PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Welcome to a fresh episode of the podcast. You're tuning into an episode in our special end-of-the-year series where we're taking a deep dive into the health of your personal styling business. In these four episodes, we'll explore how to assess key areas of your business, including your business model, your pricing, your marketing, and your sales skills, in order to identify what's working, what's not, and where to make shifts for major growth and success in 2025.

But a quick heads up before we dive into today's episode. This series was created for personal stylists running transformational personal styling business, where the focus isn't just on helping a client buy some new clothes or do a one-off styling service, but on guiding them through a deep identity-based style journey.

Whether you're already thriving and have six figures or beyond, or you're feeling a little stuck, these episodes will provide clarity, perspective, and actionable steps to ensure your business supports the life you want and the client you love. Let's get into it.

Welcome to the Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast, the ultimate no-BS business podcast for ambitious personal stylists ready to build a six-figure and beyond personal styling business.

You won't hear the typical snoozefest business advice that most personal stylists get told all of the time. Nope. Instead, I'll be sharing business-building strategies that will help you create a killer personal brand, a cult following of loyal personal styling clients, and make a ton of cash while creating lasting style transformations for your clients.

I'm Nicole Otchy, your host and a former personal stylist of 14 years who built a lucrative styling business in three major cities, but only after spending years trying to crack the six-figure styling business code without burning out. And now I'm here to tell you how to do exactly the same. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to Profit Power Moves. This is a series where we're diving into what really needs to happen in your business to create a profitable, sustainable, personal styling business that serves both you and your clients. Today we are focusing on a topic that hits close to home for a lot of stylists, your pricing and your service set.

If you've ever wondered whether your prices truly reflect the value of your work, or if your styling services are setting you up for long-term success versus burnout, you are going to love this episode. We're going to explore what it takes to create a pricing strategy that not only supports you financially but also strengthens the depth of your client relationships so more clients come back to you and you have a higher repeat client rate, something I talk about often.

Let's start with the big question. Does your pricing model reflect the level of depth and value you're doing? If you're identifying as a transformational stylist, then you need to ask yourself if you're pricing to support a transformation. This is something we often just get lost in the weeds on because the transformational approach includes reflection, in-depth client conversations, and a personalized experience that moves your client to a new level of how they see themselves and how they interact with the world.

If you're not charging enough to support this level of service, you are risking burning out and you're setting yourself up for a pricing situation that will not match the emotional and psychological toll that a service that you need to do for a lot of people because your pricing is whack, quite honestly, will have on you.

I often see stylists underpricing themselves because they compare their work to other stylists offering what they think is the same service. But I have worked with enough stylists and I've been in the industry for long enough to know that lots of people have, for example, a service called a seasonal update, but how those things are being provided to clients, the type of clients that stylists are working with, the type of experience stylists have, the type of streamlined approach to services are so all over the map that just because something has the same name doesn't mean it's the same thing. It just means we got to get better names.

I think the problem becomes, especially when you are starting out, starting to really get clients that are more in your zone of genius, they're really more aligned with what you want to do, you're going to feel that tug to go back and look at other stylists' websites like you did in the beginning when you were just trying to figure out what a stylist even offer.

It's fine. It's totally human, but we're missing a huge piece of the puzzle. One of them is there are a lot of people in the world, but also in the styling community and in business in general, that have really bad money mindset. So just because they're putting their package that has the same name issue for $550 say, or $700 or less than $1,000, doesn't mean that that's actually the value of the package or that it's appropriately priced.

Don't get it twisted. Just because you can see, “Oh, it looks like they offer a shop in a style with that” doesn't mean that that's actually how it's working. You don't know how long those shops are taking, you don't know how many they actually do, you don't know how many styling sessions they're doing. You don't know how long it takes them to create lookbooks. You don't know.

When I see stylists saying, “Well, so-and-so,” or “They live in the same area as me and they charge this much and I want to be competition-proof,” the way you become competition-proof is you just become the best at serving your particular market and knowing why you have the services you have. No one's the best that just has the services everybody has. No one's the best that never goes back and looks at their services and makes them better. That's literally not the behavior of somebody that's the best.

This type of thing means a lot of stylists end up playing a game with their financial future basically that is potentially based on someone else's insecurities and that's a real problem. Get your head out of that and be sure that when you are thinking about the services that you have, you are doing it from the thought of what serves my client, not what are other stylists doing.

Because when you start with your client, when you start with your niche, and when you start with what they are truly experiencing on a daily basis, because what they're not experiencing is the thought, "I don't feel confident," that's not the thought, the thought is, "Why don't I fit in with the other moms?" The thought is, "I don't know if I love the power for the promotion." Yeah, sure, all of that has to do with confidence, but that's not how they're experiencing their life.

When stylists spend all this time looking at what everybody else is doing or sitting by themselves and just thinking about what they should do next without factoring in the level of basically pain a client is based on their niche and based on what their style could be doing for them and isn't right now, you're in a situation where you will never price things right. You will never value your services in the same way that your potential client would because you are not your best client. You aren't because if you were, you wouldn't be a stylist.

So when you offer a transformational experience, your clients are just paying for the closet edit or the clothes or the outfits. They're paying for the journey, the guidance, the reflection, the support that you offer them. Without pricing to honor that journey and honor the experience that you have to put in as a stylist to have gotten people to where they want to go on that journey, not once, not twice, not sometimes, but consistently, you will find yourself working twice as hard just to make ends meet.

So the question then becomes, “Are you basing your prices on the hours you work or the value you're creating after a certain period of time?” The answer is always about what is the value? How can you price this on the value? When we get stuck with the amount of hours we are working for a client, we neglect all of the hard work that it took to become someone who knows what the best jeans are for curvy people, knows exactly how you're supposed to hem your jeans and why you shouldn't just pass up everything that doesn't fit you off the rack, understanding what the best bra is for people that are over a size C.

There are a million pieces of advice and wisdom and knowledge that stylists have that they completely gloss over and they price on the hours, not on the level of their expertise. If I'm hiring an interior designer, I expect that if they've been in the game for a long time, I'm going to be paying them significantly more than somebody that's only been in the game for a year or two. Why? Because I am paying on the value that I want.

It will take them much, much, much of a faster time than it would for me if I did my house myself. But second, well, I have to source and figure out, “Is this the right couch, and should I do velvet, and will my kid make a mess on this and how long am I going to actually have it?” I can't do all of those calculations. Those are the types of calculations your clients are trying to make when they're trying to figure out how to fix their own problem.

When you value your services and you value yourself and your business and you see yourself as an expert, pricing based on hours is like a crazy thought to you. That's why I want to get everybody by the end of this episode, it should feel crazy to you if you've been in business for more than two years to be pricing by the hour.

I have a few reasons why it's also just bad for the client, but for now, we're going to talk through the issue of affordability. One of the biggest challenges I see is that when stylists try to keep their services "affordable," what they really think is, "Is it affordable to me?" Again, you're not your best client. They struggle to get the full buy-in from the client.

This is really important because personal styling is so popular now and because people know it's not just for celebrities, which, please, again, stop saying this in your content, it's a sign that we are not all understanding what is happening. We're finally at a place in society where so many stylists are getting on sales calls with people that have worked with other stylists. That's actually a good thing.

It means that people are valuing it enough that even if they didn't have a good experience with one stylist, they care about this enough in their life to go to a new one. When you start having a critical mass, like I had a group call the other day and multiple people raised their hand and said they have had sales calls with people that worked with a stylist before, five, six, seven years ago, that was not the case.

Just because maybe some stylists haven't experienced it or some people haven't disclosed that on a call, doesn't mean that the industry hasn't been changing in terms of how people perceive it. This is why business knowledge, having people that or keeping their pulse on the industry as a whole and looking at this and really giving people the reality of what's happening and not teaching things that are 10 or 15 years old is critical.

Because how you move on a sales call when someone's worked with the stylist before versus someone who hasn't is different. That's what the industry looks like now. This idea that nobody knows anyone that's worked with the stylist or everyone thinks it's just for celebrities is so outdated that it keeps the stylists back in their marketing, because people are like, "Okay, that's weird that you think that about yourself because we all know that's not true."

That's really, really important. It's critical because people don't quite get sometimes in the styling industry that there are a whole lot more people that want this experience for different types of reasons, which means there are different types of clients, and one of the things that's happening is particularly because of TikTok—which is why even if you're not over in these spaces, you need to be educated about the spaces—there's a younger group of people that are cropping up on sales calls that want to work with a stylist because they're friended.

What happens is they want the experience of working with the stylist. They don't necessarily want the depth because they don't need it in the same way as a 46-year-old woman who's looking to be a C-suite executive does. It's not the same as the level of depth of work that someone that just had a baby and feels completely alien to herself and her identity and her body feels.

We're not talking about people willing to invest emotionally, psychologically, and financially and even time-wise in the same way. When you put low prices up or prices that don't include the value part of the equation, you signal to the people that want personal styling as an experience. That's totally fine if you feel that you're a transactional stylist. That's great.

The position that those people are in, though, is that once they get the experience, they walk away. They have no interest in this anymore because it was just a dopamine hit. When you go for people that want a transformation and you do value-based pricing and you are committed to being better for that group of people that you want to work with, we are having a completely different conversation.

You have more repeat clients, you can rinse or repeat your marketing in a way that is incredibly effective and strategic, and you can have more space in your life and in your day-to-day to enjoy yourself, enjoy your clients, and enjoy your life. That's the difference.

So low prices signal to clients that they don't need to be fully invested in the process. Period. Or that they don't need to really care enough for this to be more than a one-time event. Without the investments, clients might not commit to the reflection in the growth needed to see real change. That's it. People that pay pay attention. This makes the stylist's job harder and limits the transformational experience that they came to styling to do.

Again, if you're someone that just likes cute clothes and wants to make a bunch of brunch outfits but doesn't want to talk to people about how they show up, then this conversation is probably not the right conversation. But if you feel like something's missing, if your repeat client rate is incredibly low, if you are exhausted from trying to figure out what the heck it's going to be that's going to make your people listen to you, this is important because it's not your marketing that's always the linchpin problem. It's often your pricing, because that is actually a part of the communication plan.

Are your clients valuing the experience of personal styling enough to be true partners in a transformational journey? Is your price signaling to people that do value styling enough that you are the right person for them? Let's talk about the nitty-gritty of pricing. Have you ever calculated your hourly rate? I am saying I don't want you sticking with an hourly rate, but even if you have a package, it's usually based on some understanding of how long it takes you to complete it and then you layer on the value.

Have you ever calculated this? I am shocked by the number of people that have not. One of the ways it becomes clear that people have not is that when we do the math and they say, “I want to make $100,000,” and then I do the math on their $1,500 service that they want to sell the most of, they are shocked by how much work it's going to take them, how many clients have to take per year to get themselves there.

Even though this is the thing they are so staunchly telling me they need to sell, what is really critical is that there's also going to be a part of you that if you don't understand how many clients it's going to take to get you to your goal, and if you refuse to look at that, you're setting yourself up for failure because it is uncomfortable to raise your rates for everybody, everywhere, not just stylists.

But it's really uncomfortable when you have to look at how many clients you would need to take to hit the reality that you want to hit. You're not a business owner if you don't do this exercise. I know that's harsh, but your feelings don't matter because the feelings that stylists have about their prices don't reflect reality. They reflect their reality and their self-esteem and their beliefs about themselves.

But again, if you were your ideal client, you wouldn't be a stylist. Your feelings should never enter into the equation. What's really critical about calculating your hourly rate is that you want to make sure that you are basing that not on your average client and not on your best client. What does that mean? It means it's not based on the client who is the best communicator, who likes everything, who already has pretty good stuff in their closet, but also isn't that picky. They like just about everything.

You want to price it for the types of people who sometimes have kind of wacky Pinterest boards and you're like, "I cannot see the through line here." The kinds of people that maybe aren't the best decision-makers. They go back and forth, they waffle. All you've had to have is three or four of these types of clients to know that you missed out on a lot of money when you did a package price because they were not your ideal.

We say, “Well, it only takes me three hours to shop.” It only takes you three hours to shop if you have a good client or if you have a client that's a size two or if you have a client that has a clear type of style that's easy to nail down. But that's not always the case and so of course, there are going to be times where we don't want to price ourselves to the worst possible client because we don't even want to put our mind there. But you have to expect that you shouldn't be pricing your services based on the best possible scenario.

You need to do the best possible scenario and then add a couple of hours because on average, that's how it will work. You have to just also accept that you're going to have that couple of clients here where you're like, "Oh, my gosh, I'm losing money." But it makes it up in the whole of how many clients you take in a year because there's always a couple that are outliers. That's how you want to price your services.

Look at your hours that you're going to take your package rate by and divide it. Say like, "Okay, it's going to take me eight hours to deliver a $2,500 service." That's on average the best client. I want you to add three more hours, four more hours to that, and then calculate the price. Do it on 11 or 12 hours. You're going to do 12 hours divided by $2,500. What is the hourly rate? Cool, great, awesome.

That should be what you generally use as the base of how you're getting your pricing for your services. You also then need to do the larger calculation of if you have services that are $2,500 and you want to make $100,000, you got to take 70 clients a year. That's almost 20 clients per season. Is that possible? 20 clients a season. That's like every three months. Yeah, so every quarter, that's more than three or four clients a month.

Is it possible for you to take six clients a month? Well, that's what most people are looking at when they price their services at $2,500. The stylist thinks, "This is so much money." But then we sit down and I'm like, "You got the space for that many clients?" I'm like, "Gosh, I will never be able to do anything because it's three or four or five-week service." Yeah, that's why we got to sit down and figure out our pricing because, again, that's usually based on what we think is a lot of money.

If you sat down to do this and the hourly rate was just incredibly low because you got to remember, you want to set aside anywhere between 20% and 30% for taxes, savings, all of those types of things. That doesn't even include any business expenses. We're not even going to get into that today.

I want you to just know if I take the number of hours with some wiggle room that it takes me to complete each of my services and I divide it by the amount I'm charging, what are we looking at here? If I then subtract another 30%. It all of a sudden starts to look a little bit different than what we think it does when we put that price on our website. It's okay if it's a process to get you where you need to be and you have to just inch it up and inch it up.

I mean, it hurts to put it up $500 and it hurts to put it up $1,000, so why not just make it hurt once is my philosophy, but I get it, I've been in the game for a long time, it's easy for me to say. My biggest concern in this conversation is that you have the clarity on how many clients you would really be able to honest to goodness take with the rates you're charging in a year, in a quarter, because you need that bigger number and then you need to break it down for three months, how many clients are you going to have to bring in the door?

It's not that this is easy stuff to look at, but it is the thing that gets us into action to be realistic and to decide, “Do I really want to be a real business owner?” Because if you're not doing this, it's a hobby. Why are you burning yourself out for a hobby? That's crazy. That's insane. You're a stylist. You're not a brain surgeon.

I say that with all the love in the world because I was this person. I could not pay rent and I was like, "Oh, but I just want them to hire me." Well, this is not a popularity contest. This is a business. So when we get this, we have to look and decide, “Am I going to get the skills to get me where I want to be or not?”

That is why the pricing conversation is so important because now you have to sit up and decide, “How do I give value? How am I actually really tailoring this to clients?” Because when you have a price that feels a little scary, the best way to offset that is to become obsessed with the people you want to help and make their experience amazing. That's what true transformation requires.

That's why just liking clothes is never going to be enough to get any of my clients to six figures. The clients that I work with, the clients that I accept into this company are stylists who are going to figure it out and they are committed to being better businesswomen. Period. Because hobbies literally exhaust people. Pricing that is too low is a hobby and hobbies are just ways that people exhaust themselves so they can say, "I am a stylist."

Okay, put yourself in the hospital being a stylist. Have no life, ruin your marriage, do whatever just for that. That's not what we're here for. Transformational styling is important because yes, the prices are higher, but the prices are higher so that the stylist can focus on the client and be their best self. That's why you can't be burnt out and stressed out and undercharging and be a truly great transformational stylist. I don't care how good your eye is.

That's where we trick ourselves. That's where we let ourselves stay small. Stylists are like, "Oh, I'm such a good stylist." You're not a good stylist if you're not getting someone a transformation. You can't get someone a transformation if your prices are crappy and they're not supporting you being the healthiest that you could be.

If you're constantly shifting your prices in your services because you're nervous about them or you're afraid people aren't going to hire you or you lower your prices so that you just have a revolving door of one-time clients that aren't loyal, that aren't coming back, that's so critical for your mental health. It's so critical. Stylists are so afraid to learn new skills, to up their prices.

Do you know what's really hard? To constantly feel like trash in your business, to constantly doubt yourself, to constantly not know if you show up on social media if what you say will lead to sales. I've lived that life. Let me tell ya, anybody can learn a new skill if they're willing to be uncomfortable for like, I don't know, two months. That's real small in this game of your life.

The pricing conversation is important because when you see how many hours it's going to take to get you where you want to go, and you think about what you want for yourself and what you really want for clients and what kind of experience you want to give them, it changes the conversation versus like, "Oh, this feels like a heavy price to ask."

That's because we're focused on ourselves and you can't be a great stylist that's transformational if you're focusing on yourself. You're going to do it because your ego is going to put you there and you're a human being. We all do that, but it will get you out of yourself and back to the client experience and that's when you're like, “Okay, but this price allows me to be the best person for this group.”

If you're feeling like, “Mm, I don't know, I should change my prices, I should change my services,” my encouragement to you is up your prices and keep your services. Because the most important thing you can do is edit the service you already have to make it better versus scrapping it all and coming back to it.

It's really critical to know what your clients value in the experience with a stylist beyond just the outcome because when you know that, you can add in a few touchpoints or the things you're going to need to add to your existing service when you up your price to get them the most value in the container.

Because it's usually not more of the stylist's time in terms of like a ton more shopping or a ton more styling because, at some point, people do get overwhelmed so you really want to just make sure that you get, say you work with a group of people that really want to understand themselves, well, you probably want to come down a little bit on the amount of stuff you're giving them and give them more opportunity to practice and to understand why their outfits work, for example.

But not everybody's in that group, so that's why you got to know your clients. If you are shifting your prices and your services a lot because of anxiety, my recommendation again is to keep them where they are and learn to talk about them and add value to them so you can then talk about that in your marketing in a way that makes people want to buy.

Don't change the offer because no one's even experienced the offer yet. They're not buying, maybe not even because of the price, but because of how you're talking about it doesn't feel valuable enough. So that's really where the work is. Stability in your offers allows you to get better in your marketing and sell those offers versus changing them and then having to start from scratch.

Are you giving your clients and the current services you have the clarity they need in order to recognize the value of the work they're doing? Are you giving them enough opportunities to do the transformational check-ins and have to be a partner with you in order to get the results?

Finally, because we're talking about this at some level without saying it explicitly, it's important for me to say this, that your pricing is often, when you're unconscious, when you haven't done the exercise we talked about here and seeing, “How many clients would I have to take a year or how many clients would I have to take a quarter, what is my hourly rate truly when I price it on the actual work I'm doing versus the ideal, a lot of time this work I think should be taking me?” when you shy away from that, your prices will be a reflection of your self-worth.

Now, your prices should never be a reflection of your self-worth, but if you don't look at them and understand the facts, that's what they are because there's nothing else that you're kind of factoring in but how you feel about what you do and your perception of yourself, which is likely the problem, as we've talked about because you're not your ideal client.

So, if you're pricing yourself low or you're pricing yourself low, you've discovered in this conversation because you did the math and you cannot service that many human beings any year and live your life in a way that allows you to thrive, it may be a sign that you don't fully value or believe in yourself or the impact you're making.

Now, there's a lot of conversation around imposter syndrome in this group and I think it's important to remember that in order to have full imposter syndrome, you have to already have proven that you're an expert, which means you have to already know how to speak to your target audience in a way that moves them to buy from you.

A lot of times, stylists think that they have imposter syndrome, but what they have is a lack of skills that's making it hard to show up and making them feel bad and they then think that is imposter syndrome. When a surgeon who has saved people's lives has imposter syndrome and they think, “I'm not that good, I shouldn't apply to speak at that conference,” even though their results show that they're amazing, that is imposter syndrome.

If you can't get repeat clients and you feel bad about it, that is not imposter syndrome. That means there's a problem in your business that we have to fix so that more people can see how amazing you are. Once you have a clean and healthy business, if you feel like, "Oh, I don't deserve to be here," or, "I don't know why no one hires me," then we have imposter syndrome.

Really important to understand that sometimes our low self-worth, it can't be fixed by underpricing ourselves. It can't be fixed by pointing out, "Oh, I think I have imposter syndrome." It gets fixed by showing up and proving to yourself that you're an expert and that you can trust you always.

That's what business skills are, and that's why I want women to have them. Because when you have them, then you can trust yourself. You can say, “I know how to generate income. I know how to generate results in this conversation for my clients. I know how to generate a transformation. I know how to show other people how my inside and my outside connect, or how their inside and outside connect in their style and how they show up in the world.”

If you don't know that, that is where the work to up your own self-reflection and self-worth is. That's where it is because when you become so obsessed with your clients, to the point where you would rather take fewer of them and go deeper and get them fully, you don't have a lot of time to think about yourself.

In that process, you become an expert, and I'm not saying you're not going to have down days. Of course, you are. You're a human being, but then they don't turn into months of self-doubt, then they don't turn into being inconsistent and then they don't turn into us making excuses about things like, "Well, my client isn't on Instagram or whatever," or "I have to do hourly because then I'll lose all my clients." That's another one I hear from very established stylists.

None of that is true. I have stylists tell me sometimes that their clients have said, "Oh, you should really up your prices," and they're still not upping their prices. That's how I know there's a self-esteem problem. That's how I know there's a self-worth issue. It's not the market. It's you. That's the best news in the world because you can change you. You can get skills. You can become better. That's what being alive is. That's what I'm trying to do every single day.

If you're undervaluing yourself, then you will attract a client—more often than not, I won't say all the time—that may not be there for the reasons that make you feel like the most expert stylist you could be. As we wrap up, I want you to reflect on whether your pricing and your services are setting you up for success because that's what we're here about in the new year. That's all that I care about.

Are you building a business model that will sustain you and allow you to deliver the transformative experience that people are craving right now? That is why there are so many people hopping from stylist to stylist. That is why nobody thinks that styling is just for celebrities anymore.

Because remember, pricing isn't just about covering the cost or the amount of hours that you work. It's about honoring the depth of your knowledge as an expert. If you're ready to dive deeper into how you can create a pricing and service strategy that reflects your unique value, stay tuned for more insights in this series. Hop on the waitlist to my next Income Accelerator Program. I can teach you all of this and a really streamlined and really fun process, honestly, and I'll see 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.