If your business isn’t making money, it’s not a business. It’s a hobby.
In order for your business to move forward and generate revenue, you need to be taking steps in the RIGHT direction. They don’t have to be monumental steps, just consistent action that moves you forward.
So…are your steps taking you in the right or wrong direction?
People take steps all the time, personally and professionally, that take them in wrong directions without them even realizing it.
Even worse, there are people who refuse to take any steps at all and are stuck in a stand still.
These mistakes can cost you.
How can you tell if you’re going in the right direction for your life and career?
The answer can be found in the following two questions:
1. Are you working to strengthen what is currently in your life because you are happy and excited with where it’s going and its future prospects?
2. Or are you wishing for something else because you feel frustrated, unhappy, or stuck?
Answer these two questions honestly and you will know whether you are going in the right direction or not.
If you said yes to question 1, you are currently on the right path. If you said yes to question 2, it’s time re-evaluate what you’re doing and start making some different choices.
And these questions can be applied to anything.
Your career. Your relationships. Your hobbies.
Examine different parts of your life. Take your career, for example.
You either want your career to go one of two ways right now. You either want to keep what you’re currently doing for work and maintain or improve it, or you want something completely different.
Be honest with yourself.
I can’t stress this enough.
Nothing is black and white. You may like your job because of the financial stability, but you dread every single day you have to go in. That’s no way to live.
Or you may feel confident that you’re good at your job, but it doesn’t fulfill you and you hate your boss. You might feel real fear at the thought of doing your passion and no one paying you to do it.
Only you can decide your priorities. Is the stable paycheck in a soul-numbing job more important to you than spending 40 years doing something you love?
Really take some time to think through your answers. You’ll have to dig deeper than you’re used to doing to get to your authentic answer.
Your answers will guide you. Then it’s up to you to take your future where you want it to go with the right steps.
I know you are not reading this just for shits and giggles.
It’s true, right? I know you’ve got a vision that you want to make real.
You’re reading this because of one of three reasons:
1. You’re a recent grad, or just entering the workforce, and you want to skip the BS. You already know that you want to pursue your passion career because you want to spend your years doing something satisfying and meaningful to you.
2. You hate your job and want a complete change in your career. You love fashion and want to explore how to create a good life working a job you love and creating a business
3. You’ve already started down your fashion and entrepreneurial path but you’re stuck or feel like you’re spinning your wheels.
I know there is a dream life you have crafted in your mind.
You know…the dream life you journaled about or created a vision board for.
The one filled with passion for what you do, flexible working hours, a hefty bank account, travel adventures, and a thriving social life.
Yeah, sounds great, right? But is it truly achievable?
YES! Making a living as a stylist entrepreneur isn’t just a dream. I’m here to tell you that it’s achievable.
I’ve done it.
And there’s nothing special about me except that I actually took the essential actionable steps to get there.
While your career or business may not have led you to your dream life YET, it’s still possible and can happen much sooner than you think.
But are you on the right path towards it?
Only you know the answer to that. I know, for me, it took me awhile to find the right path.
I used to be maxed out, burned out, and stressed out.
My first few years of working as a personal stylist, I was burning the candle from both ends. For years! It was exhausting.
I was struggling big time.
Partly because I was working as an actress with off and on jobs; and partly because I didn’t know how to run my business correctly. There is a formula to business, but I didn’t know what it was back then. I was putting my efforts towards the wrong things.
I had no blueprint to get from where I was to where I wanted to be.
Why do some entrepreneurs experience almost instant success while others forever struggle just to get started?
I was working all the time. And working really hard. I was expending a lot of energy, a lot of will power, but I was working on the wrong things in my styling business so seeing little results.
In the last couple of years of training other stylists, I’ve realized that I wasn’t alone. There are many business owners spinning their wheels on the wrong things in their businesses.
Everyone is so busy, but they’re not necessarily being productive.
But I finally discovered why some stylists were actually rocking it and others were dying a slow stylish death.
What was the difference?
Today, we’re going to focus on the 6 key areas you need to FOCUS on for real productivity in your business.
That’s right. There’s only SIX.
Anything else and you’re wasting time.
I use these 6 focus points every single Monday morning now when I’m planning my week. I ask myself, “am I doing at least one thing on one of these key focus areas every day?”
If you’re focusing on these you will absolutely push your business forward, no doubt.
Key Focus #1 – Market Understanding
Your first focus must be understanding your market. Let me be really specific.
You need to understand the pains, gains, and ‘jobs to be done’ for your specific marketplace.
If you understand this, then everything else becomes easy. It is the basis for your marketing campaigns, your created services and products, your website, basically everything in your business stems from your customers’ pains, gains, and ‘jobs to be done’.
If you don’t know your market’s specific pains, gains, and ‘jobs to be done’, that is your next step. Do the research. Get clarity on this. Without this understanding, you can’t work on the other key focus points.
Key Focus #2 – Providing Value for Your Market
You need to serve your market.
The only way that you can break through and cut through the incredible crowd of stylists and creatives who are seeking attention from your audience is by serving, helping, and providing solutions to your target market.
You must provide value.That is key.
Notice I’m not saying to sell stuff to your market as providing value. Not yet. That will come soon.
But you have to provide free value to start the relationship.
It’s simple logic. You’ve got Stylist A and Stylist B. If both have the same services, same price, same service levels, everything is the same except that Stylist A, you don’t know from a hole in the wall.
But Stylist B…you’ve read her blog posts, watched her You Tube videos, seen her on Twitter, follow her on Pinterest, etc.
She has become familiar to you. Did you know that the word ‘familiar’ comes from the word ‘family’?
All things being equal, who are you going to hire? You’re going to hire the stylist who’s helped you out through their articles, infographics, videos, and content right? The stylist who you know and trust.
It makes absolute sense. That’s why providing value is so important.
Unfortunately, most people stop there.
Key Focus #3 – List Building
Maybe in the future the critical thing will be push notifications or messaging, but right now email is everything.
So building a list, providing something of value in return for an email address, is absolutely a key focus of any business.
Key Focus #4 – Getting Traffic
Traffic is the lifeblood of any business. You need people to walk through your business’s doors whether it be online or in the real world.
If no one ever walks through your doors (online or in the real world), they’ll never see your offers, never see your value, they’ll never know how awesome you are.
That’s no good.
You need traffic and that’s why it’s a key focus. And understanding, testing, and experimenting around getting traffic is absolutely key.
Key Focus #5 – Make Valuable Offers
You need to create products and services which address your tribe’s biggest pain points, the gains they want to achieve, and the things they want to learn how to do (the jobs to be done).
If you create products and services that answer those questions, provide pain relievers, or gain creators, you are on your way towards success.
Understand what your audience needs and they will be thrilled to pay you money for your services and products.
Remember what the key words are in this focus point: provide valuable offers.
Around here we use a 10x rule. Are we giving 10 times the value to what we’re charging? We want to make sure it’s that sort of level of expansiveness to make sure that we’re delivering real value to people.
So making valuable offers is absolutely crucial.
Key Focus #6 – Testing and Experimenting
What experiment are you running this week? What tests are you running?
You might test what traffic source is better for your website, or test an opt-in offer, or test a new service or product, or try a new experiment to determine the pains, gains, and ‘jobs to be done’ for your market through Focus point #1.
If you’re not testing and experimenting, you can’t grow. And as we know in nature, if you’re not growing, you’re dying.
So continuously conducting tests and experiments is absolutely vital.
This is how all the successful entrepreneurs do it.
These 6 key focus points are the secret to really drive your business to the next level and make sales way more consistently.
And even better…most of these steps can be automated.
An action step you can take right now:
I invite you to go through these 6 key focus points and assess whether you are working on all of these over the course of your business.
If there are any focus points that you’re confused about or need help with implementing into your business, please COMMENT BELOW and tell me which focus points you’re struggling with.
I’d also love know what focus points that you feel you have a good grasp of. Sharing what’s working is what makes this community valuable.
I’m waiting to hear from you!
I hope these actionable insights have helped you make clearer decisions on what to work on for your business.
My Premier Personal Shopping Strategy that I’ll be introducing to you soon is part of Key Focus Point #5…making valuable offers. It’s a very specific personal shopping strategy I have created that successfully provides clients with pain relievers, gain creators, and ‘jobs to be done’.
The Premier Personal Shopping Strategy shows how to anticipate meeting your clients’ needs and ensures that they feel they are getting 10 times their money’s worth from you.
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Raman says
Hi Michelle,
Thank you SO much for all of this valuable info! It’s super helpful, especially to a newbie stylist like me.
I think I have a good grasp of Key Focus Point 1 – Market Understanding. I’m currently in the midst of reaching out to people in my network to have a chat with anyone who would be interested in a service like this. I found this to be a very useful way to talk to the market directly and figure out what their key pain points are.
My question for you is about Key Focus Point 2 – Providing Value for Your Market. When you talk about providing free value, like blog posts, YouTube videos, etc, you will obviously be reaching a wide group of people across the world…can people who do not live in your region still be a client? Is there any way to provide this service through other methods besides meeting and shopping in person?
Thanks in advance for taking the time to read my comments. Looking forward to hearing from you!
Michelle McFarlane says
Hi Raman,
Thanks for your question. It’s a good one. We have stylists in different regions but obviously there are many more places we do not have stylists. In those cases, a few of our stylists provide online styling consultations. This is a more challenging service because you’re doing their closet consultations virtually which is a little harder and when personal shopping you can’t try clothes on your client and see how it looks and explain to them why things do and don’t work on them. Only our most skilled stylists successfully provide consistent online sessions but it is an option to provide service outside of your region. Just be aware if you have the experience, skills, and talent to provide this. You don’t want to get bad reviews because you’re not ready to provide this service yet.
Ander Gates says
I’m in the place of just *thinking* about the possibility of being a stylist.
I’m loving your business advice.
I wonder though, if I should get some fashion training, experience before I start out.