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.

Welcome to a fresh episode of the podcast. Today, we're going to be diving into a topic that so many stylists, creative entrepreneurs, and just creative people in general, deal with when they are business owners. That is how to handle the flood of new ideas in your business and make the best decision with your creative urges, your impulses, and your decision-making so that your business can stay profitable but you can continue to be excited about what you do.

See, the best businesses are often boring and super predictable, which is something that I know I struggled with a lot and a lot of my clients do. If you're neurodivergent, you have ADHD, or you're just a creative person in general, you get lit up and you get a lot of energy from new ideas and from inspiration.

So it could be really hard to channel that, especially if we don't have a really solid business foundation and kind of understand our business, it's really hard to channel that in a way where we get to do both enjoy the creative energy that comes with new and interesting ideas or plans for our business and also stay profitable.

The thing is not all ideas are created equal especially when you're running a business. Over the past year, I have really been forced to distinguish between what's a good idea, what's a bad idea, and ideas that just won't make any difference but they will keep me very busy and eventually pretty tired because the ratio of running the business as it is, trying to implement the new idea, and then living my life and enjoying my life has not been as much as I want at certain points because of the growth of the business.

I really had to realize that if I want a business, first and foremost, that feels good to work in, but also feels good for me to have a life outside of, then I have to be very strict about what ideas I entertain in my business.

Learning to decipher which ideas to pursue will make my business stronger and more profitable in which I have to put in more time, and more effort, it won't give me the biggest return on my time or even my financial investment, has been something that's been super helpful and I'd really love to help you figure out how to do that as well because you can really start to trust yourself in your business when you get this skill down.

I get it, as creative entrepreneurs, as personal stylists, we love a fresh canvas. The excitement of a new idea can be really intoxicating and it can be hard to walk away from things, especially if we feel drawn to them and we think we haven't been feeling as excited in our business as we could be.

Today I'm going to guide you through a process that I use and help my clients use to make better decisions. Some of my clients might not know that I'm doing this with them because I'm coaching them, I'm not like, “No, we're going to do a framework.”

But that's one of the reasons why I do a group program because people can then understand, like, “Oh, what you're telling me is not just about me. It's a framework that I can extrapolate from and apply again and again. That's what I want to do here.”

Okay, but before we get into the actual framework, we do have to talk about excitement and just that full speed ahead energy that can go into a new idea. I just want to give you this really small little distinction about the excitement in our business because sometimes we get excited to go towards something in our business, a new idea, a fresh service, a new niche, and it's not that it's necessarily a bad idea, it's that we have a whole bunch of other things pre-existing in our business that aren't working.

The excitement that we have about this new thing and this new possibility in our business is only fleeting because what ideas don't come with is a user manual that is like, “Now you will have to do 19 other things in your business to make this a reality.”

You will have to know how to market it well. You will have to know why it's different from other things on your sales menu. You will have to learn how to sell it in a sales call. You will have to understand where their pricing fits in the scheme of your business. You will have to have onboarding and off-boarding.

You may not have these things, but these are the things that would make that idea come to life in a way that would give you more profit for your business, except if you don't know how to do those things, you already aren't selling the things that already exist, and you don't know how to talk to your audience or how this new service fits in with your audience's wants, and needs, and where it fits into how you talk about styling in general, and the whole ecosystem of your services.

We get really attached and excited by an idea, but we often forget that the reason why it's exciting is because we don't have to do the work to execute it yet. That's one thing I do just want to mention here is that you want to go towards things in your business that feel expansive.

But they don't feel expansive at the cost of abandoning other things that aren't working. There's definitely a time and a place and probably more of your time is in a successful business that's going to be spent on troubleshooting things and really just learning what comes next in a business.

I have very strong feelings that income-generating tasks always come first and client delivery comes first, everything else, lots of other stuff, it's just not essential. I have purposely run my business as a styling consultancy in a way that shows you guys that because there's always going to be a to-do list of stuff you have to do, always.

That doesn't mean you never get to do new fun things. But the more you understand the business as a whole and how it all works together, the easier it is for you to be like, “Okay, I'm excited about this idea, but if I go down this road, I know that I'm looking at 20 hours of implementation, or I'm not really sure that I have this client. I probably have to have a little bit more conversations before I put all the work forward into this new service or idea and find out actually it doesn't resonate at all.”

A lot of understanding how to figure out what ideas are good and what ideas are not, is about allowing yourself to feel excited, allowing yourself to, even if you want to sit down and journal or dream about it or whatever, but not going into full-on action mode and taking time away from the business as a whole, especially if it means that we're running away from something that we really do need to work through because it just feels so good to have a new idea.

It doesn't feel so good to figure out why people are ghosting you in your virtual styling process. It turns out that you don't even know. You just know that you keep signing people and they keep ghosting you or you have a sense that your services are not as good as they could be, but some people say they are good.

If you have a client experience problem, you'll bring that with you. If you have a marketing problem, you'll bring that with you into the new idea. If you struggle to connect with your ideal client or if you refuse to go deeper with that niche or even have a niche, creating a new thing in your business isn't going to fix it.

A new partnership isn't going to save you if you don't market all the time. So we're going to talk through the order of risks you can take in your business. I'm going to explain to you why certain things are at higher risk than others.

Risk was just the best word that I could find after sitting with the thesaurus to give you a sense of risking to your time, risking to your profit, risking to the overall health of the business, and now one thing you do in your business is going to destroy it.

What will happen though is if you continue to make decisions and do not know how to properly vet those decisions, it will have an impact on one of the most important things in your business, and that is your confidence.

Because so many stylists come to me and say, "Oh, but I launched this and it didn't work, and I did that and it didn't work," it's not that it didn't work, they either don't understand the metrics of success.

If you have a waitlist, it only has 20 people on it and you get two, you beat the industry average and you were successful. But if you've been talking about the same service over and over again for 10 months on social media, and no one is signing up, that's a whole different set of problems in your business.

You're going to look at that very differently. If you continue for 10 months to do something that's not working out and you feel bad about it, then you have to question, “Why didn't I try to fix it? Or why did I do a website or why did I do whatever when I should have been focusing on this?”

But it's just kind of something critical to consider as we get into the framework here is that no one thing's going to in your business, but no one thing's going to save it either so you want to at least be doing and paying attention to the things that will generate the most return on your investment in your time.

The lowest risk thing that you can have new ideas about, you can play around with in your business is your messaging. Honestly, I wish more stylists played around with their messaging and sidestepped a lot of the perfectionism that they struggle with.

The key is consistently showing up when it comes to your messaging, never getting it right. Because you can't get it right until you get it wrong and you can't get it right until you have been wrong a whole bunch of times and then people have responded to what does work.

Because it takes so long for people to fully absorb your message and to begin to think more like you, which is what you really want, about their style and what's possible for them. The more you say that in different ways, the more you get sick of your own message, but you keep showing up anyway, the more you're going to end up seeing a return on your marketing investment.

That means you're going to have to play a little bit. That's actually something that I wish more stylists would do. I wish they would get a good idea for their marketing or think of new ways to say things and play in that way in their business. This tends to be the area where I have to push stylists the most and convince them and work to change their outlook around the path that perfectionism is going to be their biggest enemy.

Now I'm not saying you can't have a week where you second-guess yourself, you aren't really sure if this post is perfect, but I mean if it's getting in the way of you being consistent, and that's obviously going to be more than one week, then there's something for you to take a look at there because often when we're not being consistent, we're trying to protect ourselves from something, usually it's, spoiler alert, some fear of rejection, but it's something that has to be overcome whether on a deeper level therapy or even just in a habit making way.

Sometimes we just tell ourselves, “Oh, I'm bad at something,” but we don't really have evidence because we never really tried that hard. With marketing, I would rather you play, I would rather you get it wrong because whatever, your Instagram Stories, you write a slide or you talk to the camera and then it goes away if it doesn't work.

But you genuinely have to do that so often and so consistently and with the same kind of message that if there are other parts of your message you want to be more creative with, and if that's what keeps you consistent with the rest of the messaging that you need to, the same thing over and over, set a different way, then you go, I would love that.

Most provision, the lowest risk for implementing an idea and having an impact on your business is in your marketing, particularly shorter term, Instagram Stories, Instagram grid, TikTok, a newsletter, okay, it doesn't work, keep it moving, it doesn't matter.

That's an area where, honestly, I'd love to see more stylists playing. The next of the creative ideas that you want to just stop for a second and consider in terms of their overall impact on your business are partnerships and hiring.

These are still pretty low-risk. In 99% of the cases that I work with stylists, even people that are starting to build out teams, they're not all full-time, they're not carrying all this health insurance, maybe they're starting to consider it. But there's very low risk for the majority of the people that stylists are hiring in their business.

If it's an assistant, obviously you want to give them the appropriate amount of responsibility, but this doesn't have to be like a marriage. It's not that big of a deal. If you want to hire an assistant or an admin assistant or somebody who can work virtually for you, the best way you can really get the most out of that is to create standard operating procedures and make sure that you're training them.

But if it doesn't work out, then you have that stuff for somebody else. It's not the end of the world, and I think that's something to consider. If there's someplace that you're going to hesitate, I maybe wouldn't be getting help in your business because then it's going to free you up to do other things and things you can only do like generate income with your brand.

The place that I see stylists really not considering, which is kind of messaging, if you're going to go hog wild with an idea, it's often not in two places that would be the least detrimental to their business. It's partnerships, hiring, and messaging.

Sure you can reconsider it or you can take a pause or a beat before you get into it, but I wouldn't hold myself back because when I was talking about making sure that you're doing something from a place that feels good, it feels expansive, these three things should feel expansive to you. Messaging, partnerships, hiring people to help you in your business.

None of those things are super high risk, especially if you're not signing five-year contracts with people. Let's talk about partnerships. The only thing I'll say about partnerships that I would just take 24 hours, 48 hours before I went on and committed, is you just want to make sure that you're doing research on people, especially if you don't know them that well, see if their values align with you by taking a look at their internet footprint.

I think that's really helpful. It's something I should have done in circumstances where I was like, “You know what, I don't know that I really want to be in that world,” or “I don't want my brand associated with that world.” That's something I would consider, even if it's a big name, even if you're like, “Wow, there's so much visibility,” I have had those opportunities and they really weren't worth it.

If I look back on that, mostly because you can be on a podcast or you can teach on someone else's group or you could do an Instagram live with someone, and with time and with repeated relationships with the same type of ideal client, it will definitely have an impact on your brand for sure.

But there's no one partnership that's going to make you or break you or no one podcast episode that you're going to put out that's like the floodgates are going to open. I mean, sure, there are certain things that can be a little bit more helpful, just in terms of the level of visibility you can reach, but nothing's a shoo-in for sure.

If you're thinking about partnerships, just do a quick research, look and see what are the reviews say? Are they involved in anything that doesn't feel like it's a good fit for you and your brand? That's all I would say.

I would also just consider do you have the time to follow through on the commitments of the partnerships? Because some partnerships are so no big deal, really easy breezy, but some of them require a little bit more back and forth or collaboration.

My only thing to consider is that one of the things we talk about a lot in my programs is when is the best season of your business to do certain things. If you get into a partnership with someone when you're not busy, just think about “Is the outline of this partnership, in order for me to stay in integrity with what I promised, is it within reasonable bounds of what I'll be able to follow through on when I'm in a busy season?”

Because sometimes we make commitments when things aren't as busy and then as stylists that have often really high highs and really low lows, we want to fix that. If you're that kind of person still and that kind of a business, I really want you to be careful what you say yes to when it’s low and just make sure it's something you can say yes to when it's not low. That will just help everybody feel super aligned.

Now we're going to get into the top two things that I think are most pump-the-brakes issues in terms of going forward with new ideas. They are the two things that people go forward with the quickest and the fastest. It feels a little bit controversial, but here we are, I'm going to tell you the truth.

The first is changing your established client services. This really does require a good amount of consideration. Now, I'm not saying you can never change your established client services, and I'm not saying you should never change your new client services, which is up next. Not saying that.

I'm saying that the most amount of consideration, the most amount of time to consider, the most amount of weighing, and looking at your business as an ecosystem and then looking at this decision to change the service within that ecosystem, this is the part where it's a lot more risk in terms of what can happen.

Like I said earlier, it's really a lot about stylists not feeling confident because they don't understand that when they have a new decision and there are multiple parts of that decision that have to be carried out in their business, they don't know that. They don't know that in order to make it successful, a whole host of things would have to happen.

My biggest thing I can't stand is seeing you guys lose your confidence over stuff that was just a knowledge gap. That's why I'm talking about this. Changing your established client services, here's the truth about this. It does require careful consideration. It does not require the type of build out that most people do and end up getting frustrated by or just scattering their energy with in order to be successful.

Because you want to be able to answer, “What does this service fulfill for my client? Am I sure that it's something that they need? Have I had conversations in which it was clear that this was the solution to what's next for my client,” which means you need to be in more conversations with your clients if you don't know.

This is why I talk so much about relational selling because you have to have a client-led business to be successful right now, and this is why you don't need huge social media numbers or why lots of people that have huge social media numbers are not making sales because they're not willing to have the conversations and step outside of themselves.

When you're willing to do that, which I think so many stylists, when they become aware of this, are ready to do that, it changes the game. You don't need that much to change your established client services or to offer a new service or to pitch a new service, you just want to make sure before you put up all the scaffolding and all of the behind-the-scenes onboarding and off-boarding—which if you don't have, that's a problem so that's where you should be focusing—before you do all that, you just want to make sure you are clear what need this service fulfills and you want to be sure that this is going to be of interest to the market. That's why you want to touch your clients.

When you know that, then it's like, “Okay, it's worth the time to figure out the marketing because that's always going to be the most important thing,” but you don't have to market that hard to your established clients. There's a couple emails, you can just attach a PDF.

You shouldn't be building out huge sales pages for your established clients stuff, please, that's crazytown. Why? Because 60% of the revenue that most small businesses get is from established clients. There are so many stats. It will always be easier to sell to an established client that had a good experience than a new person fresh off the street that's never worked with you before.

You've already started to mold them into the perspective on style specifically for themselves that you want them to have to be more aligned with you. A new person off the street has to get over so much stuff to start working with you that the established client already has.

Being on the constant new client warpath is costing so many stylists so much easy money. This is why business savvy matters. You're working too hard, most of you. A few conversations and some other strategies can absolutely change your life. Trust me, I know.

You really want to just think twice before you just bust out with all the established client services. But again, if I was going to build out one over the other a new client service or an established client service, nine times out of 10, if the market is there and you have enough established clients after a few years, which you should, I would always put together an established client service before I put together a new one. Period.

I would be real slow. I am real slow to do this. I have rolled out multiple new offers for established clients inside the styling consultancy because I just know what it costs to get new clients and I love getting new clients all the time, that's why I show up here, that's why I have this podcast, that's why I'm in the DMs all day.

I also know that to deliver on the service I want to deliver on, I cannot just be creating new services for the fun of it. So always, always establish clients, even statistics show that over new client services.

Okay, so let's talk about what to think through with a new client service. Again, it's not that you should never do it, but it really can significantly impact your time, your profit, and your confidence if you do not get this right. Getting it right doesn't mean people are just winding up in droves so let's not be super dramatic here. There's not a serious risk.

There's just a really high risk that this is a behavior that's trying to circumvent another skill set that would really help you thrive and actually like your business and feel like more of an expert, have more time and have more money, and actually live the kind of life you wanted when you became a stylist.

There's just a very good chance that you don't know this because I didn't know this. My clients don't know this. I still have group calls with my clients who are shocked when they hear me talk about this.

It's just that getting a new client will be harder and that's why I want more of your time taken up with learning how to market so that it's so easy for you to get new clients and so that you actually can get a waitlist and so you can actually book down, so you can actually plan a vacation without worrying what will happen when I come back if I have no clients.

This has to stop in this community. So creating new services when you don't know how to sell the old services is deeply problematic because no one has tried that service before. It's not the service that's the problem, it's how you are talking about it.

But nobody talks about this because it is easier to give stylists a list of services and be like, “Here you go. This is what all stylists do. All stylists have these three services or these five services,” and nobody talks about what it takes to sell a service, which is why the industry average for income is not as high as it could be or it should be for a luxury market.

I need to be totally straight with you. New client services should have clarity around you know exactly what portion of your ideal client audience you want to serve that your other services don't, you know exactly what features help to get them to the end result of that service, and you're clear where the service fits in the overall ecosystem of your business.

For example, it's a very high ticket service. You're going to have a lot of touchpoints, a lot of steps and a lot of systems to retain a high value, which you should, you should try to attract this client, but that experience is going to take a lot more creation on the back end to deliver than a one-hour, one-off call.

If you do a one-hour one-off call, what are you promising and is it actually even going to get you a repeat client in the future? Just because it's cheaper doesn't mean that it's set up and designed in a way to keep that person who paid $500 in your ecosystem long enough to pay you $2,500 or $5,000.

If the offer doesn't make sense to lead into the next offer, it doesn't matter what the price is. You're just going to spend eight hours on $500 calls, not the worst thing I've ever heard when we could have just figured out how to tweak your messaging and sell your $5,000 offer three times a month.

That seems a better use of eight hours. Just saying, because then you can rinse and repeat it every month. This is why we want believers, not buyers. This is why the way that we spend our time in our business is what gives us the type of business that is going to feel the best, the most expansive.

It's also going to give us more time for more creative partnerships, for potentially hiring new folks to help us with our business. It's going to give us better messaging ideas. We're going to have more time to read content that gets it out there and makes it better.

These are the types of things you want to be thinking about. From lowest risk to highest risk, be most creative with your messaging, your partnerships, and hiring. Then you can start thinking about established client services and then new client services.

If you can answer where these things fall into, especially the established and new client service, where it falls into within these categories, I'm going to give you, there's four, then you're probably good to go. If you can answer these, no problem, you should go ahead on any category, but especially the top two.

Does this decision, this new idea, this goal align with my vision for my brand and my overall goals as to how I want to be seen as a stylist? Number two, does this new idea help me make the financial impact that I want to in my business. Will I actually get closer to my financial goals, even if it means I have to take a little bit more time now to get there, to build this out, because I know I've had conversations with and there's clarity that the market wants this?

Number three, does this support my lifestyle goals? Will this keep me out of being on phone calls nine hours a day when I want to spend more time with my kids? Will this mean I won't have to work the weekends? Will this help me get closer to the kind of life that I want to live while I run this business?

Number four, and this is the most important, number four is the most important, how does this impact my ideal client? How does it help them? How does it get them closer to what they want? How does it build their identity towards someone that has the kind of style they want? How does this impact my ideal client? If you cannot answer that one, it doesn't matter what the other three are because those are about you, not about the most important asset to your business, your client.

Just a reminder that client experience is so critical to your reputation and to getting that repeat client rate that we've talked about so you really want to make sure that you're running it through that four-question framework in order to figure out like, “Okay, I'm on track.”

Just a quick reminder as we wrap up too, that the business you have today is the result of the decisions that you made 90 days ago. So take the time to think through your choices and feel your excitement, journal about it, tell people, talk to people that you trust, and also spend time being excited about your long-term mission, the person you want to be, the impact you want to make, the possibility you could have in terms of income and financial security.

Spend time getting excited about that too because that will also help you make better decisions in the short term when you are panicked about money, when you aren't sure where your next client is going to come from.

If most of us, myself included in plenty of areas of my life, if we spent as much time going towards the skills we need to handle the things that were actually going wrong versus running away from them and distracting ourselves, the problems would be solved so much faster. That has been the hardest thing for me to learn in this business.

I know how tempting it is to want to go to the next thing, but honestly, our brain tells us it's going to be hard to learn marketing. Like, dumber people than you will have to learn how to market their business, why not you? That's how I want you to be using your excitement and your dreaming not just to switch stuff up and cause a drama for no reason in your styling business.

Thank you for tuning in. I hope this framework for decision-making helps you navigate exciting new ideas and also having kind of a boring but seriously money-making business and teaches you how to be even more confident in yourself because you know how to make good decisions for your business. Until next time, keep going, I see you, and I'm proud of you.

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.