PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Nicole Otchy: 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.

I am so delighted to be able to introduce you to one of my incredibly talented clients, Mary Komick. Mary is an LA-based personal stylist who I had the pleasure of working with last year and this year. She came to me at a very interesting point in her career.

She had been a stylist for many, many years and had been out on her own for about three when we found each other. What she shares in this episode that I also want to share with you to be listening for is that Mary had really felt like she had done all of the things. She had probably worked, I would guess, and I think she says this in this episode with just about every coach for personal stylists specifically and other coaches that are out there.

But there was something missing and she was really struggling to get to the next level. And she created incredible results for herself even amidst dealing with a death in her family, having to manage a family business, and grow her personal styling career among a variety of other things that happened in her life as life goes on. Just because we hire a coach or we're looking to focus on one part of our life, it doesn't mean the other parts of our life stop.

I want to share that with you and I want you to listen for that because no matter what you're going through right now, no matter what you've tried in the past, there is still possibilities, there is still and always will be a road that you haven't tried, a way of restructuring your business, your day, and your energy in order to get your results.

Do not change your goal, change the way you're getting to your goal. That's what we did with Mary, and that's what completely transformed her business. As a matter of fact, after we hung up from this call, she sent me a text message and told me that she had just received, I believe it was three inquiries based on so many of the things that we had talked about.

She opened up her email box and she had three client inquiries waiting for her because her messaging was so strong. I am so proud of Mary for everything that she'd been through and for how she created results despite it. Enjoy this conversation. I think you'll find it very inspiring.

Mary, I'm so excited to have you with me. Why don't we kick this conversation off by you sharing a little bit about your history as a stylist before we started working together?

Mary Komick: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Yes, so before we started working together, I had started my own business as a personal stylist for, I would say about three years.

Before that, I was doing commercial styling and things of that sort, but in the pandemic, I quit working for other people and started working for myself. I had been running a styling business for years before we started working together, but I did not have the systems in place that you taught me, the marketing and sales channels, all of those things, which is why I was so excited to work with you because you taught me things that nobody else was talking about in the styling world.

Nicole Otchy: Well, thank you for that. I'm excited to get into that. But before we do, I want to hear a little bit about what kind of clients you were working with. You're in California, so share a little bit about your market and just what you were dealing with when we started chatting first, because I know you had done a lot of things and you were busy, that was not the issue, so share a little bit about that.

Mary Komick: Yeah. I live in LA. Because I started my business in the pandemic, I had a lot of virtual clients all over the country, but I was also working with clients in person, in LA, in Orange County, but they weren't all the same type of client.

I worked with stay-at-home moms just as much as I worked with female entrepreneurs, executives, online coaches, or digital nomads. There wasn't exactly a true niche to it. I wanted to work with female founders and women that invested in other women but I took every job that came my way because I wanted to grow my income instead of really focusing on my ideal client.

I love working virtually and I think the time that I've been doing this, I've been able to master it but working in-person was fun too. So that lack of systems led me to stay booked and busy in a sense where I worked with anyone that really came into my world.

Nicole Otchy: But that's what all of us do until we stop because when you start a business, you have to pay the bills. I'm glad you shared that because nine times out of ten, I mean you do that until you stop.

You talked a little bit about niching and one of the things I hear the most is people are terrified of it. You went hard on your niche and I didn't really have to convince you. I love to hear you share your thoughts on niching. Was it scary? Did you have reservations? What did that internally feel like? Because externally working with you, you were all in, but sometimes that's a little bit hard to wrap your mind around.

Mary Komick: Yeah, I mean, I'll say this, it wasn’t the first time that I had changed my niche and decided to do this. I would say the difference in the way that I approached niching this time was I was very, very clear on why I wanted to work with them outside of the income potential.

It was really more of the fact that the women that I work with are investing in other women and funding game-changing businesses. I felt that that was really impactful to be a part of, as opposed to the niches that I had chosen before, which is I'm going to be completely transparent, they were more of a copy of what other women were doing in my field.

I should have been focusing on what I wanted, but I spent years thinking, “They're successful so I should do the same thing. I should work with the same people.” Then when I was actually doing it, when I was in their closets or meeting with them on Zoom, I was like, “This isn't working.”

When I niched down to female founders and funders and got really clear on why, it made everything so much more effortless in terms of really going all in on that niche.

Nicole Otchy: This is so interesting because I think a lot of times, but also just how, not just stylists, but online business owners in general, are taught to niche is very superficial. It's like they have a dog and they're 45 and they make this much money, but they're not really about the psychographics.

What was super interesting about your decision to go all in on female founders and funders was, yes, that was how you would categorize and that's what you would title them, but it was really the psychographic of you saying they invest in themselves and they invest in other women.

It was this very clean life cycle of a life philosophy really that attracted you. I think we forget sometimes that that is a niche. Even if that was the only thing we talked about, where do we start? Well, you want to work with people that invest in themselves and invest in women in business? There are a lot of ways we could have gotten there.

The fact that you were like, “Oh, this feels right,” because you said earlier something that was interesting, you said, “It wasn't working,” it was working in the sense that you were attracting those clients but it wasn't working internally for you. So that decision was about standing up for your desire and not just the money in your business, and the way you did it was so graceful and genuine that I think, oh, I'm curious, did it make selling or marketing feel easier to you once you made that shift?

Mary Komick: Yes and no. For example, a lot of the female funders, some of the angel investors, and the venture capitalists that I work with, they're in tech. That's a completely different language to me.

There was a lot of research that I did. There were a lot of YouTube videos and a ton of books that I read to really understand their language that I could integrate it into my marketing. That I was nervous about. But I understood very clearly that I was in an unsaturated market for being a personal stylist.

I think as a business owner, there's nothing I love more than tapping into an unsaturated market. So when I saw that, and I had it validated both in person when I would go to events and tell people what I did and they couldn't believe that I existed, and they were dumbfounded and excited, both that and online engagement that I was not seeing prior to making this change, that really solidified for me that it was the right move.

I became less nervous over time, especially as I learned the tech language and the things that they like to say so that they felt more understood by me. But it takes time. I think as a stylist that's been in the game for as long as I have, you just get tired of yourself, of telling yourself that next time you'll go all in or you'll make a change next quarter, or this works for now, it's not broken, why fix it?

I think when you actually make the decision to go all in with the intention that you're making a greater impact that goes beyond personal styling and it actually has to do with the impact of your own business, it makes that change a lot easier, which is why it looked graceful on the outside.

Nicole Otchy: So much good stuff here. To anyone that's listening, she [inaudible] research. That's actually what it takes to make your business feel effortless. There's also this idea of you pick a niche and then you just add it to your Instagram bio and now you're in a niche.

One of the things that I see and the difference between even my clients, the ones that are incredibly successful and the ones that aren't are the ones that are willing to do the pre-work basically, the foundational work to figure out the actual inner world of the people they want to work with. Otherwise, you just sound like everyone else.

While everybody is worried, we're having a roundtable call today about marketing and 9 out of 10 of the questions are like, “How do I look different?” It's like, you don't focus on you being different, you focus on marketing differently. That's what you did and your engagement went up. It was just like, “Oh, wow, this really works.”

What's fascinating is that you really treated your new clients as something to study. As a result, it seemed as though your content, at least from the outside, it definitely got more original. It didn't just seem, it did get more original. But did it open up a lot more things that you felt like you could talk about that were not the classic stylist like look good, feel good? I want to hear you talk about that.

Mary Komick: Yes, it’s like the classic look good, feel good, I'm going to make you feel confident every day. The women that I work with, they want to use their personal style as a tool to grow their business and their personal brand.

That's very different from women that feel a lack of confidence around their outfits, the way that they're able to put them together, and their body image. It's a completely different psychographic.

The fact that I'm able to speak to the things that I did myself as a female founder and integrated into my marketing in a way that resonates with my clients, which I was not able to do before because I wasn't working with female founders, again, I also wasn't working with women that invest in other women like I do now, I'm able to use part of my story in my marketing in ways that they understand. That was really helpful.

I think the research that I've done, I'm a Capricorn, so I was going to do it regardless, but the research that I did really did help me speak to them in a way where they were saying to me, “No one's talking about this. I can't believe you do this. This is so intriguing. I want to learn about this. What made you want to work with women like me?” I was not receiving questions like that all three years of my business before I did this.

Nicole Otchy: That's really interesting. I think that's the power of shifting to really focusing your marketing on the client and studying the client is that they feel so seen and they feel so taken care of before you even work with them that they can't say no.

It's like, "Wow, you made this for me,” and I see them with stylists too, like how could you not? Because it is so specific and so niched, and that's actually the power of a niche is that it opens up things quicker for you like those conversations.

When you came to me and we chatted on our first discovery call, tell me a little bit about what you were, because you were getting clients, what were you looking for in working with someone and what was your expectation of that?

Mary Komick: When I came to you, I was in a place personally where I was grieving and I was an entrepreneur and I was trying to balance running my business and grieving and then also joining a family business and working two jobs at the same time, full time, going full speed.

But my passion was in personal styling. What I wanted was systems in place for marketing and sales. I have invested thousands of dollars in other coaching programs that are specifically for a personal stylist, and the thing that I was always missing were systems for marketing and sales that specifically applied to my business, how I work with clients both virtually, in-person, and my specific clientele.

I was tired of running the hamster wheel of figuring it out myself when I was ironically telling people and telling my clients, “You're your best investment and you need to invest in yourself, and hiring a stylist is a way to grow your business.” While on the back end, I'm sitting here, I'm looking at 90 days worth of content that I need to produce and I don't actually know what's going to move the needle and convert.

I don't know how to speak to this new niche or I don't know if it's the right road to go down. I don't know what other opportunities outside of online marketing that I'm not integrating into my daily practice as a business owner. That's all of the things that I learned with you and that's what was such a game changer, but it was really the lack of systems that I didn't have in place that I didn't learn elsewhere.

Nicole Otchy: What's interesting is you say systems and I actually think of you as someone that's really good at systems. Maybe it's more a framework because you're actually really good at systems. I think it was probably more like, “What exactly do I say?” Not like, “How do I get a system for batching?” You knew how to do that.

Just to be clear for other people listening because she actually knows systems. She probably could teach me systems, but it was the framework I think that was missing. I hear you because it was my biggest issue for so many years.

I think also what's interesting is that I think that the marketing world, the online marketing world, for stylists specifically in this conversation, but in general has changed since COVID so I think a lot of the things that we talked about and the things you were doing were very outdated.

You didn't know that because you started your business on your own when you did, even though you had styling experience, you went on your own during the pandemic, and that's when actually there was a big shift in the market because people were exhausted of hearing just educational content and regular people knew that everyone was selling something online.

Everybody knew what a funnel was. This wasn't groundbreaking. When we worked together, it was a lot about just updating the understanding that you were given from previous courses, people, whatever to reflect what was happening now and you took that and you ran.

I'd love to hear a little bit about when did it click? When did you feel like, “Okay, I'm using this new framework, system, whatever, and this actually does work,” versus like, “We'll see, does it work?”

Mary Komick: Yes, I will correct myself and say that it was a framework. I will tell you the first way that I think that it really clicked is when you really helped me out with content pillars and being able to plan content ahead of time, whether it's for batching or individual filming days.

The way that I was able to just pour out ideas into that framework, whereas I used to stare at a blank spreadsheet and not know what to do with myself or have tons of other ideas that I wasn't cleaning up because I felt like the more I had, the more I would produce, but that wasn't the case, I was feeling really overwhelmed, so when I had a framework to fall back on that made me feel more confident in my marketing on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, a monthly and a quarterly basis, I felt a heck of a lot more secure in where my business was going.

That was probably the game changer for me because I always had something to fall back on rather than—I know a lot of stylists and a lot of entrepreneurs can relate to this—waking up every day and saying, "What do I post? What do I do? Because yesterday I didn't work out, so what the heck do I do?" You need that framework to fall back on.

Nicole Otchy: Yeah. I think she mentioned content pillars, and I just want to say we definitely do that. But knowing the content pillar types that actually makes people buy is what I think, because I did content pillars for 15 years and I was like, “Well, no one seems to care about it.”

Just having a content pillar, meaning just having themes, you need themes that relate to, in your case specifically female founders, but they're not going to be the same as a stay-at-home mom, sure, but what I think people miss is within that, it's the content types that I think is the game changer and that honestly, it's easy for your brain to be like, “I don't really want to post this. I don't really want to do that,” then as soon as you see that like, “Oh, people actually respond to this type of content,” the motivation increases because I know I've always had a lot of resistance to content pillars. It's like, “Oh, it's the same freaking thing, so boring, it's so boring.”

Mary Komick: Yeah, the content types in diversifying that definitely led to more engagement and more outbound lead generation, I have to say. Because I think before, in the outdated marketing tactics that I was using, I was a little bit authoritarian, which you and I talked about, and I was very much saying like, "This is wrong, this is wrong, you need to do this." It was education-based, and it was not converting whatsoever.

But when I, for example, started integrating content types that spoke to the things that they were thinking that they didn't want to say out loud, for example, the things that they wouldn't even say on a sales call but I know that this is their lived experience, that changed, that changed the game for sure.

Nicole Otchy: And to your credit, you were willing to do that because what I see a lot of people afraid of is to say the thing that no one's saying on the sales call or whatever. And because of different ways you can reach your ideal clients in different places, you can find information on different types of clients for stylists, you can actually get that information without needing to have the direct conversation.

You can use Reddit forums, you can use all kinds of different places to get that, but even when people have it, they get a little nervous. You were really, I don't want to say brave, because I think there are definitely braver things you've done in your life, that feels a bit extreme, like running to businesses while you were grieving is braver, but you were willing to go there.

I think that the hesitation is both with people of like, “Well, I don't want to be different than everybody else as a stylist.” It's like, that's exactly what's killing your business right now and you went all in.

I just want to be clear on that to people that are listening. If this seems magical, it isn't. Literally, she did all the work. She was an A-plus student if there were one. That's why there was a return on investment. But one of the other things you talked about was diversifying how you were getting clients. I'd love to hear more about that and just what surprised you about that aspect of the process.

Mary Komick: This was the thing that I think was the most pleasantly surprising because I was operating in my business thinking that Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, all the social media platforms were the only way to acquire clients.

I did not have any referral partners. I wasn't connected to any retailers. I wasn't establishing collaborative partnerships or relationships with other service providers that work with my clientele to bring in leads in a way that was almost passive compared to my other daily marketing activities.

Doing that, especially when I was in slow periods of my business or when I had to transition to longer times in my other business, which is real estate, that was so helpful for me because it brought in income that otherwise I don't think I would have had.

That's looking like guest experting on online coaches modules or speaking engagements both in person and online, creating an ability for myself to be on a list of service providers for other female founders to use, or funders in that case.

But doing all of these things that I had no idea existed for service providers, it's not something you're going to Google and find. I had no idea that this was possible and it really, really helped me in the slower periods of my business, I told all my friends that were stylists and they were shaking their heads at me like, “What do you mean? We don't do that. You just wait for the client to call you or the email to come in or for Yelp to get you--” and I'm like, “No, no, no, no, you need to have something running in the back. It can't just all be social media and SEO. You need to do other things.”

Nicole Otchy: Yeah. I think that that surprises people the most when we work together. I didn't expect that. I didn't expect that, but I think it's because when I was a stylist, for a billion years or a thousand years ago, I mean, up until last year, I never really focused entirely on social media. I really focused as like you could go to my Instagram or whatever and I used it as a mini website, how I do with this business.

I use it as a cross-check and a place to build relationships. But that philosophy is something I think stylists need to understand that goes outside of social media. While it sounds like more work, I think, and I'd love to hear your thoughts, I feel like this way of doing it, in my head, it's like a three-pronged method to marketing that I teach, it's actually what gives you control of your business.

I don't think we realize how little control we have, I don't just mean the algorithm, I just mean how icky it feels to only be worrying about social media and building an entire relationship in this idea of attract marketing being the only way.

It's a passive way of growing a business and there's no such thing as a successful business that's passive. Even when it's passive income, you have to run ads, you have to make relationships, you have to do these things, even if you're making money “when you sleep,” that doesn't mean those people aren't working during the day.

I think that figuring this out and learning both impacts how we use social media because if you're building relationships outside of social media, you know how to build them inside social media. Business is relationships, and you know that's for real estate. It just doesn't feel you're in control of your business when it's just about Instagram. I don't think we realize it till we have alternatives.

Mary Komick: Yes, and it gave me a higher variety of touch points for people to figure out who I was and what I do, other than just social media. I have to say the other great part of that back-end work of establishing relationships that are not online is that I no longer concerned myself with producing content for social media that was the generalized cookie-cutter content that every other stylist was doing.

I was focusing more on establishing relations with referral partners and collaborations that put me in the rooms and in front of the faces of people that would like to hire me as opposed to saying, “Should I create a Reel today that shows someone how to French tuck a shirt or what three belts they need for spring?”

All of that noise went away because I had these other things to rely on and so many stylists focus on trying to be like everybody else because they see that the market's changing and that attraction marketing and organic marketing is the thing you have to go for it. Otherwise, you're spending thousands or hundreds on ads and trying to be a passive income maker.

I just don't think as a service provider that that's what people need to be focusing on. But if I hadn't worked with you, I wouldn't know that.

Nicole Otchy: That's really interesting. I never thought of it that way. That's really interesting. I think too, if it can get you offline a bit, and I mean even offline, I sometimes think of LinkedIn as offline because it is a different way of behaving. I feel like people have to decide, "Do you want to be ‘popular’ or do you want to get paid?"

That is the thing that people get surprised by because you can make six figures. I don't even think this business has 600 followers on Instagram. Not a problem. Add six figures. I think that's because it's relationship-based, it's relevant, it's going deep, not wide, but stylists that are obsessed with what is everybody else doing are really not understanding how much money they're leaving on the table because other stylists aren't going to pay you.

We probably have a stylist where you can have a bank account you're excited about. Those are your options, ladies, and men, and the three men that are here listening to this.

Mary Komick: I always tell, I mean, my social media presence hasn't grown exponentially over the years so there's this wide set assumption from both stylists and other entrepreneurs, just as well as friends and family, that your social media following is a direct reflection of your income.

But I always say, “My follower count has nothing to do with the dollars in my bank account. That's a different thing,” and a lot of people don't get that. When you drop the ruminating and the worrying about something so menial that doesn't actually move your business in any way, does not bring leads through the door, does not put you in front of the faces of people that would like to hire you or can connect you to people that would most likely like to hire you and do so easily, it makes running your styling business so much easier.

Nicole Otchy: It makes running your whole life easier because you're out of that competitive mindset that you may not even realize you're in, but yeah, it's a wild world, social media.

I think it's even hard for me sometimes to remember that except that one of the things I really had to focus on in myself is thinking, “This account isn't growing fast enough. These people have bigger audiences,” but because I've worked with so many people that have big audiences, way bigger than I ever had as a stylist and they're making so much less than they're struggling, it's understanding that when you have sales skills, which was a lot of what you're talking about, understanding your client, research—people think sales is such a dirty thing, but it's really just connection, it's the art of being able to connect with people such that they want to buy from you—when you do that, it doesn't matter what platform you're on, whether it's networking, it doesn't really matter how you're going about getting the sale because it feels easy and effortless.

Not always effortless but it feels a little bit more intuitive to you because you know who you’re talking to. I think when that happens, that's when you can start relaxing about social media because otherwise, your brain needs something to focus on. It's like, “Well, how am I going to make this work?”

When you focus and you shift to the things that you did and having these three ways of going about it, now when your business is slow, which it will be, because all businesses get slow sometimes, you know what to do versus like, “Let me get on Instagram and see what everybody else is doing.” I mean, we all do it.

Mary Komick: Yeah. When I fall into that trap, I like to tell myself “How much money on my hourly rate, if I had one, am I losing right now by looking at somebody else's Reel that has nothing to do with my clientele?”

Nicole Otchy: Oh, my gosh. That is a gem. I hope everybody rewinds the podcast. Listen to that. That is definitely going to be a highlight from this podcast. Oh, my gosh. I'm going to credit you on the roundtable call later on that one. You freaking genius. I love it. That is so good. That is so good.

Well, thank you so much for chatting with me. I would love to close this out by hearing from you what you're most excited about in your business going forward. We'll say next year, what are you looking forward to?

Mary Komick: I am looking forward to working with female founders and funders in a way that I get to be there for the start of their journey and to the end of their journey and I get to see my impact grow much larger than personal styling and image and we get part of somebody else's business growth and that change wouldn't have happened if I didn't get to work with you. It would be much more surface-level.

I think being in the space that I am in now, I'm very, very excited about it. I'm extremely excited about some of the opportunities that are coming my way because I went all in on a market that I'm so passionate about and about working with women that I'm so passionate about.

Whereas before, it was just about making an income, because I love shopping, and all of those things that stylists will say. It's much more working on a sole level and I'm very, very excited about where I'm at and where my business is going to go.

Nicole Otchy: I'm so proud of you. You work so hard.

Mary Komick: Thank you.

Nicole Otchy: You deserve every single drop of success. I'm excited to watch all this unfold in the next year and beyond. Thank you so much for being here, my dear.

Mary Komick: Thank you, Nicole. I'm so happy to be in your world. Everyone listening, thanks for listening to my story.

Nicole Otchy: You're the best.

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.