Your Styling Business Is Leaking

Why the work stops coming, and the five leaks quietly costing you clients.

A few days ago I got this message in my DMs on Instagram. Let’s say it was from someone called Toby.

“Hi Emily. I used to have a strong client base, but two years ago that completely disappeared. All the clients just went away, and I don’t know why. I tried to get feedback as to why it happened, but I’m met with vague answers that amount to nothing at all. So I’m at a point where I’m just trying to find new clients, get in touch with new people, reaching out to executive producers, art directors, production companies, people who can book you. But I’m met with compliments on my work and no actual job offers, and it’s frustrating. Money is running thin. It’s exhausting, the wait of it all. The paradigm doesn’t seem to change, no matter what I do.”

I am sharing this because Toby’s business is leaking, and I want Toby and yourselves reading this to see the patterns, so you can fix the leaks in your business. Let me show you what I mean.

Imagine your career is a bath you are trying to fill. All the effort you pour in, the posting, the pitching, the networking, the portfolio, all of it, that is the tap, the water running in. (Perfect. This is what you want. You think it will give you results, and in theory, yes, it should!)

Now imagine there are holes around the bath. You are filling it a little, but nothing stays. The water is pouring straight back out as fast as you pour it in. You can turn that tap on as hard as you like, you can post on Instagram twice a day and pitch until your fingers ache, but if the bath is full of holes, it will never fill.

This is exactly what is happening to Toby’s styling business. You see here, and for the rest of this post I will refer to your styling career as a business, because it is one. The first step is to start acting like it is. Anyway, I digress, back to the leaking bath. Toby was blasting the tap, working harder and harder, panicking that he was not doing enough, when the real problem was never the tap. It was the leaks he had never stopped to find.

So in this week’s newsletter, we are not going to turn the tap up. We are not going to pile more effort onto a leaking business, because that only exhausts you faster. This week, we are finding the holes. Because a business that is losing the clients, that is slowly emptying, does not need to work harder and faster, which will always result in burnout, making those leaks a lot bigger. It needs the leaks named, and then it needs you to fix them.

Let me walk you through where the leaks usually are, and as I do, feel clearly for which of them are yours.

But before we do that, I wanted to just remind you all that The Fashion Mentorship Program starts on Saturday. This is the last cohort running in 2026. The mentorship program is designed to fix the leaks in your bath, but before we start the program on Saturday, let me give you a little insight into how we work, starting by naming the leaks and the first steps you can take to fix them.