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.

If you have been spinning your wheels, hiring business coaches or marketing experts, and you're still not seeing traction with your income, you're not getting true clarity on what's going to pull in clients consistently, I want you to listen very closely in this episode.

I want to start this out by saying, I am not here to bash anyone, and I only share anecdotes like the ones I'm doing today when I have heard them from multiple sources and/or I have experienced these things myself. Most of them I have experienced.

So my own experience of hiring coaches as a stylist and working with so many people after they have worked with coaches that have given them this advice is what makes me feel really, really passionate about what we're going to talk about today.

What I am here to say out loud is what is quietly killing momentum in this industry, and it has to stop.

There is a massive blind spot in the coaching world when it comes to service-based creatives. So what I am saying today are things I've talked about with my friends and peers in other industries that are also creative and service-based, interior designers, graphic designers, architects, people that also have similar styles of business model.

But stylists in particular, because that's who I work with, are really being set back because a lot of the coaches that stylists work with have never had an experience themselves with a stylist. Now, I have worked with coaches who have hired me, and also miscoached me.

So I want to be clear: even if somebody has worked with a stylist, it doesn't mean that they completely understand how to point you towards the best practices in the industry.

I'm going to explain to you exactly why I'm not just saying this to say it, because I can't help every stylist in the world—nor should I be—because I am not an energetic match for lots of folks.

I am very to the point. I am very honest. And I'm going to call you up to your next level. So not everybody and I are a great match, and I am totally fine with that.

That means there are lots of stylists that I want to go into educated business relationships with coaches aware of the things that could be not helping them get the most out of their investment.

I want today to be an example to you, if you are considering working with me, of how I think about these things, and how I'm going to explain some of the suggestions that I might suggest to you to make changes in your business.

Now, not all of these are general blanket things I tell every stylist, but I think they're good examples of things people come to me expecting me to cosign, and I don't. So I want you to know why I say this. I think it will be helpful wherever you kind of stand on that.

So today, I'm going to break down what it is that people say to stylists that are keeping them held back, why it matters, and what you need to do instead if you want consistent high-ticket styling clients and long-term income growth.

So let's start this out by setting the scene.

A lot of general business coaches really do believe in what personal stylists do. Their hearts are in the right place, but they don't understand the business model of high-end, done-for-you creative work.

That gap in their understanding is costing a lot of my clients, who have worked with me after these types of coaches, time, money, and honestly, credibility, because of what they're being advised to do in their marketing.

Because stylists aren't just client-facing in their role. You are behind the scenes doing hours of potentially unpaid labor that general coaches don't ever account for in their frameworks or business advice, because they have no experience with the type of business model that personal stylists have.

You're out here pulling outfits, shopping online, in person, editing closets, handling logistics, customizing everything that you do to people's body type, lifestyle, insecurities, all in addition to the things that all business owners are doing, including these coaches: marketing, accounting, admin, client communications.

But when general coaches are giving people frameworks and ideas and advice, they are not doing it with the understanding of all of the non-client-facing time that goes into the delivery of the service to the client.

I can say this because I've been on both sides of it now, and I completely understand why I did not get what I could have out of some of my coaching experiences in retrospect.

Because I thought they understood. I thought they got that obviously I was spending all this time over here doing this and that.

I figured that it was obvious, especially if I worked with them as the stylist. But they didn’t. So they only know the business coaching model that they teach other business coaches, which is: have the phone call with the client, maybe. I mean, I give notes to my clients after, but that is very rare. People are always shocked when I do that. They expect that they're just going to get a recording.

Everyone's out here, they're such high-end, high-touch mentors, and they can't even give people important notes on the call they just had. Like, come on, stop, really? You can't even record the call, I have to do it? It's wild how low the expectations have been in the coaching industry.

So, of course, if their business model and the business model they are mostly familiar with doesn’t have a lot of behind-the-scenes work besides what they need to do to run a business like all of us do, they are going to have major blind spots in how they advise you.

We're going to get into the specifics of that and how it shows up. But a coach that doesn't understand that, who tries to plug in a copy-and-paste coaching framework built for course creators or content-based businesses or any general online entrepreneur, they're not going to help you build a business. They're going to help you contribute to your burnout.

Because it's happening every day when I talk to stylists on discovery calls. There has been a huge uptick in my discovery call forms coming through my email because it's about the time when stylists start to get nervous about summer coming, and they just made an investment. And they're listening to this podcast and they're thinking, "Okay, wait a sec. This is very specific. I don't know how to do these things."

I get it. I would be panicking too. I have panicked. That's why I've spent a lot of money on things. That is the first issue: that there is just a massive misunderstanding. Again, it's not just something that happens to personal stylists. It happens to people that do any kind of high-end, high-touch creative service for a client that tends to lean to the transformational side.

I see this with interior designers a lot, and I've talked to a lot of them about this. They deal with the same problem, and a lot of interior designers and graphic designers listen to this podcast because they can see that it's a very similar set of issues.

Whether it be the clients aren't able to explain their creative interests or where their inspiration comes from or why they like something, or it's that they lose clients in the multi-part process as well and they can't get their buy-in. It's how to talk about the service and how to make sure that they're positioning themselves to people that have the kind of money and the kind of income to be in a place mentally that they can even have a transformation in their physical space, or on their body, or on their website, or in their marketing.

So it's very similar issues. I'm saying that because I want to legitimize the fact that this is an issue I see all the time. Stylists aren’t special or different. I'm not saying you can only work with people that have worked with stylists because there aren't that many coaches out there for personal stylists.

So I don't want to close off those numbers to people, but I do want to make sure that we're aware that this is a blind spot, generally speaking, in services that are similar. So if you find somebody that's a coach that can work with people that have experience with other types of creatives, you may be in a better spot. That's something just to know in the back of your mind.

But there's a second blind spot. It's the client blind spot. It's really, really big because it actually exists inside the styling industry, which is why I created and kicked off this business and this podcast with the Transformational vs. Transactional series, because it was sort of this unspoken hiccup that stylists were getting stuck with.

Most business and marketing coaches—outside the styling industry and inside the styling industry—have no clue how high-end styling clients think because they've never worked with them in the transformational sense.

There are lots of stylists who have worked with people in a transactional way, particularly in big cities like LA and New York, who would die before they would ever ask their client to do style discovery work or fill out a form because they are in a transactional world where they are expected to be the endless shopper for their client until they are happy to make it okay that they charge a lot.

That is not transformational. If you are not able to ask your client to be a partner with you because you think it devalues your service, it might, because your marketing didn’t call in the right person.

So that’s why I say there are lots of people who have celebrity clout or have worked in these big cities charging a lot of money, and they could tell you how to build the business, but they can’t tell you how to speak to the right people if you want that deeper interaction.

If you want to actually be able to say with confidence that you help other people have confidence. Because you need to understand the psychological nuance behind investing in a transformational experience, styling, or otherwise.

That’s why I was able to take work from the professional development world, the leadership world, and apply it to styling. Transformation means you're getting a change for somebody that is deep and internally connected to their sense of identity.

As a result of that, you will have a different type of outlook on the world, a different type of outlook on buying, on investing, on using your time, if you're the type of buyer who wants a transformational service, whether that be from an interior designer, a stylist, a business coach, whatever.

When I talk about these things, it's not like they're just special to the styling industry, because that would mean that they were not psychological principles or sales principles that were applicable all the time. That's what I say when I say a framework.

Frameworks and principles need to be able to be applied across industries, because human beings are human beings. And when they want a transformation, they have a specific outlook on life, which is why this is not magic. This is just a little bit more thoughtful work than most people are used to. It works for all industries. I'm just applying it to this one.

The coach doesn't get the difference between someone who wants a couple of cute outfits for brunch or for a trip versus someone who is looking to reclaim their identity through their wardrobe. They can't help you market or price your service with any level of integrity.

You can call your work transformational all day long—and I see stylists adopting this language all the time—but if your marketing doesn't lead your audience to understand what transformation actually looks like, your messaging is not going to be the sales mechanism that you want it to be for how much time you're pouring into it or for how much money you're investing in coaching containers.

So, let's dive into the four types of advice that stylists get that sound great but are quietly stalling businesses left and right. We're going to start out with the easiest one: Your prices need to reflect your value. It sounds so empowering. Know your worth, raise your rates, own it.

Here's the problem: this advice is a slogan. And if the person giving it to you doesn't actually understand what your service entails—the emotional labor, the logistics, the hours of behind-the-scenes work, the psychology of your client, and what they need to hear to understand why your pricing makes sense—it is a setup for confusion and doubt, and often a smokescreen for them to seem like they're deeply philosophical but have nothing to back it up.

Because stylists hear this advice, they raise their rates with no strategic foundation or any shift in their marketing, and then crickets. Because without guidance on how to communicate the value in a way that lands with your ideal client, all you've done is made your prices higher and your sales harder.

As a result, that false sense of what I've talked about before of, like, impostor syndrome, it's not impostor syndrome. It's lack of a business strategy, quite honestly, that has stylists at this point thinking, "I must have some very serious case of impostor syndrome that's holding back my sales."

No, you don't. You don't have a strategy that makes sense, and your brain knows it. So you're like, "I'm not really sure how to market this." This is where we need to trust ourselves more, because that makes no sense. You can't raise your rates but not raise the way you market. You can’t.

So most of us come to me after working with coaches that helped them raise their prices and handed them this kind of advice, only feeling more unclear after that investment. I literally just had two sales calls in April where someone told me that they hired a coach who said, "You know, I'm really concerned that your prices don't reflect your value. We need to work on that." They raised their prices $100 in one case, and nothing else changed. The coach was like patting themselves on the back.

What are we even doing? Nothing else changed. That is not going to help this woman feel better about how much time she's marketing online and getting crickets. It's not because the stylist did something wrong and had a self-esteem problem and didn't step into her worth. It's because the advice was trash and there was no architecture, no strategy, no plan, no specific way that stylist could live out that advice in a step-by-step basis underneath that hollow advice to support the shift in her prices.

Which again, in that one case of $100, that was just hilarious. But if it's thousands of dollars, which I've seen clients do, they go from hourly to packages, we're kind of in the right ballpark, but the packages don't make sense. And the stylist feels even more unable to sell it because they don't know what aspect of that package is the highest value to talk about in their marketing to convert the sale. Because they don't know what the sales trigger is. Because they don't know who they're talking to.

That's why the first freaking thing we do in my programs is: What is the sales trigger? Who are we talking to? And what do they care about? You can't do any messaging work. You can't even really build styling services if you don't understand that.

So, of course, stylists feel like they got into a situation where the investment didn't pay off. It didn’t, but not because they did anything wrong. Unfortunately, they trusted someone who didn't know what they were talking about. Which is why we have to know that there is a gap in the general business coaching market online so we can ask the right questions on sales calls.

This next one is really technical to our industry, and I kind of do understand why people say this. So I don't want to be too hard on this one if you've been given this advice, because the majority of stylists I have worked with have been given this advice. And I too started out with this.

But I have thought a lot—you may have noticed—I have thought a lot about why we do what we do in this industry. I have talked to a lot of people inside and outside it, outside of my clients. I do this weekly, actually. It's part of my process during the week so that I'm making sure that I'm giving advice that makes sense and I'm not in a silo with myself. Because I don't want to give people advice that's just like what I think is a good idea. It has to live in reality.

So this particular piece of advice, of these two types of services that most stylists are told to start their lower-tier packages at, is deeply problematic, but shows up everywhere. That is: start with either, for your lower tier, or both (honestly, that's even worse): closet edits or special occasion styling.

I'm treading a little lighter here, not because I don't stand behind my point, but I don't want anyone panicking or making any changes just based on what I'm saying unless this really resonates with you.

So, general business coaches and other stylists giving advice will tell you to start your—if you're doing like three services—with one of these two things. I understand why it sounds logical.

Closet edits are like the first part of most stylist's process in an ideal world. Event styling is tangible and easy-to-describe service would seem to have high demand because, obviously, it's an important thing in people's lives. The assumption is that people will pay for something that is high demand, in the case of event styling.

Closet edits feel foundational to the process when you're inside the industry. They're not. Spoil alert, they're not to the client, but they are to us. So, special event styling feels urgent and high stakes.

So, lots of coaches outside of the industry recommend, "Why don't you just do special event styling?" Especially if they're in L.A. or New York or big cities, and they just kind of give this advice. I hear this advice a lot.

But here's the truth. These are the worst services to lead with if you are a transformational stylist building a premium, high-retention styling business. I'm going to break down exactly why.

Closet edits are often positioned by stylists as a smart entry point because they are familiar in the general public psyche now that styling is more normalized and seemingly low commitment because the client isn't shopping and investing more money without knowing you.

So it seems like there's a psychological point of safety because it's already sunk cost. The client already has the clothes, so they want to start doing more with it. But they tend to attract a client that is in a scarcity mindset, clients who are price shopping, who want to make the most of what they already have, who aren't looking to evolve, and who are approaching the process like a fixed budget, not an identity transformation.

It's like they're trying to, when it's a standalone edit. Obviously, I'm a big fan of closet edits, but they're trying to make the closet edit the transformation that they're either not ready for, financially, emotionally. I would argue those two things go together. And they have high expectations of trying to recoup lost investment. That's just the psychology of what's happening there.

That's not inherently bad. It becomes a problem when the stylist overpromises in their marketing what a closet edit will do. Like, "It will be life-changing," because lots of stylists love a closet edit. They love it. They love that sense of, "I got rid of your ugly stuff."

But they're not thinking about it through the eyes of the client. Most stylists, as in 99% of the stylists who come to me with that offer as the standalone, lowest-tier one, also have higher-priced packages.

Now, if everything you're doing is standalone right now, that's fine. You're at a point in your career where maybe you just need to get the experience, and I'm fine with standalone services. But if you've been repeatedly booking clients for just a one-off service—a style, a closet edit, a shop—for a year or two now, you can go to transformational packages. It's okay for you to do that. You've given your dues, okay?

But if you also have a standalone closet edit alongside a $2,500 multi-part, $3,500, $5,000 multi-part service, we have a problem. We have a big, big problem because it's attracting, and potentially, the wrong clients that aren't going to stay with you.

Most stylists, when they're selling a lower-price closet edit like that, are doing it without any deep style discovery work or identity work up front. So what happens?

The client walks away with a cleaner closet but no clear sense of direction, and often not enough ROI on the amount of outfits the stylist may or may not have made for them in order to feel like they want to continue to invest with you.

They're not walking into work Monday morning thinking, "Damn, that investment changed my life so far. I can't wait to hear what margin accounting thinks of my look." Because they're over it. There's not the dopamine hit. They've worn those clothes.

And they may like the experience. If you put a styling session with a closet edit—most stylists don't, for the level of price I'm talking about here—but if you're just doing the edit, they're not going in feeling any different.

If you didn't do any pre-work with them to understand really why you got rid of something, they just listened to you and took your taste. Which isn't transformational, it's transactional.

If they don't feel the shift, they don't trust your process enough to book for the next level of service, maybe shopping or a higher level. So now you've just put time into a client who not only will not uplevel with you but has a pretty bad experience, honestly, for what your marketing probably promised.

Because you were excited about the closet edit, you're a stylist, that's your language. You know what's possible when they continue up the chain. But most stylists don't upsell people. They don't even know how to do that. They don't have any processes, systems, language in place.

They don't get what the client wants. They want to be able to do more with what they already have. So they would have been better off doing a styling session and not a closet edit. Doesn't give you the answers to the test. Because that is going to help that person understand themselves better, it's going to help them trust you more, it's going to recoup their lost sense of sunk cost on the clothes they've already bought, and they're going to walk away feeling better about themselves so that they're more likely to work with you.

It doesn't really matter what we want as stylists. It matters what they need to do to stay with us in order to grow and be truly transformational.

So there's one example. The other, special event styling. Same problem, different flavor, way worse psychologically. These clients are under pressure because the fact that it's called “special event” means it must be public. They're being publicly interacted with. It's not like a day-to-day thing. It has some sort of import in their mind, a wedding, a work event, a family party, something that's important to them.

There's some kind of public scrutiny, real or imagined. People are going to perceive them in a situation, in a context that matters to them. Layered on top of an already emotionally heightened state that you may or may not be aware of, because people hide their emotions in lots of ways, this person comes to you a complete stranger off the street. They're not your established clients.

I love event styling for established clients. Again, this is why we gotta know what the established client’s situation is, what new client’s situation is. We gotta know these clients inside and out. Most stylists offering this as a standalone service don't do enough intake or style discovery, again, to know who the client actually is outside of the pressure of that moment that they're styling the person for.

So that means the stylist is basically sourcing in the dark, relying on the client self-reporting, which is often skewed by nerves, insecurity, body image noise that always gets louder when the stakes are higher in our lives. The client might say they want to look “elegant” or whatever they want, but unless you know what that means for them in their daily life and what that translates to, you will pull options that likely miss the mark.

Now I know there are people that think that it's like some kind of badge of honor to be given no information and meet people's needs. That is a wound from your childhood you have to look at. That is not how we operate a styling business.

Even if the outfit looks good on paper, the client may not feel like themselves in it. And that is the kiss of death for retention. Add to that—because this is what I hear most often—that special event styling clients almost always come with tight turnaround times. And we live in a society with more limited inventory for that kind of formal, black tie, special occasion wear that's shrinking in mainstream retail.

Now forget it if you live in a place that's not a major city. Good luck. Now if it's the wrong season—if it's like the middle of summer or the middle of spring or like January, after New Year's, after the holidays—your inventory's even lower.

What you're doing by making your special event styling your lowest tier is you're putting yourself in a high-pressure situation with very low margin, low repeat client scenario. And you're going to walk away from that situation feeling like something was off nine times out of ten, if it's not an established client.

So when coaches, whether they be stylist or not, say just start your service entry point with a closet edit or an event styling package, they're giving advice rooted in how easy those services are to explain to themselves, to the general public, not how strategically sound they are to scale your business.

So if you want a business that keeps clients coming back, that deepens over time, that leads to more word of mouth, that's good retention and referrals, you need to start with services that give your clients clarity, wins, and a felt transformation that mimics the bigger transformation your larger styling packages would give them at a lower point.

I'm not saying you give away the whole thing, but in this example, it would be like: make outfits from what they already own so that they feel like they have some wins. They can see, when you say on your marketing, “you already have style,” they don't see it. So at least make your entry offer be a place where, at the very least, they can see it in what they've already invested in.

That's going to make them feel better about them, which is going to make them feel better about you. What we don't want is to create low-tier services that are causing confusion wrapped up in closet edits or panic and an identity crisis in a fitting room because somebody told us somewhere that we had to be the person that does special event styling.

No. You have to be the person, as a transformational stylist, that provides clarity. Clarity. Transformation comes from clarity, not from scarcity, not from people that panic at the last minute and need your service but don't give you enough time to do it. Not in half-ass solutions like one-off closet edits.

So this really isn't about being an elitist or super rigid or about there only being one way to build a styling business. There are not. These are not the only entry-level services I have clients do, but these are good examples of the ones that I see. Immediately, when I see them on a website before a discovery call of a client that I'm about to talk to—or a potential client—I know that's a problem.

I know exactly why they're not retaining clients, especially if their price points are low or they have these two types of services and they're still an hourly. Like, best of luck.

You have to understand the lifecycle of a transformational client. Period. That understanding is what's going to separate stylists who stay booked and raise their rates from the ones who are still trying to make $300 from a closet edit feel like a $3,000 experience. It's not.

Give them the appropriate transformation for the price point, but things like closet edits or special occasion styling don't give most people upsells in their business or the client transformations because they're too weak of containers for what the promise is.

This one's going to be like a marketing-based piece of advice that I'm hearing a lot from people that have worked with marketing folks, and I get it. But again, I think you'll understand why it's not useful. Post more fashion tips, fashion education, history of fashion, fashion, fashion, fashion style tips to grow.

I know you all have heard me talk about this, but I want to break it down more because lots of folks are hiring people out, with video being so big now, that are marketing agencies also giving advice. So I get it. But again, I'm not saying you shouldn't hire them. I think you should just be aware of this when you go ahead to do this.

When you have that conversation, just make sure they understand the type of content you want to put out if they're helping you write it. So yeah, content like tips, advice, fashion history, it’s got to get likes. It may even increase your views and give you more followers. But it will not lead to revenue.

What’s wild about this is I will watch stylists do this for a long time before it dawns on them like, “This is not working.” The stylists I work with who are building six-figure incomes, they don’t just educate. Obviously, I educate. There’s no problem with education. They lead.

If you want to know what leadership looks like, go back and listen to the Thought Leadership episode I did. If that feels deeply uncomfortable to you, that’s what I’m talking about. That is the level that makes you completely competition-proof.

They're creating content that helps potential clients shift their mindsets, see themselves differently, and recognize that what they want requires guidance. In that type of educational content, that is where sales happen. And last time I checked, we’re here for those.

What you’re going to need instead is identity-based content that speaks to the right person. Mindset-shifting content that prepares them for the investment. Sales content that handles objections before they click “Book a sales call.”

If you’re only giving outfit tips or the history of fashion or that type of stuff, you’re building a platform. You are not building a business. And those are now two different things.

But you probably didn’t know that because nobody told you. That doesn’t mean you can’t start layering in some of these other types of content. You probably have killer marketing in the sense that it looks good. You’re probably better on camera than most people. There’s nothing lost here. You're just missing the thing that makes it a business, that makes the marketing be the engine for the business.

Now this last one, here’s a tip. Here's a piece of advice that stylists are getting all the time, all the time: “Create passive income products or a membership.”

Now, I’m not saying I don’t work with stylists to do these things. But this, as a general “everyone should do this” as definitive wisdom one how to grow or scale a styling business, makes me want to flip a table Real Housewives style. Like, for real.

Stylists being told to “just scale” with a mini course or a membership when they haven’t even consistently sold their core offers yet is absolutely reckless. It is literally unethical. It is like telling someone to hang curtains in a house that doesn’t have walls, plumbing, or a roof. It’s ridiculous.

Because here’s what really happens. You pour your time, your energy, your creativity into building this offer. Maybe it’s a style guide, maybe it’s a membership, maybe it’s a mini course on how to edit your closet. You think: this will solve burnout and finally bring in consistent income while I sleep.

But it doesn’t sell. Or it sells to a few people who never finish it, never open it, never show up for the calls. Or worse, it sells, but it attracts the wrong audience. And now you’re stuck delivering content to a group of people who were never the right fit for your higher-ticket services.

So your marketing and your energy are constantly in this push-pull. I know people are buying this $19 thing over here, but I really need a $3,000 client. But I only know how to talk to these people down here. And I’m over-delivering in that, without a doubt.

So now all your marketing is speaking to the wrong people. And you can’t sell your higher-end. Most people in this position, by the time they’re thinking, “Ooh, this will solve my problem,” if you’re coming at a membership or a passive product from the place of “This will fix my sales problem, this will fix my consistent income,” you’re looking in the wrong place.

As someone who is now looking to create another part of the business that does have a bit of this “passive income” model in it, nothing about it will be passive, I will be spending a lot of time on it, by the way, but I’m not delivering the information live, I can tell you right now, it’s not the thing that’s going to carry the business. It’s part of the business. It is a thought leadership part. And it is very strategic to warm people up for other offers. It is not to make millions of dollars while I sleep. It’s just not.

I already know how to make money. I already know how to call in clients. I already know what offers my people want. And every single thing I’m going to be selling comes out of what I’m already selling in my one-to-one. These are not new. I’m not sitting down and trying to figure it all out again.

And I’m saying that because I’m literally doing it right now. And I would be very alarmed if I were doing it from a place of, “Oh, this will fix my slow season,” or “Oh, this will fix the fact that I can’t get anybody to sign up for my higher ticket.” No. I literally don’t have the time.

So that’s what I want. That’s the position I want my clients and my stylists have to be in before we’re messing with lower-ticket. They literally don’t have time to take on more people who are interested so we create these other things.

They are not to fix the marketing problem, which is what you have if you have a sales problem. So thinking that this lower-ticket problem solves it, it doesn't. It's just going to undercut your higher ticket if you're not already able to sell higher ticket.

Because if you haven't nailed how to clearly communicate, position, and sell your main one-to-one offers, you do not have marketing insight, you don't have messaging clarity, and you don't have an audience relationship to build something scalable yet. Because passive income is not an escape hatch, and it's honestly not passive. It's the result of a business that already works, meaning people are already buying into what you are saying.

They either need to buy that lower-priced thing to warm them up to get them ready for the higher-priced thing, which is what a lot of my audience uses this podcast for. So I'm already doing it for free, which is how I know if I throw in a $97 offer, I'll be okay, it will work. Again, not going to make me millions of dollars. That's not the point.

It's to further warm up people that want more experience with me and how I think, and get results in their business before they invest higher, whether because they need more emotionally, 'cause they've been burned before, which again, this is where the strategy comes in. I know my audience. I know that most of them have worked with somebody else. So they are very slow to say yes.

So it makes sense for me to use this podcast and other avenues to help warm them up so they can feel ready, because I don't want to work with anyone that's not a full-body yes. It's not an option for me. So if you are still struggling to get consistent sales from people who deeply value your work, what you need isn't a course to sell on autopilot. It's clarity about who you are actually talking to.

If you don't know how to get someone to say yes to a minimum $2,500 offer on its discovery call, you're going to struggle even harder trying to convert them to a $47 or a $97 product that doesn't even have a conversation with you to sell. We're going to talk about sales calls on a whole other episode, because that deserves its own conversation around what stylists are being told there.

But I want to just focus on this. If you can't sell in conversation, where you have many chances to get that person back, you can't sell throwing up one Instagram slide and hoping that it does it for you. Because here is what nobody talks about—and I can say it because I'm getting ready to do it—passive doesn't mean effortless.

It has taken almost more time for me to think through the marketing for the lower-ticket stuff that will come out in the next six months than to sell my group programs. Because the principles that you use to sell higher-ticket, more transformational stuff, once you know it, it's in your core, it's in your soul. But there are a lot more features and benefits; sales pages have to be longer, the lower the price, because you have a more hesitant buyer.

There's so much more to what goes in there, and they're not the same sales principles. So you might as well just math, you gotta learn sales principles either way. You might as well learn the ones that are going to make your life better, easier, and lead to more clients, because that client will hire you again. Because they have the money and they have the need.

If you are a stylist trying to spend more time making passive work and feel like you're failing, you're not. You're just not putting your time and attention into what you need to, your core service. That's it.

You have to market and have a relationship with your audience to sell high ticket. Why waste it on a $20 thing? So no membership, no mini course, no low-ticket downloads are going to solve inconsistent income as a stylist if you are not able to sell your main styling offers.

They're accessories. They do not build the outfit. They just make it pop. So passive offers are only going to become powerful after you've proven demand, built trust with your audience, and have a clear pathway for clients to ascend into deeper work with you.

Even those offers can't just be any type of offer. They can't just be any type of membership. They have to be memberships that set people up to do the deeper work with you one-on-one, for it to be a sales cycle situation that makes sense for a scalable business model.

People say, "Oh, I'm going to scale. I'm going to scale." I say, "What does that mean?" "Oh, I'm going to be able to make money without doing any work." Well, first of all, the amount of marketing you're going to have to do is going to feel more, number one.

Number two, you're probably not going to know what things people need to hear to buy at that rate, because they're totally different than what your clients one-on-one want. Third of all, if they're not selling your clients into the next level of work with you, you don't have a scalable offer on your hands.

So what is the path forward if you've experienced any of these things and spent time on these things, spent effort on these things, spent money on this type of advice?

You need to build your business on a foundation that reflects the real work that you do and the real people you serve for your core offers. So just think of what is your mid-tier or your high-tier offer. Everything I'm going to say should be based on that person. Who is the right fit for that?

That means you have to know how to price and package your services in a way that are backed by strategy, that make sense, as they're actually scaling people up your offer ladder. Not just a one-off, never-see-them-again kind of situation.

Your marketing educates and elevates people's mindset, not just entertains them and gets eyeballs, so that they are made into ideal clients. You need content that builds connection, authority, and momentum in your business so it doesn't feel like a drain on you, because you know when you say this, you get clients.

You need support from people that understand not necessarily the styling industry specifically, but creative service industries in general, and the specific pressure and time, and skill that goes into identity-based styling or creative work generally.

In our next episode, I'm going to be speaking more about the economic uncertainty going on right now and how stylists can continue to thrive no matter what is going on. But this conversation had to happen first, so that we will all be in sort of the right place and understanding for you to get that these types of throwaway pieces of business advice are not the answer as we go into times that may feel uncertain or difficult.

I'm not saying stylists won't thrive. I think that this economic downturn is very different than others. That's why positioning matters right now because you gotta be talking to the right people, because this will not hit everybody the same way.

Either way, everybody will probably end up spending more on clothing. So stylists have to understand how to create real value in their business so they can help clients also understand how they help with them spending their money more wisely.

It isn't a membership. It isn't some sort of passive thing that's going to placate the fears of people right now. Because the stylists that are really here, that are listening, that are resonating, are stylists who are building brands that have weight, that have depth, that change people's lives, that deserve to be taken seriously by clients, and most importantly, by themselves.

Because I care about how you feel about yourself more than how everyone else feels about you. Because you are the thing that radiates all the success that you will ever have.

So if you've been trying to piece together advice from generic coaches or recycled templates, wondering why it's not working, it is not you. It is a framework built on a lack of understanding about what it is trying to educate you on.

Stylists aren't influencers. They're not content creators. You're creative professionals offering a high-touch, high-trust service. You need a strategy that honors that. So if this episode hit a nerve, good. That means you are waking up to what is not working so you can make better, more aligned decisions moving forward.

If you want help with that, you know where to find me. Hop over on Instagram, get in my DMs. I have a couple of one-to-one spots open still for summer, and I'm booking into fall as well. So thank you for listening. As always, I will 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.