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.

A very common question that I've been asked a lot over the years by stylists is, "Do you think that my marketing isn't converting because I'm not showing before and after photos of my clients?" I remember wondering the same thing when I was a personal stylist, particularly in the period of my business when I was in the $50,000 to $60,000 point and I couldn't seem to break past it. I thought that maybe the reason I wasn't selling enough through social media was because I didn't have these really flashy, really professional-looking before-and-after photos.

It is a really big question in our industry. Should you have before and after photos? Is that what's going to make you look legitimate? And why does it often feel so uncomfortable to stylists to do that? Why does it feel like it's somehow exploitive to our clients?

Here's the truth. Client results do matter, but not in a before-and-after way exactly. Very few stylists know how to show the results that they get with a client in a way that helps potential clients looking at your marketing actually see themselves in the transformation. Most before-and-after photos focus on the stylist's skills and the client’s outcome—what their outfits look like—not on the story that helps the viewer locate themselves in the change they're seeing on your grid, in your story, or on your website.

Having sales skills is not the same thing as before and after marketing. In fact, so many people who put a lot of resources into their marketing often get professional before and afters and never sell from them. I also used to feel like it was saying that my clients had bad style before, which didn't seem very uplifting or in alignment with my values.

I think that now my view on this, now that I understand sales and how this works, that actually, if you have before and afters that are not super shocking—I never had any that were like so shocking, also because, it's not like I have professional hair and makeup in my client’s bedroom when I was doing photos, right? I also didn’t have a lot of photos of my clients looking homeless or bad or terrible before, and it felt weird to have that be staged.

One of the things that I think is super important about this conversation is for you to get that I will talk through how to use before and after photos if you want to do them. But the principle at play here, and why I actually think before and after photos are such a good example of why the industry as a whole struggles to be profitable, is because of the psychology behind why before and after photos often don’t convert, and what to do instead.

There’s a way to make them convert if that is something that works for you and works for your clients. It doesn’t have to be predatory. It doesn’t have to be weird, especially if you have the ability to take really great photos and your clients are on board with it, obviously. Sometimes the fact that the before and afters aren’t so shocking—they’re just more polished—makes them more relatable to your audience.

So wherever you fall in this, I want you to listen with an open mind and just understand that whether you’re using photos or not, the principles we’re going to talk about apply in how you talk about your clients first and foremost.

The real problem with before-and-after photos is that they collapse a very complex transformation into two snapshots. They skip over the most important part of the transformation—the bridge—how the client got from one version of themselves to another. When the bridge is missing, your audience can’t see a way into your results for themselves. They look at those photos and think, “She looks great. He looks amazing. But that could never be me.”

There’s a reason for this. In psychology, there is a term called narrative identity. It is the internal story we tell ourselves about who we are, where we’ve been, and who we’re becoming. When you only show before and afters, or you just say, “My client came to me and didn’t feel confident, and now she feels confident,” if you’re doing this verbally, you erase the middle. The middle is the part where the transformation happens and where you, by sharing that point, begin to build trust with your audience.

Now, here’s a very interesting thing about before and after photos that I want to address for my OGs out there listening. A decade ago—maybe a little bit more—before and afters actually did work because people had never seen styling results that were that dramatic. Think of What Not to Wear, the old version. Those images offered proof that transformation was even possible at a time when people had never heard of personal styling.

I don’t care what you say in your marketing—people know that personal stylists exist, especially the people who are actually going to hire personal stylists. Everyone does not think they’re just for celebrities because you can walk into a Nordstrom and there’s somebody called a personal stylist in there for free.

So what you have to get about the reason why before and afters stopped working is that, number one, the way that content has evolved is that people are showing their own before and afters. You have influencers showing outfits. You have people selling clothes for brands through that before and after process who are not stylists.

The second reason is that people are being sold to all the time online—constantly. When someone sees a client of yours or an influencer’s outfit that looks expensive, even if it’s not, they’re not necessarily thinking, “I want that.” They’re often thinking, “That’s for somebody that’s richer, thinner, or more confident. I couldn’t pull that off.”

That’s because the people who are watching you have not been trained through your content, through your mindset-shifting perspective—which is why you have to have an opinion on social media—to see that something could be possible for them before you show the before and after.

So it doesn’t just work to throw up before and afters if your other content isn’t working, or even to just share before and after emotional, like how your client felt about their clothes before and after. If you’re not helping people in your content see and shift their own thoughts, then they will excuse somebody else’s results as, “They have more money, they have a thinner body, they have a more supportive spouse,” whatever it is they tell themselves about why they can’t have something, even as they watch a stylist’s content—so clearly they’re interested.

The result is from the change in society, the change of how people are being sold to on social media, and the fact that everyone is selling somebody clothes right now, you have a very high point of skepticism. There’s a lot being discussed in the online space about this right now, but I just think it’s true in all spaces. People are very skeptical.

So if marketing feels harder, it’s because it is—because you actually have to earn your results. With the reality that it has never been easier to start an online business because it’s not that expensive—there are websites that are plug and play, it doesn’t cost that much to get a domain, social media is free—there is a flip side. It is easy, but it’s actually hard to get people’s attention, which means excellence is rising to the top really fast.

I would argue the bar isn’t that high, but it’s the reason why people feel like they’re struggling. Because if you were doing before and afters or certain kinds of content—and I work with many stylists who have really good client testimonials, video, and stuff like that—they’re not necessarily selling.

The reason why is that, A, people are skeptical. The second reason is people want you to tailor your content to them. They have their pick of everything they could possibly want, so if it doesn’t speak to them immediately, basically, they’re going to keep scrolling.

I think a lot of stylists who have the instinct and feel uncomfortable with posting before and afters, the reason why is because it can feel a little predatory. It can feel shallow. If that’s not something you feel about before and afters—if you think they’re a good tool—it’s not that you are being predatory or shallow. It’s that the reality is people just don’t see it if you don’t tailor that before and after to them.

On the flip side of this, if you do feel that they’re predatory and shallow, so you haven’t done them, it’s probably because you are also unaware of how to tailor it to the person that’s watching it and speak about your client in a way that makes them the hero—that makes them the star, not a mess that you came in and saved. Because that’s not the vibe we want either, because then people who want you to fix them come to you.

Again, you need to be a partner with your client, not a doctor that fixes their self-esteem. It says a lot about the integrity of the industry, I think, that people are not sure how to balance this. I want to help you all see that this is possible for you if you want to do it.

If you don't want to do it or it does feel predatory, you still have a responsibility to show results and make it clear to people how it relates to them. Again, I'm going to tell you this for the 50 billionth time on this podcast: if you don't know who you're talking to and you're just talking to women who want to feel confident, it's going to be hard to do what we're going to talk about today.

One of the reasons why I really recommend people have a target market for at least a few years while they get to six figures—usually once you get there, you want to stay—is because it's very hard to do the work we're going to talk about in this podcast without specificity. That's why people will pay you more now because, again, everyone’s selling to you. People want to be sold to specifically.

We are in an identity-based society where people want what they want, and they can have what they want. So if they don't get it from you, they're going to go somewhere else. Here's what your audience is going to need to see now that we've gotten that specificity out of the way. People do not buy styling because of cute outfits. They buy because they trust that you can help them become the version of themselves they want to be.

Here’s exactly how we’re going to get you from showing your client results and getting no sales to showing client results and, with time, getting sales. You have to build trust through the story, which is the bridge—what happened internally for your client between that before and after. Again, it could be the image of the client's outfits, or it could just be the frame of thought: how they felt about themselves before, how they felt about themselves after working with you.

When you skip that part, your marketing feels surface-level. It doesn't justify the price tag of the majority of the stylists that I work with. If you are under $1,000 or you have a couple of hundred dollars here, a couple of hundred dollars there, maybe you can get someone to hire you as an experience, but they won’t stay long term because real transformation, real identity change, happens in the internal narrative—not in the photo.

For your buyer and for your client, which is why this is such a cool concept, the same thing that gets the client to wear the clothes and feel good about themselves is the same thing that you need to show in your marketing to get people to trust you in order to take the step to feel good about themselves. So what is the bridge? It is the story of how your client experienced a change emotionally, mentally, and practically in their daily lived experience.

When you tell that story, your marketing becomes very powerful because the viewer can see themselves in it. Without it, your content may feel aspirational, and it may be something that gets viewed or goes viral, but it's entertainment. It's not relevant to their life.

To make the bridge visible in your before-and-afters or in your storytelling about clients, you have to explain the following. One, who your client was before—I need some context. What stage of life were they in? What wasn't working? How was it affecting their daily life? Two, what shifted? What realization or process helped them start to see differently, specifically in your work together? What were some of the mindset shifts they had? Three, what you actually did together during the styling process—what part of your process created the change?

I understand most stylists are like, “It's all the parts. You can’t have it great if it’s all. You can’t have it without the edit. You can’t have it without the shop. You can’t have it without the style.” Yes, true. But if you are paying attention and dialed into your work with a client the way you should be, especially if you’re charging thousands of dollars, you should be able to tell me for each client what part of their process specifically created the biggest shift for them, because it should be different for every client.

It usually is. Maybe it’s two parts of the process, but it isn’t all of them equally because where their mindset is and what they feel most stuck in will be represented by one of those elements—the edit, the shop, or the style. The last question is, who are they able to be? What are they able to do? Or what are they able to have in their own mind as a result of your work together? That is so critical.

If you can’t answer that, that means there’s probably a problem in your process. You need to be able to speak about your process so confidently that you feel like if people don’t buy from you, it is a detriment to their life. That’s how I feel about my programs. Why? Because I’ve spent so much time refining them, and I’ve spent so much time talking to my ideal clients.

That’s the level of buy-in you have to have right now in the industry, online, in person, in general, as a business owner, to get people to pay attention because that’s how you can create the marketing that actually gets people to watch, believe, and trust you.

One of the things I love about this conversation is that often what gets revealed when I’m helping my clients figure out how to get more sales from their marketing and their before and afters or their client experience or their testimonials—because this all also works with testimonials—is that it is revealed that when I try to figure out from them what it was that created the biggest change in the client, they cite their effort.

They cite examples of what I would call overcompensating for basically a process that’s broken. If they don’t see that the client’s getting a shift, they’ll do more. They’ll do more shopping. They’ll do more options. They’ll create endless amounts of outfits. But the reality is that transformation is never created by doing more for your clients.

You should have your packages outlined, and you do what you do for every client. Because you bring them through a step-by-step process that you’re aware of how it works and where the identity trigger changes are, you can just rinse and repeat it. There should not be any “everybody gets a different à la carte, I'm creating one-off styling proposals” for everybody. It’s very rare unless a client has a massive budget or they’re very public-facing.

Real results for styling clients are actually created by doing less from the stylist but doing it well, making sure every part of your process is very clear and refined. And by helping your client reflect more deeply on who they are becoming, because the more you’re doing, doing, doing, the more you’re distracting them from the inner awareness and from the thoughtfulness that they need to have to be able to reflect back to you where the transformation actually happened.

So when people are trying to go back and figure out, “Well, how do I create this bridge story? How do I figure out where the client had the biggest breakthrough?” They often don’t know, nor does the client, when they go back and interview them. That’s because what is revealed when I’m coaching with my clients is that they are wanting to be transformational and they’re wanting to get transformational results, but they are doing, doing, doing, and they’re keeping the focus on the clothes, not on how the person feels in the clothes or what people are actually wanting from the clothes.

So there’s never a transformation. There’s just a whole lot of outfits. In order for something to be transformational, it has to be very well outlined, very well documented. Your client needs to know what step comes next so they can focus on their own inner experience and reflection and be able to report back to you what they’re getting out of it.

Whether or not you do a testimonial, whether or not you do a before and after, your client needs to participate. So you will never be able to get what you need from your client—and from your own services, quite frankly, and from your client results—if you are overcompensating for a business model that was not well thought out.

So your marketing needs to reflect where the client had the shift. That has to result from the fact that you are, in fact, attracting clients who want to be in partnership with you, who will communicate with you, who are excited to tell you their results. When you show this bridge, when you show the why behind the transformation, that is what makes people believe it's possible for them too.

Because everybody has the experience of buying something from an ad or buying something from someone they saw online, putting it on them, and it doesn’t feel good. People used to do this back before the internet when they would see someone else’s outfit, go and buy it, and it didn’t feel right.

So it’s not about proving you’re a good stylist by having these amazing over-the-top outfits or these professional photos. It’s about showing what your process changes and how people see themselves—both what actually happens, like what part of the process does it specifically, not the whole process, and what has shifted that the client felt or saw about themselves before that they see differently today so that they show up differently.

I can’t emphasize enough that the best question you can ask your clients after working with you is what do they feel that they can do, be, or have now after the styling experience that they weren’t so confident they could do, be, or have before. It is the most telling question, and it is the difference in you being able to speak with conviction about your services and sell them without even feeling like you’re selling them. Because when you include that, even if you do have before and after photos, they start to sell themselves instead of just being examples of how you have a good eye as a stylist.

Like I said, if people don’t see themselves in the emotional experience of your client, they will say, “Well, it’s good for them, but it can’t work for me.” So whether you’re new to styling or you’re already established, this principle applies at every level. When you’re newer, understanding this at the beginning of your career gives you a really solid foundation for marketing that converts and for asking your clients that question, “What can you do, be, and have now that you didn’t feel like you could before?”

If people can answer that easily and quickly, it means that you are doing the right kind of work. If they can’t, then it’s probably the result of not you being a bad stylist, but your process not actually doing the work, the real work that transformational styling is about. If you’re an established stylist, this is what it actually means to walk the talk of transformational styling. Because what I see is a lot of stylists using this term, which by the way, nobody out there understands what it means. It’s an inside baseball term. It’s not an outside term. So it doesn’t mean anything. People just think it’s the equivalent of saying before and after.

Being able to tell the story of the bridge between the before and after—of what the client experiences differently, how they look at themselves differently, how they move differently—if you can have that conversation with the client and they can give you real examples, then you know you’re on the right track.

The other part of this, if you’re a stylist who’s looking to scale and you want to really think about thought leadership as a serious part of your business, the ability to articulate not just what you do but how specifically it changes people on an identity level is what positions you as an authority in the industry and gives you opportunities that get people to a half a million dollars or a million dollars. That is what’s going to open your world to possibilities. So it is worth doing the work to be able to get this skill down.

The goal of this conversation was for me to help show you that anytime you get anxious, as I have been in the past as a stylist, about your before and afters and making sure that they’re good enough and making sure that they’re sparkly enough, you are fundamentally working from your ego, as I was for a long time. All human beings do. I still do sometimes. You’re trying to prove that you’re a good stylist.

It’s not that that’s bad. Of course, you want to be good. But the best mindset shift I can give you is to start focusing more on showing how your process helps your clients become who they want to be and making sure that you are building in time to have those conversations with your clients.

You having those conversations, yes, helps your marketing, but they also help that client who has a million other things going on in their life actually metabolize what they just experienced in your work together. If you want to include before and after photos, or you want to do a client interview, please go and do that. Because with this information that you have today, you’re going to be able to build the bridge between who they are now and who they want to be or who they’re becoming. That is what makes it not predatory.

Because there’s a human being behind the story, not just, “Oh, there’s a lady who wore leggings all the time and looked dumpy. Now look what my amazing skills did.” There’s a bigger context, a bigger conversation. That’s when a lot of clients, when you’re having these conversations with them, that’s actually when they’re more open to you doing that before and after. You can also just do it in outfit layouts. You don’t have to—in Canva—you don’t actually have to have their face there. You can narrate all of this in a talking head video with just two styled outfits of the before and the after, and then demographic information, of course.

It’s always going to be more valuable if you could see a human face. But again, not everybody wants to be on the internet, and that’s understandable. But what it is never going to be is that the reason why you’re not selling is because there’s no before and afters. Because again, you can have before and afters, but if there’s no bridge and there’s no humanity behind the story, it’s not going to matter.

So you can just take that anxiety off your plate right now and focus on getting the types of conversations happening in your world with clients, because that’s what people are going to connect to in your storytelling or in before-and-after conversations. That’s what makes people buy because, at the end of the day, this is a business. The more sales you get as a stylist means that more people’s lives are actually transformed.

When you are producing results where someone can answer you about what they can be, do, or have now that they couldn’t before, I promise you, you will be so much more confident in selling your services because you know that they make a difference. You don’t just hear a client say, “Oh, I got some compliments.” That’s irrelevant. That does not mean they are transformed.

Transformed means they can see the difference in what’s possible for them on a daily basis, not just, “Oh, that’s a cute look.” Anyone can do that. People can buy from an influencer, and it can be a cute look. That’s not what we are here for. So get this skill because not only will it be something that transforms your business, but you can take this skill with you anywhere at any time and start to attract the right kinds of people into your life because you’re humanizing the experience that many people like to say, “Oh, it’s not for me. I can’t have that.”

You get to be a stand for people getting the results they want through their style when you learn how to market like this. It is so much bigger than just making some money on the internet because it’s very inspiring to people, and it gets them to take action, which is what we’re here for. I’ll talk to you next time.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me. It turns out that social proof is actually pretty important. So if you could help me out, I'd so appreciate it. If you just had a quick free moment and could leave me a rating or review on the podcast app, that would be killer. And even better, if you wanted to share this episode on Instagram and tag me, that would totally make my day and it would bring so much more awareness to the podcast and would help other stylists just like you who are looking to build lucrative styling business because the better each of us does, the better all of us do. Thanks for hanging out with me and I'll chat with you next time.