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.

I want to talk about what keeps us from hitting our next level in our styling businesses and how we get to the other side of it regardless of what stage of business we're in. There's definitely a misunderstanding that I see at all levels and all experience points from personal stylists that they may be at a point where certain things don't impact them anymore.

I actually think it's less about the point in business you're in and more about your identity and the experiences and the self-beliefs that you bring into personal styling. I've often been asked, “What is the thing that gets stylists to six figures the fastest.”

As someone who did not get there super fast, and as someone who works with people who have even surpassed six figures but now are struggling to get to the next level, whatever that looks like for them, there is this common thread that will allow you to get pretty far, actually. But if you don't handle it, you will eventually stall out.

It's very specific to the personal styling industry, which is why this is a standalone episode and there will be other episodes about the day-to-day in your business actions you can take to get to the next level because I have a lot to say about that, but this one is the most prevalent across the board, all levels, all skill sets, all years in business.

It is that if we don't shift from a personal stylist who happens to have a business into a business owner who is a personal stylist, a whole world of obstacles continues to show up for us. I know that I've talked about beliefs and self-identity in other episodes for sure, but when I think about it—and I sat down to make the list of what gets in the way of stylists getting to different levels in their business—I think less about the money and more about what the day-to-day operations and experience of the business are because that is honestly way more important than the number.

What will happen if you don't make the shift at some point from a personal stylist who happens to have a business because that was just the way they could be a stylist, to a business owner who happens to be a stylist is you will continually bump up against frustrations in your business and not take full ownership of them in the way that will move you forward the fastest.

What I think the origin of this belief shift being delayed for stylists is, is the origin story of how most stylists get into personal styling. I see this for people who have fashion degrees, people who don't have fashion degrees, people who worked in retail, and people who were high-level executives in retail. I have a couple of clients who used to be lawyers and are now stylists.

I've seen stylists come into this game from so many different angles, but there's often this one moment, what I call the catalyzing moment for stylists, where they are introduced to this idea that personal styling could be a career option for them.

Maybe they were the person that everybody went to for years to help with outfits, to pick out their prom dress, or to help people get ready for interviews at the office. Or, maybe they were someone who struggled with personal style and have shared with friends or family or acquaintances that struggle and how they got over it and how they got their style to be great.

Maybe they got a compliment on the playground and it led to a conversation in which this stylist is just this other woman like, “Hey, yeah, I used to really struggle with my style and then I really spend a lot of time trying to work on it and blah, blah, blah.” That person says, “You should really teach other people how to do that. You'd be really great as a stylist.”

Or a family member says when you're helping them with an outfit, “You'd be really great at this.” As you start to look out, you think, “Is this really a career?”—this is certainly how I started—“Is this really a career?” Like 15 years ago, it quite frankly was not.

There was like what not to wear and then you could work in a store and those were the options. There were two people teaching people how to be stylists and I went and worked with both of them.

What's fascinating is that this seems to be a very common origin story for stylists. Then you spend a bunch of time trying to figure out if this is legitimate depending on your exposure to personal styling. I think this is changing a lot more. I think more people are aware of personal styling even on a superficial level.

We know there are people that have this as like a job title even if we don't know about the business side. I know in my case, I remember really dragging my feet to come out as a personal stylist because I didn't want to own a business. I had a lot of beliefs about that because my dad was a business owner, he was an architect, and a creative entrepreneur to boot.

I just had a lot of beliefs that I had to work on to believe that I could have a career as a creative entrepreneur of any kind and not struggle and not have very chaotic finances which then created other issues in a home and that just wasn't something I wanted for my children.

I come at this from a similar angle to almost everybody. This was the shift that I struggled with. I went in begrudgingly to being a stylist and not wanting a business because I didn't know any other way. I truly did not know any other way to be a personal stylist.

What I can see in retrospect and what I see with clients, even some that have been in business for like 15 years, is that we can push off really stepping into ownership of our business when we don't come to terms with the fact that we are truly a business owner.

How this shows up in a really sneaky way is that we think that we're going to hire out our problems, and then we tell ourselves, "Well, this is," and we tell other people, I have people telling me this all the time, "Oh, but this is what CEOs do.” Do you think Mark Zuckerberg is running his own ads? Of course not.

And what is missed in this view is that Mark Zuckerberg isn't having other people running his ads because he doesn't know how to do them, he is having other people run them because he does know how to do them and he doesn't have the time, which means now he can manage people or manage people to manage people to run those ads.

What we miss when we don't go all in on the business side is that we don't have the opportunity to step fully into our expertise as stylists because we tell ourselves that like, “Well, I'm creative. I'm not a business owner.”

Let me assure you there is nothing more creative than building a business that does not look like a cut-and-paste copy of all of the stylist websites that you went on and I went on back in the day and thought, “Well, I guess this is how we're a stylist,” and then we throw it up and then we finally start getting clients. That's great. But if we stay there, our experience of being a business owner will be uncreative because what we did was uncreative.

It's like a client saying to you, "Well, I don't think it's possible for me to feel like my wardrobe is creative because I just did stitch fix for five years and I never felt creative there."

You'd be like, "Well, that's not the same thing as me curating an outfit, a whole bunch of outfits for you and a new wardrobe." Those people are mass buying. No hate on stitch fixes. They've gotten me a lot of clients over the years.

But do you know what I mean? That would be like, "Oh, your frame of reference for creativity in personal style is just wrong.” You'd have to recreate the frame for them. I want to recreate the frame for you about the place of being a business owner in your identity so that you can be more creative as a stylist.

Because what happens is we think we're going to outsource problems, and I actually am a big fan of you outsourcing things, but a lot of the time, we outsource them before we understand the problem.

I'm hiring an expert to fix it, except that there's basic information that you have to know about the business, not necessarily about that exact problem, in order to have that expert help you.

If you cut and pasted somebody else's business model because it looked like what everybody else was doing, or you don't have a business model that is charging enough for you to survive, or you don't have a business model that allows you to upsell and downsell, or you don't have a client life cycle, if the business plan isn't on lock, you can't give the experts when you have a problem that you hire the information they need to get you where you want to go.

The most common one I hear is that stylists say, “I really want to work with you, and I'm going to do that once I hire a marketing person.” The irony of that is that that is the fastest way to ensure that investment doesn't pay off because it's not the marketing person's, they know how to make a Reel that goes well, they know about trending on you, they know about hashtags. They know about Google ads. They know about whatever, but you bring the content and then they take the content and distribute it, or they edit it, or they make it better, or they build on it.

But you're the only one with the client experience. If your client experience is not reflected in your business model, which it can't be if we stay with the business models that all of us start with, which is just an hourly or a la carte or just services that we copied off of somebody else's even if their packages, if we don't get how each aspect of that styling process is truly an act of creativity because it serves the client to the highest degree instead of it's just what all stylists do, then we're not giving them everything that they need as the experts to help us with our marketing or help us with our sales or whatever that is in order to get the result and the payoff for that investment.

When you don't understand your business model, you'll have marketing problems, you'll have pricing problems, you'll have client retention problems, you'll have systems problems, you'll have like a whole variety of problems. You'll have problems closing sales because you have a lot of sales calls, but you're not exactly sure what to say.

It is not your marketing person's job to close the sale. It's their job to get you more leads. But if you don't know how to market, if you don't tell them the messaging that's going to convert people because your messaging never has converted, you've never tried different things, then they can get you all the leads or all the new eyeballs, but it won't work.

Because when the person gets there, they're like, “Ah. This isn't resonating. This person isn't for me.” And they bounce. I see people do this with SEO all the time. Yes, eventually some people will convert. When we used SEO, I was hugely guilty of this for so many years, I didn't want to show my face in my marketing so I would hire SEO experts.

Honestly, like 10 years ago, that really worked because the space was less saturated. So there was that, but also the client base was less educated. Now so many stylists I talk to get on the phone with me and tell me, “Oh, my gosh,” especially my established clients that are in longer packages, I'm getting on my sales calls and people have talked to other stylists, like so many people, and this is newer.

Because the client base is more educated. If you're a stylist who's not over on TikTok, I'm not saying you have to be on TikTok to market, that's really about your preferences because I don't think anyone has to be in any specific place. But one of the things I see with stylists who are established and have been in the game for a while is that they keep staying with the marketing things that work with that for them and like aren't branching out.

I get people's concerns about being on TikTok or just feeling like it's not the right pace for them. I understand that. I like being on TikTok to watch, but I don't want to create content at that pace. I prefer this type of medium.

But I think it's important to be there because in terms of just viewing, you should be there to look at things and see what's going on because it is shifting the way people see personal styling.

It may not be shifting how you're doing personal styling, for better or worse, but it is shifting your clients' education about it. That's important because you need to understand the culture of personal styling.

You need to understand that people are getting savvier. It used to be that people thought that the feeder to personal stylists was a stitch-fix. Not anymore. There are way more things out there.

Actually, that's good, but you need to know what those things are and who can speak to them in your content. You can get a marketing person, but if you're not able to give them the contours of what's going to matter, of what's going to move people forward, and what the false beliefs are that they have to overcome in order to be a good client for you, that marketing person is just going to put up a bunch of stuff that's going to have trending Reels but isn't going to ever talk to anybody.

This means that the ultimate creative act is you, looking at all of your past experience, looking about what you like, what you care about, who you care about, and who you like to work with.

Now that you have the mastery phase of personal styling under your belt, you've already mastered the identity of being a personal stylist, now you get to shift into being a creative CEO or a business owner or however, you need to put it in your own brain and get the skills.

Not so that you can do those things forever, but so that you can actually hire the people who can do those things well for you and you can make a return on investment. If I hire a coach, I can't expect them to understand, especially if they're not a stylist, all of the aspects of personal styling.

I bring that to the conversation and they bring whatever their knowledge base is in order to help me mold that into the skill that they're giving me. This is the critical part, which is that when we decide that you are just a creative, you rob yourself of actually creating a truly creative experience for your clients.

You rob yourself of creating marketing that's actually fun and interesting and much easier to create for you or for someone else when you hire them because you have your sales messaging on lock.

If somebody told me this when I got started, it would have changed my life because I spent so many years looking for some expert to fix my business, but I didn't exactly know what was wrong with it.

Now when I hire somebody because I've spent the time in this business and then in my last business learning how to actually create an original business model and creating a business that's client led, which is the ultimate creative act, not what a stylist thinks, but like what the actual client wants, once you have that, now you can hire people with a lot more confidence and ease.

I now know that I hired my coaches because it was very clear that my client base was struggling with this thing that I was pretty good at, but I didn't necessarily have the skills to show them how to be super good at it.

I went and I invested in that skill. Not only am I getting better right now, but my clients are getting better. That's a client-led business. I know what the problem is that my clients have, and by them having that problem, it impacts my business.

Now I'm going to give them the thing because I know them so well. That is what dictates my decisions, not like, “What is broken here? Who's going to come in and save it for me?” Now, you don't have to do every piece of your business.

I don't want to do my own bookkeeping, no problem. But I do need to be the person who looks at the result of the bookkeeping that somebody else does for me. I do need to make business decisions based on the numbers that somebody else hands me.

They can't fix the business. They can't tell me, "Oh, Nicole, you should change your packages to look like this." Only I can because only I know my clients and I can give somebody the contours and the details and then they can help me figure that out and I highly recommend that.

But it is stepping into business as an identity and a stylist second because if you're here, you've already mastered the stylist piece. Now, you get to be a better stylist and actually style more by gaining some skills.

The last piece of this, which is so important that I do not want to step over is that I see so many stylists blaming themselves and not being able to gain skills because they get themselves so wound up and so emotionally agitated—which girl, same, I have been there before—so that when you get that like worked up about something that's not working in your business, it's very hard to take in the solution.

When you make everything a character deficit or like something that's wrong with you versus a skill you could gain as a business person, you really lengthen the timeline to get to your next level of success, whatever that is, $100,000, $200,000, $500,000, I don't care what it is, but if you get into a tizzy because things are not working, which is the nature of building a business, it's the nature of the fact that our field—thank goodness—is finally advancing, not as fast as it should be in terms of technology, but that's another episode.

But people understand what a stylist is, nobody actually thinks it's just for celebrities anymore. Now we have to be a stylist however we want but not if we don't understand the business because we need to understand who we're going to be for if we're doing it the way we want.

When you get yourself so worked up that you make this about yourself and like how bad you are instead of seeing yourself as a business person that just needed a couple of skills, you see yourself as a stylist who happens to have a business, that is very disempowering.

Because if you don't have the identity of a person that is a business owner or a creative CEO of whatever the wording is you need to have to feel like that aligns with you, you will not then take the actions to learn the skills. You will make it about you. You will make it about this big huge deficit, but it isn't. The longer you do that, the longer you take yourself out of the game and out of the lives of people who need you.

I hope that this little pep talk about reorienting yourself and your identity to being a business owner versus being just a stylist is helpful because on the other side of you stepping into this is everything you wanted when you built your personal styling business, when you wanted to be home with your kids more, when you wanted to be able to take a vacation from work whenever you wanted, when you wanted to not feel like you were working all the time but not getting anywhere or building a legacy in another job.

This is the missing step in order to make all the other things work, so you can hire a team, so you can hire things out, and get a return on your investment. We'll be chatting about the other day-to-day pieces of actions you can take in your business to get to the next level in another episode. But for now, thank you for being here.

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.