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.

Welcome to another episode. Today, we're going to talk about some strategies that are going to help you boost your business that require you to slow down in order to speed up.

This is a topic that is front of mind for me because I have just made the choice to slow down in my business for a little bit. I want to share with you some of the things that you can do. I am doing versions of this that are a little bit different, but similar for my own business.

I'm going to also share with you one of the most important frameworks I can give you to slow down and accurately look at what has happened in your business for the past six months or however long it is when you choose to do this exercise in order to plan for the future in a way that actually moves you and your business forward.

One of the things that can happen—I'm recording this in summer, I'm doing this in mid-July—is that stylists can hit slow periods in their business and the industry-wide common ones, though they are not necessary or definitive if you do things to get in front of them, the two periods that this happens often is summer and right after the holidays, January, February.

Now, again, like I said, does not happen for everyone, especially if you are planning ahead for these periods and really making sure that you're booking people in before these two time periods hit.

There are a couple of reasons why these times of year tend to be slower for stylists and why you need to put even more intention into your marketing to prevent them. Then there's a third reason that tends to get stylists into this but are kind of their own actions that inadvertently lead to a slowdown. I'm going to talk about that.

But the first thing you should know is that summer slumps and slowdowns, including after the holidays as well, are very, very common in all industries, all sectors, and all businesses.

It's not uncommon, and it's mostly because people's attention is very diverted to other things, including their spending during the summer and right after the holidays or even during the holiday period. That could also be a slow period for stylists.

It's not that people just suddenly don't have money, though I think there is a conversation to be had about people's view of the economy right now that we're going to have in a separate episode. But there will always be people that have money.

Just because there is an economic slowdown or even a recession, there are people who thrive actually in those circumstances, which is why knowing who you're talking to and having a niche that is the most profitable, not just when things are going well in our society, but all of the time is the key to having a business that lasts.

But even if you have the right niche, you still have to be able to get in front of the distractions that tend to lead to slowdowns. What will often happen too is that retail will slow down in these two periods, in summer and the new year.

That's because people have, again, spent their money in other ways. It's not that nobody has money because the same people who could have hired you in the summer will likely hire stylists in the fall.

What stylists often don't understand is that it's not necessarily, especially if they were not booked out consistently, that their marketing worked in the fall or the spring.

It's that if you show up to any degree and you already have the momentum of the retail seasons that stylists can capitalize on, which is fall and spring, because retailers are doing a lot of the marketing for you and reminding people that it's time to get new clothes, it's time to get new clothes.

Because these things are happening, it will, to some degree, help stylists, even if their marketing isn't really great. Stylists can have a false perception that "Well, I was busy in the spring. Why do I have no clients now?" It's because you don't have any of the momentum of the outside factors.

You probably just, as we all do, including myself, got lucky in that people were searching for a stylist and they happened to find you during that time. Either they just didn't look very far, they didn't compare you, whatever, they hired you, or maybe they found you and thought you were a great fit after Googling, that can happen.

But you will get a little bit of an extra boost. When I talk to clients who are struggling they say, "Well, it was busy in the fall,” or, “It was busy in spring,” what they really mean is, “I had one client,” or, “I had two clients.”

They don't mean it was busy, busy. It means it's busier than it is now. That's actually an indication that you really need to look into your marketing because there's a reason why you are having that slowdown.

Often what happens is we have a slowdown—this is the third reason that I pointed to—in these two periods of time because they come right before stylists' busiest times.

You're going to have that busy time in the spring because, again, retailing and a lot of stylists just get more excited around spring and fall to talk about clothes more, to show up more in their marketing so they get more clients.

But then they get the clients, even if it's just one or two, and their heads are down because they don't know how to run the rest of their business. They don't have the systems they need, which is not just stylists, it's like all business owners until they get that piece down.

Then they look up because they've just served a couple of clients and they are in a period like summer, which is already hard to get people's attention. Now they are in another slump.

One of the things you can do is just really work on consistency throughout the year so that no matter what is happening in terms of your clients and your workload, you are making sure you're generating new clients.

Even if that means that you're just showing up to share what's happening with the clients you have, that is so valuable. There's a quick tip before we dive into this. But what is critical is that there are periods of time in your business that whether they are slowing down because you're choosing them or they're slowing down because of circumstances, of things we didn't know to do, whatever that looks like, you get to choose it. You get to choose your slowdown, even if you feel right now like it's happening to you.

That's why I'm releasing this at the beginning of August because it is imperative that you take the view that I have, and then I'm going to share with you right now about slow periods so you can set yourself up for fall. Because whatever happened, happened, and the way we look at the past impacts our actions and our behaviors in the future.

How we think about these things, whatever action we take, whatever behavior or attitude we have towards our business, this can either pivot right now in a slow period—and you can be in a slow period at any time listening back to this, I just happen to be in summer and it happens to be the conversations I'm having—but just insert whatever the time period is for you when you're listening to this.

We get to turn things around. The first step to that is if this is happening to you from an unwilling place like you did not choose like I did to do this, then it's really, really critical that you decide today that you're going to choose your slow period.

You're going to decide that, “Okay, this is what's happening. These are the circumstances, I am now going to capitalize on it.” Once you make that choice and you get out of victim mode, you're going to be able to do what I'm going to tell you to do today and you are going to go at lightning speed towards growth in your business.

The first thing I want to introduce you to is this concept called the gap in the game. It's something that I found in the book 10x Is Easier Than 2x. It's a great book that I've been reading and working through and thinking about how to apply to the styling consultancy in the coming years.

There is a quote in there from a man named Dan Sullivan. He is also an author and a thought leader in the business space who has an entire book called The Gap and The Gain, by the way, but I happen to get this in 10x Is Easier Than 2x.

Here is the quote that I want to share with you to frame the concept I'm going to give you to help you reorganize your brain around whatever has happened to date in your business so you can plan, get in front of, and be successful for the remainder of the year.

“Your level of capability in the future depends on your measurement of achievements in the past. You cannot move forward and grow until you've acknowledged how far you've come and have properly measured your gains.” Dan Sullivan.

The way that Dan Sullivan defines the gap in the gain is that if you are living your life through the lens of the gap, you are measuring your productivity, success, and behavior against what could have been or what should have been.

This is something I see a lot particularly when stylists aren't getting the results they want in their business, they will say, “Well, I am not getting sales. I'm showing up on social media, but no one is buying. It's not working.”

The issue with when you stay in the gap is that you, especially if you stay in the gap because you are looking at success in your business only through the lens of sales, you will miss all of the breadcrumbs and all of the signs that you should be capitalizing on in order to actually get the sale.

If you were instead looking at your business through a gain perspective, through the lens of what it would look like every time you took an action, what you were gaining in your business, you would be a completely different person.

The concept of the gain is that a gain and a gain outlook in your business is a proactive, creative, and internal approach to measuring your success in your experiences.

It's proactive, creative, and internal. The real thing that tends to happen is that we are programmed to look for all of the problems in our lives. That is the thing you will constantly have to fight against to be successful in your life, but really to be successful in business when you have any amount of visibility.

When you are constantly measuring your business success against an external factor or unrealistic expectations, so this also happens when stylists tend to look at other stylists, what they're doing, what their prices are, and then think, "Well, I'm not doing as well," when they don't even know if the other stylists they're comparing themselves to who maybe has higher prices or who looks busy on social media, A, actually is busy and it's not fake, or B, is even selling those packages. Or, how long it takes them to deliver the packages that are on their website at the prices that are listed.

When we're measuring things like if our business is successful when we say we change niches or we start to really go all in on one group of people, if we're marketing for 30 days, that's not going to be enough time to warm up an audience when you have either gone silent or you've not had that niche before.

It takes about 90 days for people to really pay attention and it takes 90 days of consistency. The business you have today is the result of what you did 90 days ago. This is why stylists give up before they ever see the success that they are trying to get to, which is the sale.

What I see is that when we rely on external factors, the sales, how people are validating us or are not in our content, we are looking at always over and over again, what is wrong? What is the gap? Why am I not getting where I want to go?

When the truth is, A, like I said, it takes about 90 days for your audience to start paying attention to the changes in your content if you are being consistent. And it takes a while for people to trust you and trust that if you haven't been active before or you're changing your marketing, you mean it.

This idea that we would show up for two weeks, three weeks, even a month, and be owed a sale is you absolutely setting yourself up for failure. Not because there's anything wrong with you, but because that's actually not how it works.

You will never feel satisfied or notice how far you're coming, and you will never be consistent if you are constantly looking at external factors like your audience buying for you when you want them to, just because you want them to, if you don't stop and try to look at, "Well, how can I look at this from more of a game perspective?"

Whenever you do something new, it's going to feel hard. That includes going to a new niche, trying different content, and not going into lazy content, like links and stuff, just because it feels easier.

The way you stay consistent when things feel hard is to focus on the gain. What am I getting every single day that's helping me see that I'm moving closer to building a relationship with my audience?

Because every day that you post or every day that you engage on your stories or every time you send a newsletter, every day you reach out to a past client, every day you do something to move your business forward, you're putting a deposit into the relationships that you need to make more sales.

If you expect to say, buy a million-dollar house, but you've only deposited $100 into your relationship bank account, you ain't going to buy that house and you're not going to buy the sale basically with your action.

If you think of how you are consistent in your marketing, I'm using marketing because you can absolutely measure your consistency. That's why marketing is so important, not just for getting clients, but for us being in reality with why we have the business we have because you can go back 90 days and look at what happened.

You can go back to last month, and you can go back and get the information you need to continue to put the deposits into your relationships with your audience in order to get the sale.

When you are looking at your business from the idea of a gain, and the gain being, “What did I do yesterday that I can build upon today? What conversations have I had recently with past clients, and people in my DMs, that I can create even better content with so they feel like I'm speaking directly to them?” That is the secret here.

When you do it you think like, “Wow, yesterday I did not have a comment to create a great post with, but now I do because somebody asked a question on my Instagram post and now I can take that and create content out of it and people will resonate with that because it sounds like I completely understand where they're coming from when all you did was engage with your audience.

That's literally how easy it is. The only thing that's required of you is to stick with it, even when people aren't necessarily clapping, and even when they're maybe not liking things or engaging with you at the level that they would if you were showing them your favorite sweater or linking things.

But people that want to hire you want to trust you. They want to build a relationship. They want to know that you're a safe person who has the capabilities and the outlook that they need to trust you with their image.

People who give up real quickly are not people who demonstrate to styling clients that they're someone that they should dress with their image. We've all been here before, but we don't think about it that way.

Please know that I'm not saying this in a harsh way. We all struggle with consistency. But when we can put ourselves into the shoes of our clients, and when we can look at our business from the viewpoint of “What can I gain every single day? What am I gaining in my consistency that's not just about a sale?” we will continue to make progress at a way more rapid rate because we'll be consistent and that consistency will give us the answers and the breadcrumbs of what to post more of, and what kind of conversations to be having in order to lead to the sale.

I will tell you from personal experience, it took me almost six months to get consistent sales in the styling consultancy. Even though I was getting people telling me they were binging my content, I was getting people on tons of sales calls, I was getting people that were writing the emails telling me they loved my Instagram posts, I had to keep showing up even in the face of people not buying because I had to show this community that I meant it.

That's why I show up every week with a podcast because I want you to know that if you decide to work with me, I am worth the trust you're going to place in me. That's what consistency does.

I am not telling you that I don't understand how it feels to be feeling like you're putting things out there but you're not getting anything back and you're only going to feel like there's a gap between your content or your output in your business and where you want to go if you're measuring it by only sales.

You'll never get to the sale if you don't start measuring what you're doing by the gain. What am I gaining every day? How much closer am I in terms of breadcrumbs to the sale?

Now, because I put in the time and I kept showing up, I kept having the same point of view on styling, and I kept saying, “I’m really committed to leadership in this space,” now, even without a huge audience, the business is easily at six figures.

It's not that I'm super excited about the money. I'm super excited that I get to have these conversations every day. That's also part of this. Are you having the conversations with the people you actually want to be talking to?

That's a lot of what we work on inside the Income Accelerator, because what I see is that a lot of stylists who are "very established" still are not having the conversations that they truly want to be in their heart, whether because their visibility blocks, whether because they just really have never sat down to figure out exactly what the people that they really want to talk to, who they really want to style, what those people need and want to hear.

Again—I'm going to say it until I'm blue in the face—I don't care how long you've been a stylist. Right now, in the current climate, if you are not talking to someone, you're talking to no one and you are just coasting on luck because people are so much more savvy. All consumers everywhere across the board, but especially in styling. They're going to need longer to warm up because they're so savvy, because they know they have other options.

You have to be consistent for 90 days. You have to be replying to the things that they're asking you. You have to be speaking in their language. But the best part of what I'm telling you is that when you start and stay consistent, they're going to give you the answer.

If I could just create a magic pill to get every client that I work with to be consistent, everybody would be a millionaire. It's not hard. It's really not hard. But it will be harder if we don't look at every deposit that we put in the bank of trust and the relationship we have with our audience and potential clients if we don't look at that through what we're gaining every day outside of, “Are they hiring me?”

Because of course I know the sale is important, but like I said earlier, lots of stylists are only happy with like one sale at a time, like one very small project at a time instead of having a waitlist, instead of having two to three clients a month, which is what it actually takes.

You can't be placated by one little sale, even if it's a $3,000 sale. Because if you're placated by it, if you think, “Oh, I got one sale, now I don't have to market anymore,” you will put yourself back in the same position and you'll have more and more slowdowns and then you'll have like six $3,000 sales a year.

But that's like $18,000, that's not like thriving. This is a muscle and a practice of looking at things through the gain and being excited that is going to transform your bottom line in your business.

When you create this mentality and practice it over and over, here is what you are going to be able to do in your business much more quickly. You're going to be able to create strategies that will help you understand your target market by doing research.

Another thing I teach my clients inside the Income Accelerator, you don't even have to have your actual ideal client. There is enough information on the internet right now for you to lurk and write amazing social media posts that start to generate sales within a couple months, a couple of weeks even if they're good enough.

When you're looking at what you could be doing right now in a slower period, you can go back and you can re-engage the comments in your most popular posts, especially if they are appropriately aimed at the people you really want to talk to, so say that's like working moms.

If you did a series of posts on topics related to working moms and you notice there are a bunch of comments or questions that you never replied to, that is your next step in your content.

Do not make it a big deal if you have been quiet for a little while. Just pick up where you left off. So many people get in their heads about, “Well, I haven't said anything. It's going to be weird.” No one cares. Just keep going. Do not make it weird. Do not make it about you. Make it about your audience. That's where it needs to be anyway.

The first thing you can do right now in a slow period is to go back. If you don't have the target audience that you want, if you have never engaged them, go and do some research, find out what they're reading, find out what they're thinking, find out what their problems are, find out what it's costing them on an emotional level every single day to not have the style they want.

That is what's going to create content that converts people. When you can speak to that, you gain trust so quickly. If you have been talking to the audience you want, you're going to go back, look at comments, look at things you haven't replied to, and you're going to make content from it, sure, reply.

But If you have replied to certain things and it's done really well, or you have created posts on certain topics that have worked really, really well for you in terms of engagement, I want you to think of different ways you can say the same thing. Or, even take the content, freshen it up, and repost it. That's totally okay too. You can archive the old one. But let's get ourselves back into action.

The next thing you can be doing is going right back to your Instagram Stories or your email list, but I think it's really easy to get quick and really, really valuable feedback from Instagram Stories, but it's going to take a little while for people to start to reply.

You can start consistently engaging people in that space. This is something people get overly overwhelmed with and they don't know where to start. What you want to do is if you put up a question box and it's been a while since you've done that, people are not going to reply. It takes a while for people to trust you. It really does. Also, people are going fast when they're looking at social media.

We know that from our own behavior, but we tend to underestimate it in other people. We think everyone's watching us all the time and the good news is they're absolutely not, which is why you shouldn't be taking this that seriously in terms of like, if you make a mistake or like, what's the perfect thing?

The perfect thing is action. We're not in school anymore. What's really hard, if you're someone that really wanted to always be right or get the right answer, or you're a really high achiever in school, is that we think that there's some version of that for being in business, but really your 75% is better than most people's 90%.

If you just show up and are consistent, you're going to win the game. Because the truth is, as I said, most stylists will get a couple of clients just by the momentum of the seasons we have.

If you want to get beyond that and you want to really have a business that has not just profitable and consistent months, but allows you the freedom to get help or hire people or whatever, you're going to have to be consistent, but not perfect over and over and over again. That's all.

That's the best news ever. Your business doesn't run the same way that life did in school. If you had a normal job, that can be really, really hard to let sink into your bones because we are used to other people creating standards, frameworks, and metrics for success, but that's not how it works anymore.

The framework for success when you're a stylist is how much you can understand your ideal client. It's not about you. It's not about your outfits. It's not about how good you are at styling. I mean, sure, that helps.

It's about your systems, your client experience, and your ability to speak to the things that keep your ideal clients up at night when it comes to their style. It's not about the latest trends. It's not about whatever the latest stealth wealth or mob life. It's not about that.

Normal people who have a lot of money and need styling all the time, are the right client. Do not care about that. What you get to do is you get to start building inconsistency in your engagement through stories through the newsletter, however, you want to do that and invite them to reply back to you through micro-moments.

These have to be really stupid easy. You don't want to ask them what every problem is in their closet. You want to ask them what one issue is that they face every day when they go to get dressed.

You want to make sure that everything is specific so that you are not asking them to work too hard because if somebody has to reply to an email, reply to a story, or do anything like that that requires more than two seconds to think, people will push it off.

I'm sure you can see this in your own behavior because I can see this in my behavior too. Not because we don't care and not because we're like jerks, just because we want to be thoughtful and think things through before we apply to someone. Actually, it's out of our care for people that we tend to hesitate.

Make it easy, make it just a poll for a little while. Make it just a really easy, send you an emoji. Make it as simple as possible to start to rebuild the relationship so that you can get more engagement. Then the last thing I'm going to encourage you to do because you probably have some time on your hands and when you have time but no money, you're going to have to really use that asset that you have, which is time.

I'm going to encourage you to learn how to cold pitch. Now if this makes you feel like you're going to break into a cold sweat, listen to me real careful. This is a game you're going to play. This is a game you're going to play for a few months.

You're going to make a cold pitching template that's perfectly suited to your ideal client. If you work with working moms, you're going to go find some examples on LinkedIn of women that you think would be really great fits. You're going to find out more about them because the internet is a big place and you can usually do that.

Then you're going to send them an incredibly thoughtful email with two or three personalized points about them that made you reach out to say, “I would love to work with a client like you. I'm a stylist, this is what I do. I work with women just like you. If you don't have a lot of time and you want to focus your energy on your career, your family, whatever, then I would love to chat with you.”

You are going to send it over and over. It's going to take you a minute because you're going to have to be able to go ahead and personalize those two points at first. But this is not just one of the best skills you could ever get as a business owner because it puts you fully in control of your business, it is going to rewire your brain around courage.

I have hired multiple people in my career from cold pitches. If you get angry every time you get a cold pitch from someone, that is an indication that you need to do the work to figure out what your bad relationship is with sales.

Because that person believes in what they're doing enough to cold pitch you and let me tell you, every time I get one like that, especially if it's a good one, even if I don't need it, I reply to say, “Good for you. Thank you for selling me or trying to sell me. I don't need it now, but I so commend your ability to write this thoughtful pitch to me. Thank you for taking the time to do that.”

Because I love to encourage other people to be thoughtful and to believe in their business because I believe in my business. You have to take a look at why that might feel bad to you because it isn't their fault. I mean, sure, do I get bad pitches all the time? Yeah, that's just called life and that's just called business.

But when I see a good one, honestly, even if I don't need it, I'm like, "You go. I love that you're doing that." I love that there's evidence in the world through cold pitches of people who believe in what they're doing enough and care enough about a potential client to take the time to research them and write something thoughtful.

I think that's incredible. I have also had success with that. Now, you're going to have not like huge numbers of success. But remember you’re a personal stylist who hopefully has a high enough price point that you can only take so many people a month.

You can only take so many clients in a year. Every new client is worth way more money than we often give that sale credit for. It's not just the sale you make at that moment. It's the life cycle of the client that makes, if you have that awareness in your mind, that it's not just one sale.

We're not just trying to get one sale. We're trying to get clients that repeat over and over again. That's what I teach my stylists to do in my programs. If you have that mentality, it is worth the time it takes to build the cold pitch both because you're getting better as a salesperson, but also because the energy you're putting in is towards a relationship. It's not towards a one-time sale.

If that is another way you need to rewire your brain of even if nobody answers your cold pitches, you can be making those emails better, and it is a numbers game. The numbers game gets exponentially easier to close when you really learn how to do research.

It's real hard to do that if you don't know exactly who you're talking to. I hope that these little tasks that you need to be building into your business all the time but are especially great right now when you might have some time to start to move your business forward are something that you really take action on because it will change not just your business, but you.

If you become someone that looks at your business through the gains and not the gap, you will be unrecognizable. Get out there, choose your slow period if you're in one whenever you listen to this and use it to propel yourself forward to be unrecognizable both in your business and in your own mind in the next six months. I'll talk to you 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.