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.

Today, we're going to dive into this concept of seeing your personal styling business as an ecosystem. I'm telling you, this is game-changing. I want you here with me for this chat because this gets me fired up. I think that no matter where you are in your styling career, I want you to just really think about is this how you're thinking about your business?

I have clients that are multiple six figures. I have clients that I've done in one-to-one longer containers and taught them how to be a stylist and build a business. I've done all of it and this applies to everyone because you always have to go back to this concept in order to understand why something is working in your business and isn't. It's like the perfect litmus test for a styling business. I love it.

I especially think that if you are a transformational stylist, this concept is so, so critical to success because if you're not there and you're more transactional, you are not necessarily keeping as many of your stylish clients over the long haul. We'll talk about that in another episode, because I think there are some misconceptions that people think, “Well, if I'm transformational, they'll get what they need from me and they'll walk away,” but that's not actually how transformation works.

If you are listening to this episode, you're going to hear some signals in it that are going to tell you that I'm talking to a higher-level stylist, and that is true. But what's really important for you to do is to understand that there are certain things you need to have in place in your business in order to get to what I consider and what I think most people will consider an established stylist level.

What are those things? I'm talking to someone who has worked with a variety of clients who have paid them, who are strangers, they know who their ideal client is. They know. They might not be speaking to them, they might not understand why they're not getting them consistently, but they've worked with that person, they've loved them, they've been BFFs with them, they've wanted a thousand more of that person, that is critical.

You've worked with enough types of people, and this is what all new stylists should be aiming for. When they're trying to build their skill set as a stylist, which is separate from building the business, you want to get your skill set as a stylist with as many people as possible so that you can get to the point of your next level, which is knowing your ideal client, knowing their characteristics, who they are. That is going to be the foundation of this entire conversation. If you don't know that, you will falter.

The good news is, if you don't know that, you will understand why you're struggling. You want to know this other piece of information that you can confidently deliver services like a closet edit, a shopping session online or in person, and lookbooks, whether that's through professional software or Canva or however you're doing it, you've done that, you've done it over and over again, you don't need to think about, “Oh crap, how do I edit a closet,” every time you go to a new client.

Those things you can do in your sleep. That's what you need to do to get to an established client level. Ideally, you also have experience working with styling clients to do multiple types of sessions in one package, so closet edit, shopping, and lookbooks, all are maybe like your seasonal update or whatever. You have this experience of working with clients over time, not for one quick two-hour appointment.

You have multiple experiences of that. That's important because it's hard to get the level of depth we're going to talk about if you haven't. It's not critical, but it is something to consider. You may be missing critical information about your audience and the ideal client that you already know you love. If you've not worked with them in one service that has multiple types of styling sessions like an edit and a shop, or a shop and a lookbook, or all of them together.

Now that you’ve done the groundwork, you know that you’re ready to elevate your business to a level where you’re getting consistent income, you’re marketing your service, your prices and sales are working together, you know that if you say this on Instagram Stories, you will book sales calls. You know that if you say this, you get this result. You know that these are the things that most people are looking for from you in your ideal client demographic.

If this sounds like you, keep listening because today's episode is going to change the way you approach your business forever. When you don't treat your business like an ecosystem, you will spin your wheels and you will eventually lead to burnout before you are booked out.

When you are someone trying to fix one thing over here, your marketing, your pricing, your services in isolation and nothing is sticking, it's because everything is interconnected and you're treating them like they are separate parts that have no bearing on the other.

If you're listening and you feel like your efforts, no matter what you've done, no matter what investments you've made, weren't leading to more clients or revenue, this episode will explain why, and more importantly, how to fix it. Every thriving ecosystem has to start with a strong foundation.

If you're looking at a plant that's potted in something, the foundation of that ecosystem for that plant to survive is the soil. In your business, the foundation for your ecosystem, your soil, is your ideal client. Let me explain why. Because we are going to use the definition of an ecosystem that is the general use, so a complex network of interconnected systems, when you look at it from that angle, interconnected systems mean if one system isn't working well, then the other systems are not going to thrive.

If you boil down the number one reason stylists do not have consistent monthly income, there's a lot, but we're going to go down to what I think is the foundation after working with so many stylists, not just in this business, but for a decade before I opened the styling consultancy, it is because their business is not set up like an ecosystem that works together. They are approaching their business problems through the lens of what about my marketing? What about my pricing? Oh, maybe I need to start a new service over here.

They're not thinking, “Wait, if I do this, how does it impact what happens over here?” This means that these types of stylists spend a lot of time and sometimes a lot of money misdiagnosing their problem and working way harder than they need to. At some point, they look in the mirror and they say, “Maybe it's time to throw in the towel.” I know I have been there.

As an established stylist, the difference between this stage of business, when you're at that level of frustration, say, or you're approaching it or you are not there yet, but you know you've tried a lot of stuff and you know that your approach has been—because no one's taught you otherwise to be clear—that oh, maybe it's my pricing, oh, maybe my audience isn't right. Oh, it's definitely just my marketing if I'm not booked, which that's logical, I see why you think that.

Sometimes it is, but you're going to see today why that's only a very, very small sliver of the problem. That's actually the easy part to fix your marketing when the rest of the ecosystem is working. But most stylists think that the marketing is the hardest part so they're putting all this effort over here and not seeing the payoff. It's because that would be like continually pruning the leaves and watering the plant and putting it in sunlight when the soil that it was in is trash.

It's the exact same thing. When you are an established client who knows who you want to talk to, who's worked with those people, who knows you get results, but you think it's just your marketing, your ideal client is the backbone of your business. It is the thing that will drive all of the decisions you make. Yet, and this is not just a styling industry problem, it is an online business problem, the majority of people are taught the most pathetic, most shallow, most superficial way of looking at ideal clients.

It honestly embarrasses me because I really did think that those stupid worksheets were the thing for years. Like, when did they thrive? Where did they live? What did they like to eat? Are they married? Like, no. Nobody cares. It's not doing anything. What I really want for you is to be able to create assets that you can rinse and repeat to preserve your energy and get to six figures easily instead of constantly starting from scratch and trying to market your ideal client.

Your ideal client is so much deeper than someone who can just afford you. There's someone whose lifestyle, needs, and desires, which is different than needs, align with your preferences and still set as a stylist. If you do not have absolute clarity on who this person is, like, I couldn't wake you out of a dead sleep and ask you intimate, personal questions about them. Do they mostly have a credit card their husband doesn't know about? That's actually one of them, then you are building your business on shaky ground.

I'm going to tell you the most nuanced, weird things that I had to get about my audience in the course of this episode that will show you that. Here's one of the things you need to know about them. What are their insecurities when it comes to style? It is not a lack of confidence. That is what they tell you because that is what you say in your marketing. That's why when you take away confidence out of stylist’s vocabularies, they have to get real serious about their marketing skills.

It's not that I have anything against the word confidence, just that people are using it wrong, because no one can feel confident in their style until they understand it. If the stylist’s process doesn't have the client in a place of education and self-reflection, the client will not be able to have true confidence. That's why that's misused a lot of times.

Yeah, maybe they feel overwhelmed when they shop, or they don't know how to dress their body. Or maybe, and this is one very few stylists speak to, they have status anxiety. They actually do care what other people think of them, and that's okay. They may not be at a level in their style maturity where they are able to divorce themselves from other people's thoughts about them. That is still valid.

Because most stylists don't give their clients and their marketing the skills to detach or the understanding of what it looks like to not want compliments from other people and what work they have to do on themselves to get there, they use really, really shallow marketing because they want to say what all the other stylists are saying. But the sales triggers, and this is what 98% of stylists that I ask on sales calls cannot tell me about their ideal client, their sales triggers are the things they will not tell you.

Stylists are like, “Oh, they gained weight, they got a new job, they had a baby,” those aren't it. It's how they feel about those things in different contexts of their life that make them spend money. Their sales trigger isn't their weight gain. Their sales trigger is what they think about their weight gain and how it impacts their life specifically.

Because a stay-at-home mom who feels like her husband does not think she's attractive anymore is going to have a different sales trigger about her weight gain than a woman who thinks it's holding her back in an office of men who she feels she needs to look a certain way to get anybody to listen to her. Those are real-life experiences and those are actual sales triggers.

But nobody talks about them, so everybody's out here giving style tips and wondering why they're not going anywhere. Because if you can speak to the person about their husband not thinking they're attractive anymore, they may never tell you on the sales call that that's what it was that made them convert but I promise you, if you do the kind of things that I have my stylists doing and having the kinds of conversations I have my stylists having with their clients, you will find out later on that that was a story, the one that nobody ever responded to on Instagram, that was the Instagram story that had her book that sales call.

People don't tell you the truth until they hire you. If you don't know the right questions, even after they hire you to have them tell you the truth, then you're never going to get this information. You don't get this from an Instagram poll, guys. I mean, there's certain information you can get from that, but you have to cultivate a level of relationship with your ideal client that gives this to you.

I am giving you the answers to the test right now. This is why programs that other people have done don't work. This is where I can see programs I've done in the past didn't work and ones I've done recently do because anybody that tells you this level of truth about something like what I'm telling you right now, I'm not messing.

I know that this is hard. I know that this is uncomfortable and I know all the things that come up including the hidden credit cards and all this kind of stuff and this is where stylists are just blown away when they understand the process I have to help people get to this level of understanding.

If you've done these things before and you feel a little bit lost, I'm talking to my stylist clients because sometimes we need a reminder, go back to your Income Accelerator Marketing section and the beginning, the first model, and look over that again because again, we all forget these things. I forget them too sometimes. We all have days where we're like, “I don't know what to say,” and you're allowed to have those days. That doesn't mean that you're a fraud or anything. It just means you're a human.

But remember that these are the things that are there when you take the actions and you are building that relationship with your audience. People tell me every day what their fears are in their business because I come here every week and I talk to you like this. It is not an accident. I'm telling you, since this mostly happens behind the scenes, anybody, the most shy stylist can get this information.

If you don't know this about your ideal client, what makes them trust you, which is basically an example of what I just gave you earlier about the husband example of gaining weight, lots of folks gain weight, but the sales trigger isn't the same. Now, again, you're going to have a group of people that have multiple sales triggers within the niche. Say you're working with, I don't know, stay-at-home moms or working women, and they all have weight gain, or they all have a promotion or whatever, you're going to see different examples of the sales trigger from these conversations.

All of it needs to go in your marketing, because sometimes stylists are really black or white about this, and they're like, “Well, what about,” yeah, all of it counts because even if someone can't relate to that exact sales trigger, your ability to speak to that is going to have them be like, “Wow, this person is someone I can trust because they get the nuance of this.” They get that it's deeper than, “Oh, I just want to feel confident.”

Wanting to feel confident about a specific context is what makes you stand out, period. It's not like only one thing. It's multiple things, which means you have so many marketing opportunities. That is all it does is make you look like more of a pro when you can speak to that.

Let me give you an example of the stylist that I worked with. Her marketing was really around getting her clients outfit options and how much easier she makes their life. That's what all of her marketing was, which is like, it's not going anywhere. In the program Income Accelerator, two rounds ago, we talked about diving deeper into her niche and having these conversations and getting the information she needs from the folks in her audience and her established clients.

She realized that actually her ideal client, if she could just clone them and only wanted to work with them, what they wanted was to understand themselves better through the process of building outfits and getting dressed. She had an audience who wanted to learn and be educated by her and she actually loved that. It really fit her skill set, but her marketing, her general basic—I think I can say with all the love in the world and she would agree with a little chuckle—was focused on how she did the shopping and saved them time.

Even the service, the way she was delivering it, we didn't overhaul it, we just tweaked it, but it didn't make sense for her target market's goals. It was too quick. If somebody wants to learn, they need more integration and they may need more immersion. We fixed those things. She kept the basics of it. We just changed the timeline. We changed the style discovery process. It had more reflection.

We changed her questions on her intake. We changed her questions throughout it. We changed what she did and said in the closet edit. We changed the way she was delivering her lookbook. It was more of an integrated learning experience versus “Here you go, here's a lookbook, talk to you next time you hire me.” There's so many little things that we tweaked that were not huge and she didn't even have to change her sales page, except for her to change the time and how long it took to deliver it.

But her copy, because we did that with her services, drastically changed. The way she was talking about this in her marketing and the way she was doing even the tagline on her website, all of that changed. The actual service description, it didn't really change that much because we made these shifts after really rooting her services and again her messaging later on further into the process from the conversations with her ideal client.

Not only did this feel better to her, was she more excited, but she shifted her messaging publicly and even talked about this a little, which I thought was super cool, like bringing people in on the process of change, and she started booking services and skyrocketing her income before the program even ended because she was able to talk to the fact that, "Hey, if you're someone that wants to learn in the process of getting dressed, I'm going to be the stylist for you."

So if you're not deeply connected to your ideal client, then everything else in your business, from your services, to your pricing, to your ability to call in those clients and close the sales call is going to be out of sync. Once you've built the foundation, this is the second part of the ecosystem. You have your ideal client locked in, it's time to build the services that are going to solve that client's problem.

This is where so many critical mistakes are made because people are copying other people's business plans. This is why everybody that leaves my programs has their own specific sort of service list and business plan because I want you to bring your creativity and I want you and you need to bring the information from your ideal clients to the table. It's not about what I think every stylist should have. It's about what their ideal target market is dictating through the feedback they give them.

Let me say this loud and clear. Your styling business is a business. It is not a choose-your-own-adventure book. It's not. Your services need to fit your niche's lifestyle and perception of value because a lot, and I do mean a lot of stylists, go ahead and create a business and create a bunch of services alone on their couch on a random Tuesday because it's what they think they should do, or worse because what they see other stylists are doing.

Then they're like, “I don't know why this isn't working. It makes no sense.” The problem is that we have a very screwed-up idea of what a service-based business is because nobody is telling the truth anymore. The truth is that your business needs to fit you. It needs to work with you. It's the first thing we talk about is alignment with your audience, alignment with what market value is.

Because this also seems to be an area that everyone is making up. It's not the case that everybody, everywhere, regardless of what you think they deserve, will hire you as a stylist. You don't have unlimited options for your niche or for how you deliver the service. You have a lot of them, but if you want to make money and you want to be booked, you do not have unlimited options.

There is actually a way to see, do these things make money? Do they align with the energy output I have? Do they align with how I want to work? My expertise? Do they align with what people will actually pay? You need to ask yourself, does your niche for virtual styling have a collaborative approach, meaning they're going to have to do some of it themselves like their returns, or do they want a high-touch in-person experience?

What outcome do they value most? Do they want convenience, transformation, or exclusivity? Transformation, convenience, and exclusivity are not all things you can give everybody in every package and the way they are delivered to the target market is not going to be the same for everybody.

It's not going to be the same for a stay-at-home mom as it is a high-level executive who literally almost sleeps at her office. They are going to want very different things. They may tell you they both want to look confident and they're there because they gained weight, but if that's where you stay, you will not be consistently booked out.

Of course, that's not your fault because nobody told you that wasn't enough in that ridiculous little worksheet that we've all been doing since 1992, it feels like, on niching. I had a stylist that I worked with who was targeting a tech-savvy working mom, someone in their late 20s to mid-30s.

She was literally working with people that were in tech, that was it. She wanted to take care of the mom sector. She was very niche, which was very smart. She was thinking she was going to offer virtual packages with a done-with-you component. That really worked for her.

But only when she did her services and scheduled them at certain times, only when she also had other supports and other bonuses in the actual service that had people doing the returns for them if necessary, and that was an added payment, or they had the option to upgrade their service to a done-for-you if they were in the area.

But another stylist that I worked with in that same container was doing a high net worth client who also worked a lot of them, not all of them, but in tech. They were often marketing professionals in very specific groups of tech or in Silicon Valley specifically.

That person who may have even had a desk right next to my other client's ideal client, who's that working mom in the tech field, she was focusing more on full service in person, really, really high touch, really, really luxurious, bringing tailors and all of that.

These women might have even made the same amount of money, to be clear. They might have worked in the same office. But the working mom in the way that she talked about the psychographics and her priority of wanting more time with her kids or all the things that her ideal client gave back to her dictated a completely different service.

In the coaching and in the group element, they got to hear from each other and it was so, so cool to understand that. That's the kind of thing that you don't know when you're off in a silo creating your services or you're just copying a business plan. Again, no shame to stylists who have done that. I did that too when I first started because that's what I was given.

But back then it was just less savvy. That was not even that big of a deal because the business plan existing, to begin with, was novel. Now, that's nothing. If you're not seeing consistent bookings in your business, it's often because your services are not aligning with your ideal client.

Where I see this breakdown happen the most is that if you can't explain your services and why they are structured the way they are to your ideal clients, specifically on a sales call, then they will ghost you. They might have come in excited.

They might have seemed like the ideal fit, but as you're talking to them more and more and then you notice there's this ghosting element that happens often, it's often because of the way you're explaining it, the way that you're talking about the service is going to be best for them, they do the mental math and think, "I don't know that this is for me. This isn't the level I wanted. This isn't high-touch enough. This is too high-touch. I don't want you in my house."

These are the reasons why stylists get that. They'll get people on calls, but then they end up going back and closing them. This is because your business is an ecosystem. If you don't have service knowledge for your ideal client, your sales will tank because it's all connected.

Let's talk about pricing. This is where ecosystems break down if you're not careful, if you let your emotions take control of your pricing decisions, which honestly, who among us has not done that, myself included?

Your pricing needs to do three things for you. Obviously, it needs to get you to the income you need to live your life well, and comfortably. Two, it needs to reflect your expertise in the sense that, let me be clear, it's not how many years you've been in service or how many people you've styled, it needs to reflect your expertise, meaning what you are best at, what you like most, and what is the asset to the ideal client that you want to work with.

Because all of your experience isn't going to be a show-stopping asset, it's going to be like “Meh, whatever” to the person you want to style. Every single thing you think is amazing, every press outlet that's featured you isn't going to matter to your ideal client potentially.

You need to know what of your expertise and accomplishments matters to your ideal client. This is something that I think really is hard to see for ourselves. Then the third one, your value is a result of what your client's perception of value is given the expertise that is most relevant to them.

If you don't know what expertise you have that is most relevant to your ideal client, then the way that you align that expertise in your client's eyes through your pricing is going to be lost. You won't be able to explain why your $5,000 price tag when everyone else is charging $2,500 is totally reasonable for the group of people you want to work with and the type of expertise you have that they care about.

It really doesn't matter how many people you've worked with, if I'm being honest. It should because you should be a better stylist, but from the perception of reflecting value, if you don't know how to talk in the way that the ideal client needs you to about your experience, it doesn't matter.

Imagine you're targeting a client who spends regularly, easily, without a second thought, $1,000 or more on a blazer. They really love designer clothes, so that's actually pretty low for that client, but just stick with me. If you're charging $1,500 for a seasonal update that takes you 20-plus hours to deliver, you're not just underpricing yourself because you probably will burn out, but you're signaling that you might not understand that ideal client's world.

Because anybody that is easily and without a second thought spending $1,000, $2,000, or $5,000 on a blazer and you're charging $1,500 for 20 plus hours of work together is going to be very, very suspect of your expertise. Valid or not, I'm just telling you, that's what they're going to do.

That's what I think when I see a coach that charges so little, I'm like, "Oh, I'm all set." That's just the truth. They're going to think you're not going to get them results faster. If it doesn't matter if it's true, that's what your price is telling someone, especially a high-level luxury client.

If you're thinking, "Well, I just don't want to work with that person," that's fine. There's a version of it for your client. It's all in how you are able to package your expertise for your ideal client so that the price makes sense with the package you are presenting them, and the story you're telling about your business.

Yeah, of course, I'm going to also tell you that it's probably not going to be the smartest if you're charging that because again, it will come with you being burnt out because you're going to need so many clients in a year. Too many stylists get into this place in terms of not being able to price their services what they actually need them to, which is honestly just math, but their emotions get in the way.

Their emotions get in the way of understanding what the most important and relevant expertise is for their ideal client so they can present that in their marketing and their storytelling and in their pricing in a way that gets people to be like, "Yeah, that all tracks. You're the right person for me." When you worry that you're charging too much or you're pricing things on what you can afford, you're forgetting that if your ideal client were you, they would be a stylist.

The reality is your pricing needs to match the transformation you are offering to the specific group, the foundation of your whole business, and your ideal client and the expectations they have of a stylist, which is not the same as somebody else's expectations of a stylist.

Often it's our lack of understanding of why our services are structured the way that they are that comes out in our marketing because we don't even realize it. But it's when we say the price to someone on a sales call and they look shocked, it's because something about our pricing didn't indicate the level of value that we were giving.

By the time they get on the sales call, their expectation of value is significantly lower than the price you gave them. That is where your pricing, your marketing, and your understanding of your ideal client in this ecosystem model show you there's a mismatch.

Again, then if we want to fix it, we go back to the ideal client. We go back to the foundation of the ecosystem and we fix it. When your service knowledge is where it needs to be, meaning you don't just have a service because somebody told you you should have it when it makes sense for your niche when you don't have a service because every other stylist has it when you can say, “Okay, I have this service and I have these points in it because this is my ideal client,” your confidence and your price is going to be unmatched.

You're going to feel the way I feel about your prices. That's what I want for you. I want you to feel like this is a deal. Let's head to the last part of this, which is your marketing and your sales because they work together and stylists think they are separate.

This probably is the biggest thing that I am so sad about is that I don't think I even realized this till a couple of years ago, that even though I had really high sales close rates, I didn't get how much marketing primes the sales process and how marketing is actually just sales one too many.

We think of it as education or entertainment or whatever. While those things are important, it's education in service of the sale. It's entertaining in service of trust to get the sale, that's the part I think is missed. If your pricing is aligned, then your next step is to ensure your marketing and your sales work together so that you are warming up potential clients and positioning yourself as the expert that they need based on their niche and psychographics.

Some stylists focus on growing their audience and they don't even realize that, but they don't convert followers into clients because their messaging is off. A lot of stylists think these are two separate things. As someone who has been a little bit slow to grow her audience because I genuinely was closing so many sales, I think we also forgot something.

I'm not saying I've never had a sales problem in my business, I definitely have. But I want to be clear that what I see is that stylists that work really, really hard on their ideal client and their messaging flows from that and their services and everything's really lined up, they may need to worry about their growth of their accounts and their social media and their email, but it's often like a last minute thing or something that falls to the bottom and they have to be conscious of that task, any admin work in their business.

It's not their sole focus. For example, I went to my coach's and I was like, "Shouldn't I be growing my audience?" and they're like, “You can get to a million dollars with your audience right now.” I had 300 followers less than I do now. That probably sounds really, really small given that so many of my competitors have massive audiences.

But because of the way my business is structured and because of my first year in business and the way that it went, I don't really need as many clients as some people do. That doesn't mean I don't need to grow it. It means it's a task on my list. It is not the reason I'm not making sales.

It's not an excuse for me to not do it. Now I go between launch periods and growth periods. But what I've seen is that, well, that's where my focus is, launch periods are growth periods for me because I know my audience. It's just the techniques I use. I do more reels versus carousels.

I notice that I'm consistently building my audience, but I get as excited about 10 new followers as somebody else would about 10,000 new followers because I know from how many stylists I've worked with that having big numbers does not equal sales. I have clients who are internet famous, who before we worked together could not make a $2,500 sale.

They couldn't. There was nothing they felt they could do. It was because they were behaving in a way that was cannibalizing sales. They didn't know it because fair enough, they were prioritizing tasks that lead to rapid growth, and that's great, but if you're a service provider, it's not necessary.

Again, this is not an excuse to not grow your accounts, but it's also not an excuse to say that growth is the reason you can't sell if you only need 20, or 25 clients a year to be at six figures, which is where it should be. Then why do you need 10,000 followers who won't listen to you? That's illogical.

That is good news because so many people are worried about vanity metrics, but the majority of people who will hire you will be lurkers. They will not be the people engaging with your stuff. Don't let people liking things make you think that that is the problem.

It's not. It's the lack of sales calls that are the problem. When you don't see it this way, you'll have a problem in your ecosystem. If you can't see that there is a connection, not between how many likes a post gets, but how many sales calls it gets you, I constantly track what messaging gets me applications to my program or gets me a sales call.

I can tell you with extreme accuracy, which is why I go in fits and starts, which is why I cycle in my business and that's why I teach a lot of my more advanced stylists to do because it's really hard to do all the things in your business really well all the time. But once you have this foundation of this ecosystem down, it's really not hard to know, ”Okay, when I say this, I get this sale.”

So you are constantly priming the pump for the marketing to create the sale. That means once you're in the sales conversation, you can close the sale easier because the client has been warmed up by the marketing and you know the marketing worked and you know how warm they are because you know that when you said this, they booked a sales call.

That is the piece that so many people don't understand, when they don't have systems in their business, when they don't have a business plan, they cannot see how their marketing and their sales go together so they keep changing their marketing mechanism, again without the foundation of the ideal client understanding that we talked about at the top of this episode, and then they wonder why their sales aren't closing. They start to say, “Oh, it's the audience. It's this, it's that.” But really, they don't know how to talk about why their prices are the way that they are.

They don't know how to talk about how their services are connected to their ideal clients or created the way that they are. They're not able to talk about the fact that the majority of their clients have these specific behaviors, that they have these unspoken desires, that they have a credit card, they hide from their husbands, and they're not able to do any of those things.

All of those things come together and that's why the sale isn't happening. There's a million pieces. If you don't look at all the parts together and say, “Okay, well, I'm getting people on the sales call, but they're not closing. Then they're coming back and they're watching my Instagram stories and they're engaging with you, but they're never addressing that they ghosted me.”

That's a very different situation in your business than if you get on sales calls and the person is just completely not the right fit. I'm going to change your marketing differently if you're the person who gets ghosted with people come back around to you, which is very common and very popular right now in the online space, versus the person who can't get anyone on a sales call or everyone they get on.

I see this a lot with people that have clients from TikTok. They're really, really bad fit, but they're just looking for a deal. They don't understand that this is like a discovery sales call model like a consultation. Those are two completely different marketing problems, but you couldn't misunderstand it if you don't understand the ecosystem model because the person who has the completely wrong fit folks coming to sales calls has a deeper baseline client demographic conversation problem than the person who has people ghosting and then coming circling back around.

I have so many things to say, I know my audience so well. What do I say first? That's the problem you should have as an established stylist. If this is where you want to be, if you want someone to help you assess your business ecosystem, fill in the gaps with you that are making this feel like you're not creating assets that you can use over and over again, but you're starting from scratch all the time, which we both know you are way too experienced to be having that situation in your business, then head to the link in my show notes, fill out an application, or DM me on Instagram, and let's talk about whether this round of Income Accelerator is right for you, there's a few spots left. Talk soon.

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.