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.

What if it was possible to entirely rewire your thinking around your pricing and your business such that no matter what state your business was in, no matter how many leads were coming in, no matter how much traction you're getting on social media, it would never occur to you to offer a discount for your personal styling services as a way to jumpstart your business?

That's entirely possible, entirely possible. Today, we're going to talk about the fundamental understanding of discounting that you need to have in order to rewire your brain in the way you think about discounting your styling services.

Because one of the things that I see with stylists at every level, stylists that have teams, stylists that are solos, stylists that are making $100,000, stylists that are making $200,000, stylists that are barely making $50,000, is that it doesn't matter how successful you are, you can get pretty far and still have a part of you that undermines your own belief in what you do.

I think that there is this thought that when you hit this amount of money, all of a sudden you'll feel legitimate. But legitimacy in your business is something you give yourself, not something that other people give you.

The way that that comes to be is that you believe you're a big deal. You become sold on you. You become sold on your offer. You become sold on your transformation that you give your clients.

Sometimes we're so busy in the day-to-day life of trying to build a business, trying to take care of our families, trying to make this thing work or keep this thing working if you've already got it there, that we don't understand or don't even realize that we still are not fully valuing what we do at the level that we should be.

I don't think this is special to stylists. I run in circles with a lot of different entrepreneurs of all different kinds, and I see this at every level. I actually think that every time you get to a new level in your business, you will have the same lessons that you thought that maybe you were past come up again and discounts tend to be like a lesson in disguise, like the desire to give a discount to try to basically hit the easy button in your business to fix something that is in no way related to the amount you are charging for it is a very common thing that we do and I've done it too.

So what I can say about it is that just because the thought enters your mind, it could be something that you'd never entertain again. In fact, how I look at this now is I have zero urge to discount anything that I do.

But if I did, I would take that as a sign that I probably was burnt out, that I felt very frustrated, and that it was more of a signal of my internal world than it was of a way of fixing anything.

So it would alert me to thinking about, “Okay, okay, okay, what is really going on here?” The discount is a sign of an underlying problem that I need to get handled inside myself to take full ownership of my business.

I never, ever, ever, at this point in my career as a stylist, when I was a stylist or now as a business consultant, think the answer is a discount. That is because I discounted so much during the first, I would say four years of my business as a stylist that I learned these lessons firsthand.

It's not that discounts are inherently wrong or they're going to break your business, it's that they genuinely are a way for our brain to try to hit the easy button. In doing that, I'm all about the life hack if it actually solves the problem or gets you the result you want, but this ain't going to solve the problem.

That is what we often don't understand because we do not understand the root of the problem that got us to the point where we're in a situation in our business where we feel like a discount is the only option to try to drum up business.

So today is really not about discounts are good or discounts are bad. It's about understanding what they are a greater symptom of. There are very strategic points in my programs and my one-to-one work that I do sometimes suggest that for a very limited point of time and in a very strategic way, even the way that it is positioned or spoken is so specific that a discount is a means of getting someplace in your business you might want to go and it is never, I repeat, never a public-facing discount.

When I say that these things are very strategic, they are the opposite of what I'm talking about today. What I'm talking about today is that you're going to come to a point in your business where you look up either from worrying about your business or from being in your business and delivering your services and you think, “Oh, no, I don't have enough clients. Oh, no, my messaging isn't working. I feel like I'm doing everything and nobody's buying,” and you're going to go and think, “Maybe if I offer a discount, I can get some people in the door.”

I understand the need to get cash. I get it. I'm not just saying that. I had to pay the rent with my husband who was getting a PhD when I was a stylist. I don't have a trust fund. I didn't marry a rich husband. I don't have that. I didn't have that as a stylist. So when I say, "I get it," I get it.

At the end of this episode, I'm going to share with you a different way to think about getting some money into your business that is not a discount. So stick with me. When that urge comes up to do that discount because you look up and your marketing isn't working or you've been in your business delivering all the services, and now you don't have enough clients because you weren't marketing, that is a knee-jerk reaction. That is an impulse. It is not a strategy.

I think so often we think that things like this are a tactic, or we're being really strategic. But if you think about where it comes from, it comes usually from a negative emotional drive.

Yeah, it comes from a desire to want to fix something, but if you and I were being honest with each other, you'd much rather not discount and have the clients than discount to get the clients. If that's the case, it's not a strategy for growth. It's a Band-Aid on a bullet hole, basically.

Today I want to lay out the three things about discounts that are so, so important for us to peel back the layers and get so that we're not tempted to follow the thought in our brain that a discount is the answer so that we can say thank you for your thoughts but we're going to keep it moving when that idea comes to mind.

I can't emphasize this enough, I see it at every single level. I see it with stylists charging $10,000. I see it with stylists who are barely clearing $500 for a service. I see it at every level because it's just a symptom of a problem, it's not like a real plan. It's not a real tactic when it comes to us in this kind of frenzied state.

The first thing that I really want to touch on here is when that urge comes up to discount, I want you to go for a walk, take a bath, or do whatever you have to do to handle your nervous system, which in and of itself should be an entire podcast, because so many of the decisions we make in our business—and I don't know why more people don't talk about this, this is definitely something that is talked about in rooms with people that I see making a million dollars or half a million dollars, but I do not hear it being talked about at all the levels of business, particularly online—getting a handle on your nervous system is so important, especially in situations like this where this urge is coming up to “fix” something in your business from a place of scarcity and fear, which I get it, you have to pay the mortgage or the bills.

I'm not undermining that and being like, “Let's all be toxically positive.” I'm not going to roll that way with you. That's ridiculous. I'm an adult that understands that we have to pay bills. Period. End of sentence. But when the urge comes up for you to discount your services, what you're doing is you're discounting yourself. You're in a disempowered space.

Again, this is not like you're planning a Black Friday sale at December and it's June now. This is not a strategy that's long-term. This isn't in the moment, “Oh, no, what are we going to do?” You're already like by thinking about the discount, you're discounting yourself.

So when this urge comes up, I want you to first work on your nervous system. Then I want you, when you're a little bit more relaxed and you're in a state where you're not going to judge yourself as best as you can, I want you to think about what happened before the urge came up to offer the discount.

What was going on in your business? Again, was your head down and you were doing client delivery and you took your foot off the gas when it came to marketing? Have you been just throwing spaghetti at the wall, trying to get your messaging to pay off and you're telling yourself, “I'm doing all the things, why is nothing working?” when you're not really coming from a client-centered place, you're just looking around at what everyone else is doing, you're already in not the best place when you're putting out that content, and you're just doing all the tips and tricks.

You're just giving away all the stuff and you're thinking, “I'm putting up my slides and saying you can hire me,” but you're not creating a relationship with your audience. That's likely why things aren't converting for you.

Or is there something else that just happened? Like something in your personal life allowed you for whatever reason to be taken away from your business and you now are looking up and are like, "Oh no, I don't have clients."

If something happened before you had the urge, I need you to diagnose that problem because that problem is going to help us to rewire your brain to never think that a discount is the answer again because all that a discount distracts you from is whatever the problem was that led your business to the point of needing a discount.

So whatever was happening either in your marketing, it's usually a marketing-related issue, like your marketing wasn't converting, it wasn't very good, but you kept doing more of the same even though we have a lot of valid information that it's not working.

Or your marketing generally works, but you've been so busy with client delivery, you haven't been able to be consistent, which is super common and I can say that I still struggle with this often.

This is why having a plan for growth and often growing before you're ready in terms of getting help and getting whether it be consulting, an admin, or whatever it is is so important.

What's so critical is for you to be able to take radical responsibility for everything that happens in your business. I don't mean to blame yourself. I mean, take responsibility in the sense that what actions have you been doing over and over or not doing over and over that led you to this point? Because that's what we have to fix, not the discount.

Because if somebody's bought your services before that is a stranger off the street without a discount, more people will buy it. Period. If people have converted from your marketing before, more people will market again.

It's important for us to just say that dips in business are totally natural and normal. It's how we handle them that's going to be the marker of what happens there. You need to get good at diagnosing the problem that is the actual problem.

Maybe you need to figure out how you talk to people so that they actually convert. If you think that it's your offer, like, “Oh, I need to go find another,” “Okay, I've diagnosed the problem. Nobody wants my service,” I'm going to tell you right now, that's not the problem.

Offers do not sell themselves. The promise of the transformation that the offer holds is what sells it. How you talk about the offer is what sells it. It's never, “It's a closet edit,” nobody cares. They want a result. They want a transformation and how you get them there.

If they trust you to do it over somebody else is a matter of the relationships you build with them, the fact that you have a point of view and you stand out, and the fact that you will show up consistently so that you can be trusted. Those are the pieces that sell the offer, not the offer.

There is no magical styling service that you're going to create that's going to sell itself. It's how you talk about it. That's why there are some people out there in every field that are not even that good at their job but they're great at marketing, and so they do really well. But the delivery of the service or the actual thing that they're producing is trash. If you think it's the offer, it's not. I'm just going to give you that little tip right now.

Once you become someone who's like, "Okay, I'm looking at it. Now I'm going to get help for that problem, or I'm going to try to try something new, or I'm going to do something different, or I'm going to make a plan so the next time I get busy again, I'm going to get back to the plan and when I get busy again with clients, I'm going to figure out how I can schedule things that advance or whatever,” that is going to be way more helpful so that when you're busy, maybe you have a bank of content on your phone that you can just put up or maybe you're just mostly relying on stories so that you're not being forgotten by social media and you're not worrying about the grid for a minute, I want you to just be present and think about “How can I troubleshoot this without changing any of my prices or without changing my service?” because, again, that's not going to be the issue.

It's going to be your marketing, your messaging, your consistency, your ability to show up even when you have a full book of business whenever that starts coming back. What you're doing when you do this is you're training yourself to be a businesswoman or man.

You're training yourself to be the creative CEO of your business by not going to a discount because the next point that I want to hone in on here is that when we go for the discount and we haven't done what I just talked about, which is look at what was happening before the urge to discount, we underestimate the financial damage that is being done to our business because we're not looking at the actual numbers and the reality.

We're not looking at the fact that maybe if we looked at our patterns and looked at our business overall, last year we had the same thing and then we got nine clients and we're the busiest we've ever been.

Maybe we don't even know what we should be charging when we do have clients such that we have some padding for slow times. Because what I see more often than not is that most stylists start their business no matter how successful they are now from this place.

They were really good at helping friends and family with outfits. People asked them for their advice or they had a normal job and people in the office were always like, "Oh, you always look so good. Can you help me get dressed for this or that or whatever?" Then one day, somebody, a sister-in-law, and aunt, somebody turned to them and said, "You should really do this for a living."

For whatever reason, they turned around and were like, "Wait, what? That's an option?" and they were unhappy in their job, or they didn't have a job, or whatever, so they decided to make a go of it. We all go at this from this story-eyed, I think, very impressionable, if you will, excited place.

What ends up happening, and this is true of so many people, but really with stylists, because they're so passionate about what they do in helping people, they start to build the plan while they're flying it.

Then they leave their business in that state, even when they are usually booked or even when they do get a dozen or so clients or more, even when they become pretty established, they're still working from a model that's like a half-built plane, like it gets up in the air and it goes a distance, but it's probably not the safest or up to code kind of thing.

So in your business, you cannot realize the financial damage that you're doing if you don't understand number one, like, what is the profit margin on your prices? What are you aiming for every year? And are your packages a direct reflection of that goal? How many clients do you even need in a year?

Maybe you don't have any clients right now, but you need 40 clients in a year and you're at 35. If you had some more savings in your business accounts, you could hold on for those last five or those last 10. But if you don't know those things, you will start getting yourself busy with clients that are not a good fit, you will start working for less money and burning yourself out, and you will have also started to, and sometimes eaten away at the public perception of your brand and what it stands for by discounting and by making a big deal out of the fact that you're discounting your prices.

Because if you are your brand and if you are the face of your brand, discounting it makes it look like you're discounting you because isn't your time still involved? I know that's not how you think of it. I know you're thinking just get the people in the door.

But again, if you don't know your numbers, you could potentially be doing really, really great financial harm to your business because you're taking yourself out of the opportunity to get better at your marketing, to fix the actual problem, and to know that if what that discount, especially per like the hourly rate and the take home, what that actually does to your bottom line and to your goals.

But if you don't know that, you're just pulling a lever that gets you in a position where now you're busy with people that are probably not a good fit—we're going to talk about that in the next one, the next point—and you are not aware of the time and the energy drain that it's going to take so that when people come to you that are a good fit, you don't have as much to offer or to give.

Now you're demoralized by the fact that you're doing the same amount of work for less money over here. It's particularly depending on how big the discount is. If it's a big discount, this is deeply problematic in ways that clients often don't realize until it's too late because now they are truly, truly pissed off at their business.

There is just this resentment that can build. You're already not in a good place when you're thinking you're going to discount. We do not need to add fuel to the fire. So the first piece to this after you figure out “Okay, how do we get here?” is if you did want a discount, what would that discount even be such that it didn't leave you in the red?

If you don't know the answer, that is your next step. What are your financial goals and how many clients do you need per year? That is going to help you get a grip and help you calm yourself down if, in fact, there's a way that you don't need to discount, you just need to look at your numbers. That's often the case.

This is another reason why discounts are so sneaky. They distract us from the thing that we need to be paying attention to, which is our numbers, and to building and maybe rebuilding the plane that is our business in a way that makes it safer, that makes it more fun, and that makes it, honestly, more legitimate in our own eyes.

There has to come a point where you say, "Okay, enough. I'm not just going to rely on referrals. I'm not just going to rely on not knowing my numbers. I'm just going to hope for the best when it comes to tax time, and I don't know if I have enough in my bank account. I'm going to go all in on my business, and discounting is not going to be the lever I pull because that's me not going all in.”

The third thing that we're going to talk about is just the long-term problems that discounting creates. Yes, there's this idea of it burning you out and then having these ramifications from the point of the discount and being booked with discounted clients to the point that you start getting normal paying clients again.

But there's actually a bigger piece to this and these are all building from the micro to the macro because all of this is me pointing out to you that you need to be in charge of your business, that you are a businesswoman or man. I keep saying that because if there's a man out there listening to this, I would love to know you exist.

But basically, this is all pointing towards the core issue, which is the self-perception of yourself as a businesswoman. One of the biggest things that I hear from my clients that they take away from our work together, that is truly, truly game-changing, and I'm not just saying this like, "Oh, what I'm doing is so game-changing," because I didn't know it until I really started taking a lot of clients over the past year, and I just heard it echoed back to me over and over, was that I give a very clear framework for your business being profitable.

It works at every level. You can be like a solopreneur or you could have a team. I've worked with a bunch of stylists who have teams and the percentages are the same. What the percentage is that you should have for recurring income from your established clients, the percentage of income that should be coming from new clients, then as the business grows and you start to bring on team members or support, what the other rates you need to add to your fees are so that you're able to absorb that without worrying.

One of the most important things we talk about in my one-to-one and in my group programs is you need to get that your prices for new clients are such a part of the perceived experience.

Today I had a client tell me that she never spent more money than she did with me in one-on-one. She actually signed with me because it was so much money to her. I just paid $50,000 for a year of coaching, which is by far the most money I've ever spent. That was also why I did it. I did not have $50,000 lying around, but I knew that it would change me to spend that kind of money.

When you discount, you don't just discount your time, your expertise, and your own perceived value of yourself. You're discounting the experience that your clients want to have with you.

Because I don't care what anybody tells me in this industry, I have been around for a long time, I have talked to almost everybody that creates styling software, I have no other business coaches in the field, I know what people say in this field.

By and large, I think people that are adjacent to the industry, not necessarily stylists themselves, have the right perception of personal styling, but I think a lot of stylists struggle. I think our perception is that this is a luxury service. This is an aspiration.

What I see is stylists are struggling with that. Stylists are uncomfortable with that. They'll say things like, "Well, I'm not a luxury stylist." What they mean is I don't shop at Chanel with my clients, but if your client is shopping at Target and you're taking them to Banana Republic, that is an aspiration so you need to think about the reality of how your clients are looking at your services.

They're looking at it from the lens of “I want to step into something transformational. So I want to pay for something that signals to me in my brain as the client that a transformation is happening,” and that is by making an investment that's serious.

You as a stylist may not get that because you don't have the deficit of skill in styling that your client does. So you don't understand maybe or maybe you used to know and you forgot the actual daily cost of not having your style handled and how it impacts your relationships, the opportunities you go for, your finances, the way that you do or don't make friendships at the park or at the playground.

You're missing a very—and this is why most stylist marketing isn't hitting, just I'm going to give you the answer—it's because you're missing the perceived value and you're missing the actual pain that people experience when their style isn't where they want it to be because what's happening is this person is seeing themselves in the same way they're discounting themselves.

By you offering a service that is not discounting and you saying, “Listen, this is what's possible for you when you step into the next version of yourself,” and ultimately that's what styling is, if you're talking about the clothes all the times and how much outfits they get, you're missing out on what they're actually wanting, which is, “Here is what I get to step into. Here is how I can begin to take the necessary motion forward to be the person that I want to be,” to be the person that asks that person on a date, to be the person that goes for that leadership role that I couldn't have ever imagined, that is the person that is on stage is doing TEDx talks.

Whatever your group of people and niche is, and again, this is why if you choose to not speak to anybody specific, you're going to speak to no one because you have to hold the dream, you have to hold the perception for your clients, and when you discount, you lose it. That's the client issue.

When you discount and you do call in people, you're calling in people who are unlikely, if they come into that new client funnel, to be able to go into then the next part of your funnel, which should be that 40% of the income that's coming into your business from repeat clients.

This should be the easiest part of your day to get this 40% of your income to be so stupid easy, it's crazy. When I show my clients how to do this, they cannot believe how simple this mechanism is to, in some cases, get 40% more income, depending on how experienced in business they are, depending on how many established clients we have to tap into.

When you discount at the front of the house, you screw up the back of the house of the business. When that happens, you now have to work twice as hard to fill the gaps and get more clients.

This is why most stylists burn out. That's why I talk about burnout because I'm seeing burnout with people again that have teams and people that are at the bottom because almost everybody in the industry is missing these percentages across the board.

The discount again is a sign of a lack of a larger business understanding. If you knew, if I told you that if you discount that service at 20% or 30%, you're losing 35% to 40% of your revenue in six months or a year, would that be worth it for that moment?

Probably not, because you're putting in the same amount of hours to give out a service to somebody and to deliver that service to then lose even more income later because now that person isn't going to stay with you because your fees are too high, your regular fees are too high.

This is why I'm so passionate about you guys seeing yourself as businesswomen because when you do, this no longer becomes an option for you. It's like you probably don't do crack. It's not like a thing you think of, “Look, I had a stressful day, let me go do some crack.”

Well, when you step into your identity as a killer businesswoman that makes serious money and makes a serious impact in people's lives, you also don't think about discounting because you would never do that to your clients.

You would never rob them of the opportunity to experience the greatest transformation they could have. Maybe the reason why a discount doesn't seem like that big of a deal is because you are thinking about how you buy and you're buying from a discounted place and you're always looking for the deal, but you want everybody else to pay you the full price.

Then you have to say, “Oh, okay, fine. I'll do the discount to get people on the door,” because that's what gets you in the door. How you buy in general tends to be the kind of client you attract.

As soon as I started changing how I bought things and how I viewed other people, especially service providers, and I paid them for their time at a level that is probably more than generous, my whole business changed because I valued myself enough to believe that it was possible for me to generate more income, so I did.

I paid people what they should be paid. I've even had people offer me discounts that are people I know really well that have done services to me and I'm just like, “No, what is the cost? Don't discount me,” and I want you to be that person too.

Think about are you offering the discount from the place of what you want or are you doing it for your client? Because all of your business needs to be through the lens of your client. That's why we often get ourselves into a place where the business is not thriving enough in order to push us to the point that we would even consider a discount as the solution, that is the foundation of this.

Instead of a discount, I want you to think about how these words feel to you. What would it mean if you could get a cash injection into your business? How does it feel to have a cash injection versus a discount? Doesn't it just energetically feel different?

One of the things I teach my clients is how to get cash injections on their own like volition, like whenever they want to take the summer slower with their kids or it's Christmas or whatever they want to do and they want to take time off, they've run a cash injection.

A cash injection is an offer, I’m not going to get too much into it, but it's an offer that does not compete with your normal offers and it's usually a lesser price, but it's also less at your time and it allows you sometimes to pre-qualify clients to go up your offer ladder.

It means then they could go into your normal offer suite and their perception of that offer suite would not be in any way damaged by the discount. Because it's not a discount, it's just a limited-time service at a lower price that is not available for the rest of the year.

I would rather you sit around and brainstorm ways you could do a very small service that gave someone a taste of your expertise and call it in your own head, don't call it publicly, never call it publicly a cash injection. We're just calling it that because I think the energy behind that is so much better than a discount.

Also, it's not ruining the public perception of your offers. I think this is an important thing for you to think about is what other options do you have to feel more empowered and get money in the door because like I said, I take it seriously.

That's why I talked to you guys about being a businesswoman and thinking in a strategic business way because yes, you are creative but there is no world in which you cannot be both a creative and a business person. That's good.

As a matter of fact, I think creative people are better business people because they can let their minds go and think in different ways that other people can't and that leads to innovation.

I hope that this summary of what happens on the micro and the macro level, both to you, to the client, and to the business model as a whole is helpful. It begins to rewire the way that you think about your business because it is totally available to you for a discount to be something that is not even in your vocabulary for your business, and it can start today. So, I will 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.