Improvability Blog

Q: If I buy your Colour Analysis home-study kit, how do I access also the following: correct style for body shape for women, make-up application, and information for men and how to dress to body shape. These seem to be the 4 areas you need to know before you can start an image consultation course. Am I correct that you used to have a “box” with all these? Petunia

Dear Petunia:

There is no law (legal, moral or otherwise) that says you have to provide every service under the sun before you start your business. 

In fact, I would strongly recommend that you DON’T follow the conventional approach of providing every service imaginable because that just puts you in the same league as the rest of them out there - nothing more than average and, in my book, average is a word that belongs to the world of mathematics and should never, ever be used to describe a human being.

You need to set yourself apart from the world and his mother, or how else will you get noticed? 

Be different and specialise:

• Some of my consultants are utterly brilliant at colour and I have advised them to stick to what they’re good at and comfortable with - providing consultations, workshops, presentations, and lots of other related services about colour only
• You do not need either a make-up kit or specific training in make-up application to be able to provide a successful colour, style or image service.  My courses show you how to either use make-up or not.  If you run an independent business, then you can choose for yourself whether you want to include make-up or not. The big colour houses insist on you learning all about make-up because they want you to sell their make-up products to your clients; that’s how they continue to make money from you for many years after your initial training has finished – but you can only access their products as long as you keep to their terms and conditions…
• Some people are great at personal shopping so need to study both colour and ladies’ style. Why on earth would they need to cloud the issue by studying men’s image too?
   
• Some people are marvellous with make-up, and colour training is all they need to add extra value and a unique slant to their business
• Do you really want to work with men? No?  Then why waste your hard-earned money on men’s image training?
• Do you want to work at corporate level? No?  Then why waste even more money on corporate image training?

The big image and colour training companies will sell you a massive package of several days of colour analysis, style and body shape, make-up, personal shopping, wardrobe planning, men’s image, and corporate image, often all together in one fell swoop. 

Why?  Well, that should be pretty obvious and, if it isn’t, then maybe being in business for yourself isn’t really for you! 

On a 5 or 10-day course, my big question has always been, “How on earth will you remember what you learned on day two?”

Believe me, on a 2-day face-to-face training course with me, your head will seriously hurt at the end of day one.

And after day two, your brain will be full to overflowing and you may need to lie down in a darkened room when you get home. 

Just take a look at some of the testimonials from those poor darlings who’ve tried it! 

“Thank you for a brilliant course - I haven’t had time to draw breath since I got back! Yes, my brain HAS been working overtime,  I’m going to sit down over the weekend when I’ve got some peace and quiet, read through my notes, download all the bits and pieces I need to and begin to put my newfound knowledge into operation. 

I feel that I gained a wealth of know-how this week, so thank you for your expertise and guidance, and for the fun way that you put it all together!  I am still really excited. P.S.  I think you’d be very pleased with the dramatic / creative look I am sporting today!” Sara, Reading, UK

Learning in bite-size chunks clearly works as more than 40% of these lovely people come back to me later for more training.

Try the modular approach

Learn the bits you want, when you want, and then spend time becoming excellent at each subject before you move on to the next one. 

As you start to attract more and more clients for one service, you’ll have them ready and waiting for the next one you choose to learn (but only if and when it suits you!).

By the way, Petunia, these are the ‘boxes’ you were asking about.

Self-study DVD-based training courses

1. Colour Analysis in a Box teaches both seasonal and tonal colour analysis for beginners

2. The Complete Colour Analysis Training Kit contains Colour Analysis in a Box plus all the colour supplies used in the course itself:

The only other things you would need to start a colour analysis business are a mirror and a chair for your client to sit in!

3. Advanced Colour Analysis for Image Professionals was launched last month. 

This is not for beginners. 

As the title suggests, it includes masses of advanced colour analysis techniques, plus how to get what you’re saying over to your client (or you’re both just wasting your time), plus a whole load of marketing ideas that actually work (and a few that are dead ducks too!).

4. 3 Steps to Success for Image Professionals

Live event running 16th August in Chesterfield, UK.  Just a few places left on the course itself, plus you get the 6-DVD set free.

We’re recording the whole day to create a 6-DVD self-study pack with all the notes from the day.  You can pre-order this right now, for release in November.

Learn how to attract more clients, more sales and more profit with this extra special business training for image professionals.

5. September sees the last live event two-day Ladies’ Style training course of 2010.

We’re recording the entire event to create Ladies’ Style in a Box, covering body shape, scale, style personality, etc. 

This will be ready for release in December. Right now, we have 25 kits to pre-order at a special discount. Once they’re gone, they’re gone!

STOP PRESS!

Don’t order any of the above until you have checked out my mad sale to celebrate 30 years in this incredible business.  Ends 12th August 2010.

Being put forward for an industry award by one of your peers just has to rank pretty high on anyone’s list of business achievements. 

But to be nominated by the same person two years running and then to win the IFIC Spirit of Inspiration award for ‘Most Inspirational Consultant Running an Image-Related Business’ in October 2009 has made a profound difference to my personal confidence level and to the way in which we now market our business.

Thank you, Debbie Gray, for having the single-minded determination to nominate me not once, but twice.  Debbie won the
inaugural IFIC Spirit of Inspiration award for ‘Image Scholar of the Year’ in 2008.

We’ve received congratulations from other business owners, consultants and clients all over the world.  One brand-new client took the time to let me know that it was the award that was the final motivation for her to book on a training course with me. 

And it seems that my story is now motivating other consultants to want more for themselves.  One lady wrote, “This gave me quite a lift and has made me determined to believe in myself and get out there!”

Winning this award has not only been a personal high for me but it’s also bringing us more business AND inspiring other image consultants to achieve more in their own business.  

Well done, IFIC.  The Spirit of Inspiration awards are clearly working!

Hundreds of years ago, I needed to find a photo of both Neil and myself very quickly to post out to a friend abroad. As I absolutely loathe having my photograph taken, I had to search back through some holiday snaps from the previous year and finally found one that a kind passer-by had been coerced into taking for us.

I started scribbling a quick note to go with the photo trying to describe where it had been taken which, unfortunately, meant I had to take a closer look at it. And I was utterly mortified for, there, sticking out of my chin, were 3 enormous white hairs - each seemingly at least 6 feet long!

I was horrified that I had ever let my usually high standards drop so appallingly low. And there was no way that photo was going anywhere! I ripped it up right there and then.

I think this rather unnerving experience made me even more acutely aware of human facial hairs growing out of all sorts of nasty places. Even 5 years ago when I was writing my Colour Analysis training manual, I included this note in the ‘Presenting your Best Image’ section for consultants:

"I can’t believe I’m having to say this but…. remove noticeable facial hair.  Moustaches and hairs growing wildly from your chin, nose and / or moles will not increase your professional integrity!  Men have to shave daily – should you?"

Even further back in history when I was nothing more than a girl, I had to deliver some make-up products to a lady who had ordered them over the phone. I’d never met her before, I’d never been to her home, it was a wet, dark evening in late November, I got lost, I was cold and I had nowhere near the confidence I have now so I was totally unable to apply good social etiquette to the sight that met me when she opened the door.

Against a background of dark brown hair and pale porcelain skin, some idiot had just bleached all the once-dark-and-extremely-sturdy hairs on her top lip so they now stuck out like dazzlingly-neon-white fork prongs.

I felt my chin hit my knees as my jaw dropped open and I stared and stared, just like a 3-year old.

I know that, had she been there, my mother would have smacked me round the back of the ear because I just couldn’t take my eyes off these vile-looking protrusions.

I’ve never seen anything look so unnatural. How on earth could anyone think that bleaching dark hairs like this was in any way going to cover them up?

She may as well have stuck a sign on her forehead which said, ‘Look! I’ve got a moustache’.

I’m sure there must be some bleaching techniques that don’t produce such horrifying results but it’s probably worth asking your best friend for a down-to-earth diagnosis of whether your upper lip needs some attention.

And it’s not just me.

Do you know that one chap even started ‘a blog dedicated to making women all over the world remove their moustaches - soon’.

Amazing moustache facts

1. Swimmer Mark Spitz won 7 gold medals at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games while sporting a moustache when swimmers usually shaved all their body hair to decrease drag. Spitz claimed that it helped create a pocket of air to breathe. After the Olympics, many European swimmers began growing moustaches…

2. Mexican artist Frida Kahlo famously depicted herself in her artwork with both a moustache and a unibrow.

3. At the biennial World Beard and Moustache Championships in 2007 there were 6 sub-categories for moustaches:

• Natural
• Hungarian – big and bushy
• Dalí – narrow, long points bent or curved steeply upward. Named after Salvador Dalí
• English – narrow, beginning at the middle of the upper lip the whiskers are very long and pulled to the side, slightly curled; the ends are pointed slightly upward; areas past the corner of the mouth usually shaved
• Imperial – whiskers growing from both the upper lip and cheeks, and curled upward
• Freestyle – all moustaches that do not match other classes

4. ‘Movember’ is an annual month-long event involving the growing of moustaches during November. It aims to promote and raise awareness of Men’s Health issues, notably prostate cancer and depression.

5. Victorian writer Wilkie Collins created a mustachioed heroine for his mystery novel ‘The Woman in White’. ‘Marian Halcombe’s complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache’ yet she still manages to inspire the extracurricular passion of the novel’s villain, Count Fosco…

"Kim,
I would like to do the ladies’ style, men’s style, corporate image, and advanced style and would like to know if you have any DVD training for them and how much is the whole pack?" DB, South Africa

DB, At the moment, the only self-study DVD course we offer is Colour in a Box. 

We are constantly being asked to do something similar with Ladies’ Style and will be looking at how to do that more closely soon. 

I want to see how the Advanced Colour Analysis Training Day and the resulting Advanced Pack work out first, so that I can gauge reactions and incorporate suggestions for improvements from ladies like yourself who have already registered for one or the other.

Thanks for letting me know that you would be interested in more self-study courses.  Without emails like yours, we wouldn’t even be considering it!