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.

The day that I realized that the price of admission to hit six figures as a personal stylist, to have opportunities that I absolutely never dreamed of like having an international shoe company seek me out for a campaign that made me more in one month of work than I made the entire year as a personal stylist two years previously, the cost of finally having potential clients, book sales calls, not just when it was fall and spring but all year around consistently was that in order to get those things, I would need to invest before I was ready.

I would need to bet and go all in on myself way before I was ready. I would need to deal with my heart racing and my palm sweaty and I would need to decide fully. I would need to be all in. So today I want to talk to you about a few important aspects of investing in yourself and your personal styling business because I know this topic can lead people to be in analysis paralysis, which is just delaying your success and delaying you from helping the clients who are looking for you and need your help.

This episode will be broken down into three parts. In part one, we're going to talk about the mindset shift that will guarantee you always make your money back when you invest in yourself and your business. In part two, the most common types of investments that I see stylists making, and I have made many times, that do not get them where they want to go in their business. In part three, we're going to talk about how to figure out what kind of investment you need to make for your business based on where you are.

For part one, I want to talk about the mindset shift that's going to guarantee that you always make your money back when you make an investment. Here is the shift. If you sit back and expect your investment to prove themselves to you, you're setting yourself up for failure.

I have worked with clients who have approached our work together like this and it is no fun on, I think, either person's side of the relationship. When you invest in anything, you are responsible for getting the most out of it that you can. When I started to look at my investments from this standpoint, everything changed. I became a better buyer, I started to attract better clients, and I no longer was willing to sit in my own discomfort as an excuse.

This actually means that you need to follow through on the actions needed to get the outcome you want. Your brain is going to tell you over and over that it doesn't want to do it, that this is too hard, that this isn't necessary, and maybe the person that's telling you to do this step or that step doesn't really know what they're talking about.

Then you're going to go back and you're going to wonder at the end of that experience with that coach, that consultant, or that marketing program why are you not seeming to get the same results as the people that are the “superstars” that come out of those programs? The answer is always you didn't go all in.

I have done this in my own career, we've all done this, we don't go all in, but the minute you start to become someone that takes full responsibility for the results you get in your investments, a few things shift.

First of all, you become someone who is much more focused because you're determined to get the best and the most that you can. Now, this doesn't mean that you are constantly emailing and breaking boundaries with the coach, the consultant, the marketing person, or whoever you've hired. It means that you ask the questions that need to be asked when you're lacking clarity.

It means that when you see you're not getting what you want out of the experience, you think, "Okay, is it that my expectation of the experience is off, or am I just not getting what I need to do that?" Then you speak up.

Before you speak up, it's been really important for me to realize this about myself, I have to stop and pause, look, and say, "Okay, what have I done action-wise in terms of how have I followed through on the plan, the course, or the protocol that I've been given? Am I going to this person, having not really done the actions and just asking a question to fill the space?" Because it's so easy to just ask questions to feel like we're getting the most out of the investment, but that's just busy work. That's not the work.

One of the reasons why we don't get the most out of our investments is because we make too many at once. I see this with stylists all the time. They're like half in on this, they're doing this little marketing program, they're doing this little membership. They're doing this and they're doing that. So there are a lot of calls and they're just half doing frameworks. They're not really doing the homework.

Maybe they've had a coach, then they decided it was expensive, and they didn't get what they wanted out of it. Now they're taking their energy and just scattering it. That means they're not getting anything out of any of those investments, but they're thinking that they're doing a great job or that this is the prudent way to go about it because it's not as expensive as going all in with a coach or a consultant.

We’re going to talk about the difference between a coach and a consultant in a minute because I think expectations are off about that. But if you don't have an understanding every single day of what to do to move your business forward, of how to get clients, of how to do those things, doing a little one-off situation isn't going to solve it because what you're missing is a holistic view of your business.

You can't understand your marketing until you understand your services. You can't understand your services until you understand your ideal client. You can't understand your ideal client until you understand what experiences from your life you should be bringing to your business and what the marketplace wants and then combining those together to create your business.

All of these pieces go together and when you treat it like it's a one-off here and a one-off there, you begin to make investments that scatter your energy and don't get your results. But the number one thing that's going to prevent this is you deciding that you're going to get your money back or you're going to get your time back from your investments.

The way you do that is you go all in and you do the work that doesn't always feel good. If you don't do the work, you most certainly don't blame the person that you hired. I have hired probably around $250,000 worth of coaches, all differing prices in my career to date, in both my personal styling business and in this consulting business.

I have gotten something out of every single experience and sometimes I didn't get the outcome or the result that I thought I would get, maybe it's not even what was promised but later on, I realized because I did the work, I was set up to get the payoff later.

The other thing to think about is if you're actually focused in going all in and you're not getting the result immediately like in the time that you're with that coach or that consultant, that doesn't mean that it wasn't a success, it means that business takes a heck of a lot longer than most of us ever realize.

Usually, it takes between three and four months if you change your messaging for people to catch on and that's with consistency. It takes over seven hours of somebody to interact with your content before they make a purchase. It can take even more depending on their buyer type, which is something that I make sure all of my stylists know about. It can take even longer if their buyer type is a specific type and the investment price point is very high.

So when I say that just because you are getting a bunch of information in doing the work, the expectation is that you're going to get the immediate payoff, you're going to start getting the clients right away, you need to have a realistic expectation that just because you have maybe the framework and the steps to take, there's still another layer to this, which I think more people need to talk about, and that is it takes time for your messaging to catch up to your ideal client.

That is why a lot of people quit before they get results and why they go back and say that their investment wasn't worth it, when really, it's just that maybe the expectation was not properly framed. That is the first part.

You are responsible for your mindset around it and every time I invest, I know I'm going to get a result and every single time, I do. Sometimes they're huge, sometimes they come later, and sometimes it's just the circles of people that I am now introduced to because, at some point in your career, you do need to pay to play. You just do. There's no freebie here that's going to get you to the big dog level.

So if you're putting a bunch of free content together and wondering why you're not getting results or you're in a half-ass mode in a lot of your investments, I'm just going to tell you right now if you want big things for yourself, if you want to make a big impact, you gotta shift your mindset all in, trust yourself to always get your investment back, and do the work you gotta do.

In this part, I want to talk a little bit about the most common types of investments I see stylists making and are not getting them where they want to go in their business. I want to break down the difference between what a business consultant is, or a marketing consultant, or anybody that has the word consultant in their title and a coach.

Most of the stylists I talk to have worked with business coaches, and they have not worked with business consultants. That's because most people in the online space call themselves business coaches. I do not for a very specific reason, and I'm going to explain to you why in a minute.

Business consulting is when you analyze data and decide what needs to be done inside the business from a tactical and strategic standpoint to move the business forward and get your styling business the results that you want that reflect your unique needs.

It's looking at numbers, it's looking at marketing posts, it's looking at language, it's looking at how your messaging is working, it's looking at what kind of followers you have, I'm looking at all of those things. Then I'm giving my client a customized set of plans, advice, and tactics. It's more advice and tactic-based.

Of course, there are questions being asked in the consulting relationship, it's information gathering, but it's less of, “How do you feel about this?” and more about what is actually happening right now.

Business coaching is defined as something that is a relationship that facilitates and nurtures the growth of the client in order to carry out the work that needs to be done in the business.

Basically, a business coach doesn't give you the strategy, the tactics, the answers. Sometimes they'll say, “Yeah, that sounds reasonable,” or they'll give you a direction, but it's really a client-led container.

Now, business consulting is a client-led container, but it's that you're bringing all the information and all the data. I'm not asking you as a consultant, “How do you want to do this? What do you want to ask me?” Business coaching is very much like, unless the coach has a framework, which is usually in a group program, but in one-to-one, you show up and the business coach says, "What do you want to talk about today?" They ask you a series of questions to help lead you internally to the answers.

What I think happens is that a lot of stylists go into business coaching relationships expecting that that business coach is going to give them the answers. That just isn't how business coaching works.

Now, add to it another layer, that a lot of stylists go to business coaches without a very clear sense of their own business model, what the industry standard is, what the standards are, if they're in person for their area, what the geographic standard is, what the pricing is.

All of this stuff is important when you're trying to be competitive. Most importantly, the majority of stylists I talk to do not know why they have services that they have. Everybody has to start somewhere, and so they launch a styling business, and when they do that, they look around, and they look and say, "Okay, well, it looks like that stylist has a service, and they all have closets, and they all have a stylist, so I'm just going to do that," then they look at the pricing, or they let their feel dictate their pricing, then they launch a business and then they wonder, “Why is this so freaking hard?”

The answer is because you don't know why those stylists have the services they have. You don't know how long it takes them to deliver those services. So you don't know what their pricing ratio is to their time. You're just basically grabbing other people's business model or an approximation of it, if it's even a business model, it's like the blind, maybe the blind in a lot of cases because there's not a lot of programs out there that are really, really business focused.

There are a lot of programs out there that will show you how to build a styling business, how to do a closet edit, how to do those things. But how to create a long-term, sustainable personal styling business that gets you to multiple six figures, six figures, there's just not a ton of them out there. I know, I've been in the industry for over 15 years.

What happens is that people hire a business coach, I did it too, and they don't understand the industry, which that's not their fault. They expect, and again, this is something coaches need to be clear on, they expect that the person coming to them has a pretty good understanding of their field and their industry. So it's not their job to know that, it's the client's job.

When a stylist goes to a coach and they don't know who they want to work with and they don't know how their services fit into a specific demographic, whether that be where they live or the virtual online space, they don't know enough about their ideal client, they haven't asked the questions, when a stylist then goes to a coach, they're expecting the coach to have the answers.

The goal of the coach is to help the client think critically about what they want and come to the answers for themselves. What you have is an uneducated consumer of the coaching service. You have someone that's like the stylist who doesn't really have a business plan and no part of the business is working together.

So the coach is asking them a series of questions from the place of, “It's your business. Why are you doing what you're doing? How do you want to do this? How do you want to mold this business?” and helping them come to the conclusion. But the conclusions they're coming to are based on false promises.

What happens is I have a lot of stylists that come to me and I have this experience as well with coaches and they say, “I really love to work with you, but I just spent all this money on a coach and I worked really hard on the pricing and it was really hard on my mindset.”

That's the reality of what most stylists are talking about when they say they worked really hard on their pricing. They didn't work really hard doing the research or looking into what the industry standard is. They worked really hard getting themselves to feel more comfortable to up their prices, and that's fine.

You got to do that work no matter where you land in hiring an expert, but they did all that work to cite themselves up to get a price that doesn't really reflect where they want to go and is going to make them have to work harder and oftentimes burns them out.

They don't leave the coaching relationship with a sense of where to go and find clients and what tactics and strategies really work for right now. I have heard many stylists come to me and tell me that business coach, one for personal stylists, told them that the way to get more clients was to go to the retail sector and talk to salespeople and ask them to refer clients to them.

When I tell you this is one of the worst pieces of business advice I have ever heard, I really cannot even begin to tell you the level of rage I feel. It doesn't make any sense. Retailers, people that work in retail, are looking to get clients themselves so that they can make higher levels of commission. They have it much harder than personal stylists. They can't go on the internet and market themselves usually.

There are some exceptions to this, but even if they do, they're stuck with whatever is in the actual store. Personal stylists, if they know what the heck they're doing, have so much more available to them, there's no reason they should be going to retail partners for that.

It's not the price of the people in the stores. Stores can't even get people in them. Malls are doing terrible. Why is anyone telling personal stylists to go to retailers and get clients from them? Could it happen? Sure.

After you bring in a lot of clients and you give them a lot of commission, that person's going to remember you. Maybe they'll refer you, but you don't go in cold to that relationship and expect that. In fact, it's one of the least likely profitable connections you're going to make.

Are there other ways to use retail partners that make you look better? For sure, but it isn't to get you clients. It's to enhance the client experience you already have. This is what I mean when I say that people that don't, and this stylist has got this from a business code for stylists, but it's an incredibly outdated model. That's what I was told 15 years ago when I was working with somebody to teach me.

Back then, that made sense because styling was so new and different. If somebody was working at Neiman Marcus and had really high-level clients and the person at Neiman Marcus couldn't go to their closet, now some of them can. Now retailers have more extensive opportunities for their employees to be with their higher-level clients outside of the store.

That's even why it's even more ridiculous. Now you're stepping on the toes of really high-level salespeople in some of the luxury industries like the Webster and stuff like that. They do really high-end concierge stuff for their clients.

When a stylist goes into these stores and asks that, it just makes them look bad quite frankly. This is what I mean. That actually came from someone that's a stylist, but that means that that styling coach hasn't really updated their methods and their models to give them advice that makes sense.

Now think about if you're a coach that doesn't know anything about styling, has never even worked with a stylist, they are even more unable to help a stylist get where they want to go.

When I look at stylists and they tell me, "Hey, I want to do this, but I'm doing all these other things," I say, "Well, where did you hear that from?" and they're so busy, they're busy doing the wrong things. You're going to be busy, but I want to make sure that you're busy in a way that moves you forward. That's what strategy and consulting do.

I'm not saying the mindset piece isn't important, but if you're spending multiple thousands of dollars on a coach and you're only walking away with a better mindset, sure, that's going to help, but then you're stuck not knowing what actions to take with your new shiny mindset.

That's where I see so many stylists feeling burnt out and feeling like they've been screwed over and being afraid to make another investment. But really the issue is that they do not understand the difference between the two types of investments.

Consulting gives you a plan and yeah, sure, I do coaching with a lot of my clients too, but we lead with the plan, they take the action, and then we go back and work on the mindset from that place. We don't start with the mindset and then throw the tactics in later because then you're just making up things that aren't based in reality.

If you're not looking at data, if you're not looking at your past results, if you're not doing those things in a coaching relationship and you don't know what to do every day, then you're probably not in the right place.

If you have a solid business plan and you're not able to move yourself forward or you just need advice or some sort of coaching on a specific area, then maybe coaching is a better choice if the rest of it is pretty solid.

But again, some coaches do consulting and some don't. That's a really important question to be asking. One even bigger point is, even if they gave me a strategy as a business coach, if they don't know my field, how many assumptions are they making about what a personal styling client wants versus what is reality in the market? Because I am looking at a lot of business plans that I'm redoing based on what some coach somewhere thought that styling clients wanted and it is so wildly off-course.

It's because they are using a coaching model and they are not using a personal stylist business model. Those are two different ones because when a personal stylist is in front of a client, they have a ton of other work that they need to do behind the scenes, and a coach or a consultant really just has the call with the client, writes the notes, gives it to them, and then walks away.

What happens is I see stylists pricing their services in a coaching model and it doesn't in any way reflect the reality of all the work that the stylist has to do, so then they're getting paid way less than they realize because in order to carry out their services, they are charging a level that is not per the hour what was expected.

They're only reflecting the client-facing time in their pricing. It's not reflective of all the things that go on in the back of the house when the client isn't there. Because the coach doesn't know anything about styling, they can't help that stylist become more strategic in how they streamline their services because they don't know. They don't know what the client life cycle should look like so that the stylist can break down their services in a way that leads to more profitability.

I have done this, I have hired coaches that I thought were going to give me the answers, and they just asked me a lot more questions and I do think that that led me to grow in a lot of ways. It certainly made me a better thinker and it did a lot for me, but there was a period of my career where I think consulting really would have gotten me where I wanted to go years faster because you really don't have honest mindset blocks on a business if you don't know what to do when you're not taking action, it's like about your whole life kind of a mindset block.

If you have a mindset block on marketing and none of your marketing has actually ever converted, maybe you don't have a mindset block, maybe you have a strategy problem. I would be frustrated too. I think that's the thing, lots of stylists are being told it's a mindset issue when really it's not, it's a strategy issue.

Of course, you're going to have a mindset problem and an attitude problem if you don't know what you're doing or you're putting time into things that aren't converting. Some things to consider there.

Finally, I just want to talk about how to know what type of investment you need in your business. There's no one way to build a business, which means you have to get really good at understanding what you need at different times of your business to grow. Knowing what kind of investment you should be making in your business is critical because it allows you to get the results that you're actually wanting from the experience that you're investing in.

I like to look at this in two different ways. There's the knowledge gap that people have to fill and get help with, and then there's an identity gap. Personal styling clients have this too.

If you, as a business owner that's a personal stylist, a knowledge gap looks like not knowing what tasks to do each day to move your business forward, feeling overwhelmed because you're doing a lot of busy work like playing in Canva and formatting your newsletter, but not really thinking about what the client needs to hear to be converted and not having a clear target market because you're not really sure which of your many types of clients you've worked with, you want to narrow down.

That's a knowledge gap. You have worked with clients, but you're not sure which of those groups of clients is the right target market because it will be most profitable, you’ll like it the most, or your services are a good fit. Knowledge gap. You don't know what to do each day to move your business forward. Knowledge gap.

Now that's different from knowing and not doing it, by the way. You're not really sure which of your services are a good fit or how to change your services for your niche. Knowledge gap. You have a very low repeat client rate each season. Usually, knowledge gap because you don't have the strategy.

It could also be the result of your process being off and not as pleasant as it could be, but that's also the knowledge gap. You have inconsistent incomes based on season. The spring is really busy. The fall is really busy. Then it's like crickets. Because you don't know what to say in your marketing, you don't really know how to fix that. Knowledge gap.

You are really struggling to know what kind of revenue-generating activity is the thing to make your business move forward/you don't actually know what revenue-generating activity is. Knowledge gap. All of those things mean you need strategy, you need a plan, and you need to fill in the knowledge.

In order to do that, you need to have a holistic understanding of your business. You cannot pull out one piece like your marketing and think, “Oh, let me go fix this in this little mastermind or this little group course,” and think that we're going to be better off.

Could you position yourself a little better? Absolutely. But it's not your marketing job to be your business plan. Your business plan impacts your marketing and informs your marketing. It impacts and informs your sales process and all of those things.

The reason why stylists struggle is because they know they have a knowledge gap but they're looking to seek it like plugging up one hole in a boat and then it's bringing a leak in another part.

Instead, they need to take the whole boat out of the water, refinish it, plug all the holes, and then put it back in the water. Not plug one hole at a time because the boat's going to sink or it's certainly not going to go very far. Those are knowledge gaps.

The other part of this is an identity gap and the identity gap happens a lot more with stylist stylists that are established. I see it quite a bit right now with stylists that are not growing, their business isn’t growing, and they are not really understanding that they need to fix that.

Sometimes that comes from a fear of putting themselves out there. Sometimes it comes from an inability to go and find the answers they need. So if you're an established stylist who has a business that's done pretty well and you have established clients, you can coast by, they're making $50,000, $60,000 $70,000 without really having to do much, cool. You're going to start seeing a slowdown eventually because you don't have new business coming in, but you're also not getting up to date with your marketing.

I see a lot of stylists doing things and then claiming that they don't work. It's not that they don't work, it's that they haven't properly positioned their business for the way that the styling market is now.

For example, I heard stylists say, "I tried a funnel system and it didn't work." You're right, it didn't work because you weren't talking to anybody specific and now consumers are way savvier about hiring a personal stylist. You have to be more specific. A general funnel, it ain't going to work for you.

I see stylists doing giveaways. I don't even know why you'd waste your time because most of their marketing isn't really converting people once they get there. Sure, you're going to grow your followers, but if you can't sell to the followers that are already there, it doesn't make any sense.

Now that is a knowledge gap to some extent, but the point isn't the knowledge problem. These stylists have enough experience to know what their clients want. They're choosing to not embody the identity of someone who continues to be a business person and refines their business skills.

All they care about is being a stylist, which I get, but this is not 15 years ago or 10 years ago when I started where you could get away with that because it was so unique. Now, it's just not that interesting to be a personal stylist anymore, and there's more than ever was before.

What I see happening is because personal stylists that did well saw a slowdown, they doubled down on what they were doing before and it's not working. If that's you, what you're really needing to look at first is what is the identity gap that's between you and getting to the next level? Have you sat down and thought about where you want to be or who you want to be?

Are there ways that this business is really just a reflection of the old you? Both in terms of your skill set because you got to get with it, business is always about educating, learning, and developing yourself. But also, sometimes we're just in the process of we deliver the same services over and over. We're just happy that there are clients, to begin with, that we honestly get into this mindset of like, “Well, if they're here, it's good enough.”

But if you've been in the game for like 3, 4, 5, 10, 15 years, that is not the way you should be thinking about this, because how much motivation can you really have to show up for those clients if that's the way you're looking at it?

You have too much expertise at this point for you to be like, “Yeah, I mean, as long as they pay me, it's fine.” I mean, I guess if you have no connection and you just want to do a transactional service, go for it. But don't claim that you're doing a big transformation for somebody if you don't really have your whole heart in it.

That's where I see a big knowledge gap. I mean, that's where I see a big identity gap. Again, you can have both, but I think it's really what is driving the bigger problem. For established clients that did well, and there's a slowdown, and they maybe just had established stylists, for established stylists that were doing really well, say before the pandemic, and have struggled to get back on track, it's an identity problem. Because sure, there's information that they need, but they really need to sit down and reevaluate how they want to run this business and do they want to sit and get the skills that they need to be a personal stylist now because the market has exploded.

That is something to consider. Identity gap issues come up. True identity gap issues really are the results of having a fair amount of experience and not slowing down enough to address the next level you.

Again, you can have an identity gap at any point and you need to have taken action and have some results for a true identity gap to show itself. Otherwise, you just have some one-off mindset problems. I hope this is helpful. I hope this gives you a sense of how to get more out of your investments and I will talk to you on 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.