is your opportunity to really set the tone for your working relationships and ensure that you and your client or potential client are on the same page.

First and foremost, it is really critical, especially if you're someone who feels squiggly and icky about sales, to have a structured framework around these calls, not a script, a framework. This isn't about being rigid, it's about ensuring that you gather all of the information that you need and demonstrating your expertise without getting off course during a sales call.

Here are a few key elements that you really need to have in your sales call in order to be able to show your expertise and keep everybody on track while also helping set the tone for their relationship once the client signs with you.

Screening questions. These are going to help you before you even get on the call, assess whether the potential client is a good fit. You can do it without it. I'm really at a point in my career where I can do a sales call without it.

But if you're not super comfortable, if you don't close 80% of your sales calls, you really want to make sure you have pre-screen questions. For example, you're going to ask things like what their style goals are, what their budget range is, what their willingness to try new things is, what have they tried before?

There's more to these and I have a specific set of questions I go over in my Income Accelerator Program and I explain the psychology behind them. But for the purposes of this quick chat here, I want to make sure that you at least have some questions set up before people get on your calendar.

That very act of them having to answer questions before they get to your schedule shows a dynamic that is critical, which is you will be expected to communicate with me to be in my world. This is not like “I'm going to go fetch things for you” kind of situation. That's something I see a lot of stylists not getting because they're trying to give this high-touch experience. People giving you information is a high-touch experience. So rewire your brain around that view if that's something you believe.

Expectation setting. I want you to be clear about what your work and what working with you entails. I want you to talk about your communication style, the level of participation you expect from clients, and any other important aspects of your process before that person gets on the call with you.

This can be done in a variety of different ways. It could be done through an email, like a confirmation email. It could be done through a magazine or some kind of a PDF that you give people. There has to be an expectation that people know what they're getting themselves into.

In my opinion, that includes price. Most people are not good enough that I deal with on a daily basis. Most stylists who don't have business plans, who are just free balling it in their marketing, if that's you, you probably don't have the sales skills you need to throw out a very high number, thousands of dollars, and convert that person if they've never seen the price before.

You can do that, you can absolutely do that, but having the person already know what that price is before they get on the phone with you is going to make an enormous difference while you're building these skills.

If you want to get your sales skills unlocked, if you want to come hang out with me and I'll teach you, you're welcome to take them off, but I think at that point, you'll understand that there's no reason to do that.

Most people don't have a good reason for hiding their prices, besides the fact they think they're going to convince the person on the call or something. You need to be convinced, they don't need to be convinced, you need to be convinced. That's what sells high-ticket services.

This is someone who mostly only sold high ticket for most of her career. I can tell you that. It's not about the other person being convinced, it's about you being convinced in the value of your service. If you feel that way, you don't really care where the person finds the price. I think that’s really critical. Set expectations and part of the expectation is the price.

The third aspect of the sales call process that you really have to have down is your positioning as the expert. It’s important that you be warm and approachable on discovery call. Remember that this call is ultimately about establishing your expertise.

You want to make sure that you are getting relevant information from the client and then you're using that relevant information to sell your styling packages. I used to do this thing that was wrong that somebody taught me to do back 14 years ago where I was supposed to get on the call with a client and then tell them about the history of my styling business.

I cannot tell you how much that makes me cringe and want to die in retrospect. Nobody cares about our business more than me, more than you, nobody cares. Nobody cares. They want to know what your business can do for them.

It's really critical that you only give people the information they need to make the sales decision for them, and giving them all kinds of extra information and even telling them every service that you have, deeply problematic for that sales call closing.

Assessing readiness. You have to be able to assess the readiness of a client on the sales call. You have to be able to do that. I'm not saying that people can't lie, I'm not saying people can't misrepresent themselves, but you have to use thoughtful questions in the dialogue, not in the pre-screen questions, but in the dialogue with your client to gauge whether they are a good fit and are truly ready to invest, not just the money, but the time in working with a stylist.

If you're someone who's like, "As long as they can pay me, it's good enough," no, no, no, no, no, no. Nope, that's going to be a big problem because it's basically like a choose your own adventure situation you're going on, and that adventure can last you months of heartache if you don't know if the person has their heart, their mind, and their bank account in the right place for this experience.

You really need to be someone that can truly sit in the conversation knowing that even if they seem like a good fit, they could ghost you after, they could be whatever and you're fine. It doesn't matter.

One of the ways you get to be that person is you know how to command a discovery call, you know how to have a sales conversation because what's really fascinating to me as I've gotten better and better at this is that I actually now go into sales calls knowing that even if they don't sign with me, I will get something out of it.

I will understand something about my audience better. I will have better content ideas. It's not even a problem because there's more where that came from and I would love to have them with me. But if they're in a place where they can't be forthcoming, where they can't answer a follow-up email, where they can't behave in a way that shows that there's someone in control of their own feelings, thoughts, ability to communicate back, we're not in a good place for this situation for my work with them. Period.

That's going to happen a lot, and it's not a problem. They're on their journey, you're on your journey, and it's no problem. But sales conversations can give you a lot back, a lot back, if you learn how to do them properly. That can be way more than just the sale.

That feeling of knowing whenever you get on a sales call, whatever happens, you're going to win in terms of what you're going to get out of the experience, life-changing. I've had two stylists, who have struggled over the last year to close sales, learn this process, and close two in a week. I mean, that's just crazy to me, how incredibly effective it is when you get the skill.

One of the things that I see a lot of stylists struggle with on sales calls that end up setting the tone for the experience in the styling container, but also why they don't sign a lot of clients is that they get into a position where they act like somebody's friend on the sales call.

There's a lot of chit chat, there's a lot of girlfriend-like behavior. There's a lot of like, “Oh my gosh, me too,” we don't want that. We do not want that. That doesn't actually let the person that's on the call with you, they may be friendly, they may seem to relate, but that does not position you as the expert.

That's what one of my clients is really struggling with. She had a real best girlfriend vibe to her, which I love as a person, but it was really getting in the way of her sales calls. It was really getting in the way of somebody thinking like, "This is worth $3,000 or $4,000."

When she shifted that and she got into the discovery call process and framework that I taught her, everything changed. She's the same stylist. It wasn't a matter of her services or anything like that. It wasn't a matter of her ability to help people. It was simply the way she was holding the conversation. That's really, really important.

Then the last part that I think is really hard for us to remember sometimes, I know I have struggled with this, is how much clear communication and our processes within the styling container contribute to how good of a client somebody is.

So the final mechanism for really maintaining an ideal client, so they sign as an ideal client, but we want to keep up that behavior, we want to reward that good behavior basically, is when we falter in our client experience.

I've talked a lot about client experience, but this is the part where people get a little, I don't want to say lazy, I think they just don't even know what to do because it's such a hazy area because no one goes to school to be a stylist and run a business even if you learn the theory and the color and the body analysis and all those things.

No one tells you how to run the business side in depth. So no shade. If you struggle with these things, I learned through really working with other creative entrepreneurs and other business owners.

It wasn't really from inside the industry that I learned these things. So even if somebody has worked with another stylist before, your process is unique to you and most clients have not worked with a stylist before. So they don't know what to expect. They only know what their experiences of shopping or styling themselves or editing their closet is.

Likely those were not the correct ones because if they were, they wouldn't need you as an expert. You have to remember that you want to act like they came to a new land and they've never seen the street signs, they don't know how the traffic works. They don't know the way this all works.

So you want to do a couple of things that I've seen really help keep that client in an ideal client space. The first is set clear expectations for all sessions and all conversations at all calls in advance. Let the client know what you're going to be covering at each session, how many sessions there are, and how they can prepare.

Number two, you want to provide detailed instructions for things like online shopping and writing and verbally. So explain how many types of items they should order, how many sizes, why you recommend people order multiple sizes. I think sometimes we forget that other people don't do this because they panic about their credit card going up, up, up.

You want to make sure you get in front of that to help people. You're obviously going to be able to return things. I'm going to pull things from places you can return. That sounds obvious, but it's not to a lot of people.

I've also had stylists work with people that had really bad experiences with stylists, and they didn't pull from places where they could return, or they weren't really transparent about certain things, or they were not upfront that they only pull from certain stores because of the commission they get, which I think is deeply unethical, especially if you are also charging for your time and those things need to be upfront. Period. End of sentence.

Otherwise, you will feel like they've been duped. What should they do if they order something and it doesn't work out? Which is relax, it's not a big deal, you'll find them something else. You really need to be able to prepare them for the good things and the bad things in their own head that are going to come up.

Number three, really like I just said, be upfront about the realities of the styling process. Let them know that they will not love everything and that finding pieces that they really like take time even with a stylist.

The more you upfront this conversation before you've ever ordered clothes, the more this becomes a non-issue. What happens is that when you don't point out, the things could get triggered or that they could get frustrated that things don't work, when you don't point that out before the clothes are already in their house, it happens a little bit less in the dressing room and that's because you can have the conversation in real-time, but if you're a virtual stylist, this could be the most important piece of information I give you in this episode and it's you have to have a process.

You have to have a process that tells them the things that could go wrong when they're away from you because they're away from you 90% of the time so that they know to get on the call with you, so that they know to get into communication with you, not go back to the story in their head, “See, nothing works. My body type is tricky. This is hard. I'm not meant to be stylish. Even a stylist can't do it.”

That's what's happening when a client goes to you. That's what happens when you don't know what happened to them. Some people go towards things when they're upset, they're more confrontational with the upset. Other people, most people, 90% of people in my experience, they go silent and they pull away and they withdraw because they do not have the emotional skills to communicate what's happening.

So that is why you can't give people those emotional skills but this is why discovery calls are important. This is why having expectations upfront of “You're going to have to communicate with me,” this is why these types of things help you call in the right client, because 90% of people, including clients I work with right now, when things aren't going right, they don't come and tell me, they behave in wonky ways.

We're all human beings, we're all doing the best we can, but it's deeply problematic for any container where you're trying to get somebody results and where they're supposed to be attached to getting the result.

The more you can do the work upfront in how you onboard them, how you have your sales call, how you market to them before they ever become a client, the better you're going to get. We want people that are as healthy and developed and adult as possible, and not everybody is and not everybody's aware that they're not, which is why we as stylists have to do our own work to be that way.

We can't run away from every hard feeling. We can't do those things because it will be reflected back to us on our clients. So make sure that you are helping them win this process, especially virtually by letting them know things aren't going to work. You're not going to like everything that I do. We're still partners. We're going to handle it.

Then the last one is to establish clear communication channels and response time. Let the client know when and how they can reach out to you, when and how you'll reply, how long it usually takes you to communicate back with them and stick to that. Repeat it in every email. Repeat it at the bottom of your footer in your email. Repeat it back as often as possible, because people feel safe when they know exactly how and when to communicate.

They don't want to overstep their bounds, they don't want to come off as annoying, they don't want to come off as rude, so they often say nothing. Then that sets everybody up for more issues.

These are all things I go over in Income Accelerator, the psychology of this, why it's good for the business, how and when to do it, because there are certain points in the process that if you say something, it could be a little bit jarring to the client.

All of this is stuff I go over so if you want to learn more, get on the next wait list. But just remember you are taking care of clients when you communicate. Do not feel like you're doing something that's like, “I've had stylists but I think it's low status.” There's nothing more low status and makes you look less like an expert than not setting people up for success.

If that's some belief you have somewhere knocking around, get rid of that, because this is going to make you a really successful business owner by upping the amount of repeat clients that you have because of how incredible your experience is.

Then as I just close this episode, I want to remind you that if you've not had great client experiences, for whatever reason, maybe you're listening to this and you're realizing that your communication throughout the process wasn't the best, or maybe your sales skills are not where they could be, forgive yourself and spend at least as much time as you are agonizing over what went wrong with clients, updating your systems so that your communication and your client experience is better so that you can set the right tone going forward.

Nothing is a failure ever in your business unless you don't learn from it. If you don't learn from things and you just keep doing the same thing over again, you're failing. If you have a bad experience or you make a mistake and then you go and you learn from it and you change things in your business, you are doing exactly what you're supposed to do. You're growing, you're changing, you're evolving.

Exactly what you ask of your clients, you're doing. You are in integrity in your business. Let that fall to the wayside and just be obsessed with how you can make your experience better.

So a quick recap of what we talked about today. You're going to craft your messaging and your marketing to reflect your values and the traits of your ideal client. You're going to use your sales call and discovery process to set expectations, demonstrate your expertise as a stylist. You're going to maintain your very amazing, clear communication and processes throughout your working relationship with clients.

I just want to remind you that attracting the right client isn't just about making your work easier, it's really about creating the best brand that you possibly could. Because when you work with people who truly value what you offer, you do your best work and then you create transformative results that other people can see, whether that's because of the client testimonial that you create or because people that are in your world as clients are referring you to other people that they care about and love because the experience was so good.

I hope this episode gave you some actionable strategies to implement your styling business. Hope it was helpful and don't forget that if you enjoyed this, go leave me reviews so that I can reach even more stylists and that stylists can make more of the impact they're meant to in the world and help other people show up more fully. I'll talk to you in the 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.