PODCAST SHOWNOTES

So I have a fitness coach named Ashley, who I have been working with for about a year to get my nutrition in order and to start lifting weights after years of just doing Pilates. Now that I'm 45 and that's apparently just what we all do, we lift weights. Before I hired Ashley, I probably spent a year and a half getting ready to get in shape. I had multiple YouTube lists of workouts and stretches that I was going to do. I had definitely at least 100 TikTok videos saved on meal plans and high-protein recipes that I never actually started. And here's the part that really gets me now that I've been working with Ashley for a while. I wasn't just stuck, I was preparing to do the wrong things. Because what I didn't know at the time was that random YouTube workout playlists weren't going to give me results. There was no progression built in. You're just doing random things. And I didn't know anything about the concept of progressive overload, which is apparently incredibly important if you're going to spend any time lifting weights. I knew eating protein was important, but I had no idea I needed way more fiber to go with that protein and that was why I was always hungry even after I was eating protein. I was expecting to see visible muscle after a month and knew nothing about a concept called nutritional periodization, which apparently is what helps shrink the fat, build the muscle and actually show your definition after all that lifting of heavy things.

So all of that preparing was actually just me preparing to spin my wheels more. I'm telling you this because I watch stylists do the exact same thing, when they're building their first real multi-part styling offer. Not just the not starting yet part, which we talked about in the last episode, the preparing and focusing on the wrong things part. And most stylists don't even realize that that is what's happening, just like I didn't either, until I hired Ashley. And that is what we're going to talk about today.

I'm Nicole Otchy and this is The Six Figure Personal Styling Podcast. The show for personal stylists building world-class businesses and setting the standards in the industry. Profitable growth, thought leadership, real client transformations. That's what we're covering. Because the best stylists don't just edit closets, they shape culture. Let's get into it.

One of the reasons I believe so much in the work that I do is because I launched my own personal styling business almost 20 years ago now, which is crazy, with the help of an online business program specifically for personal stylists. I truly could not see at the time what it saved me, the pricing questions, the business name questions, the legal structure, all of the things that I would be spending on for years, the right number of sessions for a package, the right pricing for different levels, when and how to market. All of it would have happened in isolation with no real client feedback, because I wouldn't have even launched anything without the structure in place to do so that that company gave me. And I am to this day so incredibly grateful. And it's truly what has inspired the work I do now. And so that experience is a big part of why I decided to build my foundations program. And it's why today's episode even exists.

Because what I see often is that stylists spend months, sometimes years working on things that feel productive to building their offer, but aren't actually building towards a functional styling offer that the market will buy. And when I dig into what's actually going on, it almost comes back to the same two things. So that's what we're going to cover today. And I want you to listen to both of these carefully, because one of them is almost certainly where you're going to lose your time and your money right now, if you're a stylist that is just starting out looking to get beyond friends and family or want to do this full time without realizing it. So this episode is going to save you a lot of heartache.

Here's the first thing. Before you build a package that is multiple parts and you go to sell it for what you probably consider a lot of money, like hundreds, thousands of dollars, your individual sessions need to be very tight. So your closet edit session, your shopping session, your styling sessions, each of these needs to be something that you can clearly and confidently run in under three hours, under three hours. Not because three hours is a magic number, but because after about two and a half hours, people are not usually able to focus, meaning the client, they get overwhelmed, the client and you start to lose momentum. And what I see is that when stylists regularly go over that amount of time, four, five, six hours, the stylist often thinks that they have given the client a lot of value and the client is thinking this took way too long. Even if the client is being polite, the reality is, nobody wants somebody that is not their friend or family in their house for six hours editing in their closet.

Now, you might say the person had a lot of clothes, blah, blah, blah. You want to break that up because at some point, the decision-making starts to wane. And that is actually what I learned very early on in my career from some stylists that I shadowed in New York, when I was first starting out and it was really game-changing for me. And then when I realized how it hit my services and how it allowed me to have a better result with the client and what it meant about decision-making, I was like, oh, this makes so much sense. So if the service isn't tight yet at each of those stages, you are not ready to go to a larger package, because a package is just a combination of those individual services with better systems between them, in order to create a bigger and more comprehensive transformation. There's also a lot in here about like how you're having conversations with them and all of that, but we're just going to talk about the mechanics, because that's something that all of you can take and run from this episode.

So there are more parts, more touch points, more places for things to go sideways. And if your closet edit is already running long and it's chaotic and doesn't have a very clear order and you're not able to prep the client in advance and do all of these important touch points. Adding a shopping trip and following up styling sessions to create like a bigger package is not going to fix the client's perception of you. And it's probably not going to go as well as it could have. In fact, the client's probably staying with a stylist that's doing like four or five, six hour closet edits, because it's sunk cost at that point. And now you have a client who has had three underwhelming experiences instead of one. And you've likely charged pretty high rates for that. Or I see a lot of stylists who know that their packages are going too long and they think there's no way I could charge this amount. But instead of fixing the process and making sure that they actually have tighter individual sessions, they undercharge.

So what ends up happening is they end up taking on the burden, but still not having a great client experience as a result. No client wants to be with you while they're hungry, editing a closet or shopping. You also need to be able to prepare your clients for each of those sessions so that they are not hungry, so that their credit card doesn't get shut off, when they go shopping with you, if you're in person. These are all things that I did not know that I was taught in the beginning that now, when I use a stylist, they're like, oh my gosh, how did I not know this? And how many clients did I burn through and not give them professional experience that would have stayed with me longer if I had? Because a lot of stylists don't realize that it's not just a delivery problem. Even if the client's like, I love my outfits, I got really cool clothes, they're building a reputation problem.

And what I see is stylists who can stay in this loop for a really long time, not because they're not great stylists. Again, they could be amazing stylists, but logistics just isn't their strength. And they don't know what the benchmark is, which is why I think it's important stylists know you should not be regularly going over three hours with the client. They launch a package because they think that that is the move, that's what they see everyone else doing. And once the sessions start to run long and the client feels vaguely unsatisfied, the stylist starts to pick up on that. And then they over deliver, or they drop their rate next time, because she has a stylist or he has a stylist who doesn't feel like they can justify it. And then that creates a system of beliefs in the stylist that they just need more experience, when what they actually need is a tighter process, so that they can make the rest of their experiences go better. It's not like a moral failing to not know this. I had no idea about this until somebody told me.

And so the stylists who move to packages and hold premium rates, once they get there are the ones who have their individual sessions really clean first. And many of them still don't have the processes and the systems they should have, but at least the client experience feels a little bit more elevated. They know what to do when a client wants to pull them off track during a closet edit. They know how to run a shopping trip that saves focus. They know how to close a styling section so that the client actually feels like that it's finished. And there's not like endless back and forth text messages about what about one more thing? What about one more thing? That is the foundation of building a professional styling business. It is not your branding, it is not having a website, it is not your niche, it is not your Instagram bio. None of that. It's the ability to run each session well, consistently, in a reasonable amount of time that keeps the client engaged in the process, which means you also need to have the touch points around it, like the client prep, the communication, in order to achieve that.

So you've already heard Bari's story on this podcast and I just want to share a little piece of it that's relevant here. Bari came to me with very limited experience as a stylist. She had done work as a vintage curator and had styled people in that context, plus friends. But that was kind of the full extent of it. And so when she set her mind on starting a styling business, she came to me and said, I also need to get experience when we work together. By many people's standards, what Bari and I did in under six months together would not have been, quote, reasonable. But she was able to get a pretty big package, multiple pretty big packages off actually and start charging premium rates for it in, order to get her foundation of her business to six figures within that six months. And I want you to sit with that for a second, because during the time we worked together, in those six months, she also took trial clients. Because she had the guidance and we had worked together, it was easy for her to trust that when I said she had, you know, so many experiences, like I think it was five with strangers, because she had a really great Instagram following, that it was time to launch it. And she just did it.

And she was marketing regularly, even though she didn't necessarily know what she was doing, she was showing up. Because that is a true and real data point about what's actually possible, when you have the right structure and you're not spending years trying to figure out, did that client like me? Did they not like me? Did that work? Am I good at this? You can't know if you're good at it if you don't have a structure, like we talked about last episode, to actually hold the work. So many stylists overperform and call it transformational, when they don't have the mechanisms that need to be there for the client experience, let alone their own sanity. And it wasn't having a ton of confidence or knowing everything perfectly that got Bari to that six-figure business within the year and it wasn't like tons of years of experience. Like most of you she had similar experience, where she has incredible taste, she's an exceptional stylist, she had a great eye for vintage, she had seen a lot but she didn't have like years and years and years of, you know, client experience under her belt, before she went full-time. Like so many people I work with think they have to. She didn't have like a perfect Instagram grid or, you know, a perfectly built-out brand. She did it herself. It was getting her individual sessions tight, using my framework, getting a handful of test clients so she could see them work in real time and then launching her packages at full price with enough evidence that she could hold that rate without flinching. That is the secret, get the sessions to work, build the package. And if you've been telling yourself that you need more experience before you can charge real rates, I want you to think about that, because she didn't wait until she felt ready. She built the thing that made her ready.

The second thing I want to talk about with respect to building your first packages is that before you can put a client in the right service, whether that's a one-off or a multi-part service, you need to be leading your sales conversations. Not just listening to what the client says that he or she wants. Because what I see often is that a stylist gets on a call with a potential client. The client says they want a shopping trip, because that's what most people want for a stylist. So the stylist books a shopping trip as a one-off. They get there and within 20 minutes, it's clear that the client doesn't actually know anything about their style. The stylist hasn't done any kind of style discovery with them. The client is reporting that they need this, they need that, but there's no cohesion to the shopping list. This person doesn't really know how to dress their body. They don't understand the proportions. They don't probably like their body that much, because they hate shopping every single time. It's never people that love shopping that hire a stylist.

And a shopping trip isn't what that client ultimately needs to fix what they're experiencing on a daily basis. Most likely, a lot of times, what clients need is a closet edit and a styling session, before they shop so that there could be better understanding. And there definitely needs to be style discovery so that you and the client are on the same page. But now the stylist is three hours into a shopping trip where she's not prepared, she's running all over the place. And she's trying to please someone, when there's no groundwork for what will actually be the standard. So you're trying to figure out how to wrap this up without the client feeling shortchanged, because you walked in and realized, oh, there's a lot more here than just shopping. So what ends up happening is the stylist will often throw in extra time, or they add on styling help. Or I see this with closet edits. You get to the closet edit, because the person calls you and says that's what they want, a closet edit. Then you get in there and you realize, wait, you don't even know how to wear your clothes. So the stylist starts putting outfits together.

But then they charge the same rate as they would for the original shopping session, that's three hours, or the closet edit alone. But now they've done shopping and styling and they're charging the same amount. And then some version of this happens again with the next client and the next one, because they don't know how to qualify clients into their offers. And then they feel like selling is gross. Selling isn't gross, if you know how to put people in the right offers. What can feel gross is when we put people in offers that we are not sure they are the right fit for, because we don't get the sales call structure we need, to qualify them. And this is how stylists end up doing three services for the price of one for years. And again, this has nothing to do with your eye as a stylist or your styling skills. It's just you don't have the sales skills you need, in order to flourish and to let your actual styling talent do its job, so you end up being overworked, you end up under charging. And it feels like you can never kind of get a firm sense of, if you're doing a good job, if people are happy and scope creep keeps going up and up and up.

Because the reality is that when someone comes to you as a potential client, they know that they're unhappy getting dressed in the morning. What they don't know is whether they need a closet edit, a shopping trip, a styling session, or a combination of those, some combination in order to get them there. And it is your job to figure that out as a professional stylist. And the only way to figure it out is to ask the right questions, before you ever book the appointment and take their money. When you learn to do that, selling doesn't feel as scary, because you feel more confident in your abilities to put people in the right offers. The specific questions I use and the full sales call process I teach is something that's live inside all of my programs, including the new foundations program. And I'm not going to get into that here, because it requires a much longer conversation, but you do need to be able to think through this.

If your sales conversations currently start with your client telling you what they want and you're just booking it, that's something to look at. You may want to ask something like, what makes you think that it is a shopping session that you need? Or how come you are sure that the problem is starting in your closet and we need to start there with an edit? Those are the kinds of things that are going to get the person talking and help you better understand them. Before the package, before you charge their card, before you take their money, before there's Venmo, which we'll talk about why we're not going to be doing Venmo, before any of it.

And so here's what I want to leave you with. If you are building towards your first real package, or you really want to make this a full-time gig and you need to make significant amounts of money to replace a full-time job, the question isn't whether your branding is right or your niche is specific enough. The question is whether your individual sessions are tight enough and whether you know how to lead a client to the right service, before the work begins. So that when you step into higher priced offers, you can confidently hold that price and market at that price.

Because, like I said in the last episode, most of the people that I work with are of a lot of integrity, they are perfectionists. And so they try to get in the reps, but they're getting in the wrong reps to build their expertise. So if you can say that you can get the majority of your sessions in, in under three hours with the client, your edit, your shop, your style and you know how to qualify people on sales calls into the right offer for them, then you probably are ready to build a multi-part, much more expensive, high-touch styling package.

If the answer to either of those is no, then that is where your energy belongs right now. Not in more research, not in more content, not in fixing things that you think you might need one day and definitely not in more branding. Because if you think about what I shared about my experience hiring my fitness coach Ashley at the top of the episode, which changed when I hired her, was not that I got more information. I had a ton of information. What changed was that she assessed where I actually was, figured out what I actually needed and built a plan with real progression behind it. She built something for me that was designed to produce results, not just to keep me busy, which is what I was doing on my own.

And that is what it looks like when you have a structure that you are working towards as an expert, instead of a random playlist like I had. So if you've been at the playlist phase, consuming and preparing and not quite launching, or if you've launched but your sessions are still running very long and your sales conversations are kind of letting the client lead, then Foundations is built for exactly where you are. And I would love to have you with me in this first round. We're going to very quickly get all of your individual session types very tight. We're going to build your sales process and we're going to get you to a package that you can charge real substantial rates for and actually deliver and market with complete confidence that you can stand behind it.

The best part about this is you're going to have support while you're doing it, not just a course that you're going to watch and try to figure out on your own. The waitlist opens April 20th and the link is in the show notes. The founding cohort, which is this round that opens on the 20th for the waitlist, is the only version of the Foundation's program that includes live, twice a month support, while you're actively building. Future rounds will be more self-led. So for someone who does better with real-time feedback, while you're in it, this is the round that you want to get in, because we're not going to do it in future ones. There will be support, but it won't be also with live calls. So if you're interested, get on the waitlist and I will see you there. In the meantime, I will talk to you next week.

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.