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.

Have you ever experienced a season in your styling business where you realize that your marketing isn't attracting clients anymore? This can be incredibly frustrating and confusing, but it's also very, very common. It's a challenge that a lot of stylists I work with face.

Today, I'm here to explain to you why this happens and how you can shift your marketing to get things back on track and start attracting clients. Your marketing not working actually doesn't always mean that you've done something wrong. It's actually often a sign of your growth as a stylist.

Today, we're going to explore the reasons behind this, including how your approach to marketing may need to evolve and the importance of aligning your content with your audience's transformational needs.

Why would your marketing not working actually be a side of your growth? Because marketing strategies that worked for you before are often a marker of a point in time when you were attracting a certain type of client and you were a certain type of business owner as a stylist.

What used to be exciting and energizing in the early stages of your business just may not resonate anymore with you. As a result, it may be impacting how you talk in your marketing and about the process in general of people that are styled by you.

Since business isn't really linear, there are really normal periods of transition that are normal that we really don't talk about enough. I think that this is something that should be normalized because if stylists understand that having the same client, the same business model, and the same pricing forever is actually a sign of stagnation and of lack of growth, then they will look at these periods in their business really differently. It’s actually a sign of being in the game and becoming an expert when your marketing may not be working anymore, and I am going to say this, your actually being consistent.

If you're not being consistent, that's why your marketing isn't working. We don't even have enough information to know why it's not working. That's a whole other episode and I talk about consistency enough that that's obvious. But if you're doing the same types of things and all of a sudden people aren't reaching out anymore, there's something to take a look at. One of the biggest reasons I see this happening that is so hard for you to see when you're in it, but not so hard to see when I am working with stylists, is that their new kid energy has faded.

Honestly, this “new kid energy”—it’s just a phrase I came up with—can even start to fade a couple of years in. That's usually when I see it. It's usually around the point where a couple of years into being a business owner, maybe you've been a stylist for a while, or maybe you did a part-time and the part-time work really filled your schedule because you had other things you were doing, maybe you had another job or you had little kids or whatever the reason was but now you're like, “I'm going all in. I'm going full-time,” and you're ready and all of a sudden the things that worked before didn't.

Sometimes it's that when you're in those earlier stages of your business or maybe you've been at it full-time for a couple of years, you are still new and excited. You have new kid energy, you show up with this fresh excitement, and you post content that reflects your newfound identity as a stylist. This can really carry you far.

It will also over time attract a type of client that's probably a good fit for you because of where you are. When you evolve as a stylist, if you don't course correct, you will start to leave people behind. If you don't level up into a new client, then things will get really stagnant in your business.

When you start to face some of the day-to-day realities of running a business and that new kid energy fades, you are probably going to see that your marketing fails a little stale, or maybe you feel a little disconnected from your marketing because you went into the business very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and very positive and very excited.

Honestly, the more confident you become and the more skilled you become, you often will start to doubt yourself more because you just know what you don't know all of a sudden. Whereas when you're just starting out, you're like, “Oh my gosh, everything's so exciting.” Maybe you can't even believe people pay you to be a stylist or that anyone would that's not a family member. As you begin to face the realities of how hard it is to run a styling business, you're going to come up against some mental stuff.

I say this all the time. What happens is when stylists were in the beginning, maybe they were sharing a lot of outfit links or they were talking about their own outfits a lot, as they evolve—and we'll talk about in a second—as the client evolves that they start to want to work with, those two things aren't going to match.

The way that you're marketing as a newbie stylist and the way that you are able to even show client results or client testimonials may not match up with your messaging anymore. Instead of seeing it as a failure or a problem, I want you to think about this as an opportunity for you to learn how to evolve your messaging as you evolve as a professional.

Really, it takes a lot of reps of working with people who are not friends and family, people you don't know, people you have no common ground with as a stylist, and charging them real money in order to start to get what is required of you in order to make this a serious enterprise.

This period can go on for a very long time. It can be years, depending on how all-in people are in their business. People can come to me and say, “Oh, I've been a stylist for so long. It makes no sense that this isn't working,” but they haven't really been all-in on their business.

They've been doing it part-time. They are prioritizing other things above the business. They are taking the summer off, they're not showing up consistently. Maybe they have another job. Maybe they've decided that family life is coming first.

Whatever that be, you have to be honest with yourself. Are you all in on the business? If you're not and your marketing stops working, that's part of the reason. Because as you get more experienced and you get more experience talking about things, people will start to tune out if you're not evolving in your messaging.

The first thing you can do is really sit down after you get to a point, maybe where you notice, “Okay, my new kid energy maybe has faded. Maybe I am a little bit more of a seasoned pro than I'm giving myself credit for. I've just experienced a lot more. Maybe my self-doubt has increased,” now you have to sit down, you have to think to yourself, “Do I want to go forward as a transactional stylist or a transformational stylist?”

If you go back to old episodes, I'll have it linked in the show notes about the difference between these two types of styling, but this is one of the unspoken reasons why a lot of stylists struggle with their marketing. Because when you understand the client identity that you really want to work with, you will start to see that the way your messaging in the past may not work for the type of client that you really ultimately want now that you have more experience under your belt.

This happens with stylists who are very experienced and were doing really well, but because of things I talked about in earlier episodes about how the market has changed since COVID and how people look at personal stylists and what they expect from them, you'll also see that audiences have just burned out as a result of seeing so much clothing content and seeing stylists that are acting like influencers—no shade to influencers as I always say here—but that is going to mean that they'll just go to the influencer who's free for the links if you're behaving in the same way as an influencer.

When you understand the identity of the client that you want to work with, you will be in much greater control of your marketing messaging and getting results from that messaging. When I'm creating a marketing strategy for my clients, either one-on-one or when we're working together in my Income Accelerator, I am always focused on the client that they want to work with, identity. I act as the client in my responses to their marketing and their messaging or in my feedback to them.

What do people who want a transformation, who want to be a partner with a stylist, that's a very different experience from people who want you to just drop some links or bring them some clothes and not talk about their identity, that's transactional., what do people who want a real transformation need to hear in your marketing? Because there are two types of stylists, there are two different types of marketing strategies. There's a transactional styling marketing strategy and there's a transformational.

The services you have, the experience you want to provide, and the people's identity that you want to speak to, when it comes to your ideal client, need to all work together. Transactional marketing is quick at the service level. It's like, “Here's a shirt I love. Here's where you can buy it. Here's what I wore today.”

Nothing that goes back to the client, nothing that goes back to the client identity of the person that's watching it, no way for that person to take what you're giving to them and think about something more deeply for themselves or create an experience for themselves or even to evaluate like, “Do I like that shirt or am I just buying it because she's wearing it?”

This is the kind of content that doesn't really get you clients especially as your prices get higher. What happens often, people raise their prices but they don’t raise their marketing standards as they do that. The reason why transactional marketing works really well in the early stages is that your prices are usually low and the commitment required from the client because the price point is smaller.

Maybe you just have a series of very small packages, that is like a one-off and you're letting the client choose their own adventure. That's totally fine, but that is going to give different energy than, “Here is a transformational all-in kind of package where you're going to get me for three to six weeks and we're going to go all in.”

However your services grow in value and price, your audience need to get information from you and get an experience from you in your marketing that grows with the value. They need to understand the “why” behind what you do. They don't just want the links because the investment is too big.

Clients who are looking for a transformation don't just want a cute outfit. They want an outfit that reflects who they are becoming. Transformational marketing speaks to the identity of the client and helps them connect their external appearance with their internal goals, and it signals that you are the right guide, the person they can trust to help them do that.

One common mistake is showing things like testimonials or posting content without any context. Because what happens is stylists start to get more experience, they start to say, “Oh, I have client testimonials. I'm going to share it,” but they're very flat, they're very one-dimensional, and they don't really give the person that's reading it or watching it the ability to step into the shoes of the person who they're reading the quote or the testimonial from because they don't know where that person's coming from emotionally and psychologically.

They don't know what kind of life they have. They don't know anything about where they started. Maybe that person had a good style. Maybe the person watching it thinks my style is probably too behind to get the transformation they're talking about. Without any context to certain things like the outfit posts that you link or the testimonials that you give, you're providing a transactional marketing message, but hoping people are going to pay a transformational price.

What happens is you end up getting stylists who are posting things like a testimony from a client that says, "I got so many compliments on my new outfits that so and so made for me." But that doesn't help the person that wants to hire you next understand how you're going to transform their confidence or get them any type of compliments or make them feel like they can step into that experience.

Instead, you really want to work on providing deeper stories, deeper context to the outfits that you share of yourself. How can a client use maybe how you thought through your outfit that morning to think about or evaluate if that's something that they would want to wear if you're providing a link? I'm not against you providing a link, but it needs to be in service of something deeper and your clients having an original thought about that item. It cannot just be, "Oh, this stylist wore this, so I will wear this."

Again, really good transformational stylists don't do this. I see very few people that I really consider in the game to be excellent transformational stylists doing this. This is a given, but it's when you're going from that newbie new kid energy into a more experienced stylist that I see that's getting lost in translation because people are thinking, “Well, it always worked for me before. Why doesn't it work now?”

It's also because you're probably giving off expert energy, but your content is like 20 steps behind you. All of it has to go together. It really can be problematic. Again, I don't care how long you've been styling, I care about how long you have been applying that consistently to a styling business and acting like a business person in your day-to-day life.

Because if you start and stop all of the time, you will be stuck in this period of like, “Why aren't things working all of a sudden for a very long time?” That has an enormous impact on stylist confidence. We don't need that. These things are normal. The question is, “How quickly are you going to go all in on the business to fix it?” That is really it.

A lot of that means a lot less work than people think. They just have to stop, sit down, and create a strategy and a plan because if you keep doing the things that you were doing before and they're not working, that is literally the definition of insanity and we ain’t doing that around here. Nobody has time for that, people need you.

Really thinking about “Am I providing context for the transformation that I want to and am capable of giving people in my marketing? Am I going a little bit deeper so people can figure out if I am the right guide for them?”

Let's talk about some strategies beyond what I've just shared to help you think about ways to get things back on track. One of the first things I tell a lot of the stylists that I work with is how can we reinvigorate your marketing with your purpose?

Again, if you're in this period where no matter how many years your new kid energy or your excitement for this career has kind of waned because the reality of running a business has hit, this happens across the board with all creative entrepreneurs, you are not special. You are not different. Nothing has gone wrong. This is not a sign to tap out. It's a sign that you've been in the game and you're actually cultivating your expertise. That's the first thing I want you to understand.

The second thing is that may mean that you have to retap into your purpose as a stylist because what happens is you may have started your business for one reason. If I see one more About page from a stylist that says something like, “I wanted to style since I was nine,” no one cares about what you wanted, we need to know why you want to help other people with style.

Because that probably didn't start when you were nine. What is your grown-up reason for being here and being a guide to other people? That's what true experts are able to talk about. You may need to re-tap into why you're doing this now.

I knew over my 14 years as a stylist and even now when I look at the industry, my why has not really changed even though I'm not a stylist anymore, but the depth of my why has changed now that I have a daughter and I think about all of the head trash.

I heard women talking about in their closets and in dressing rooms over the years and how I want to create a legion, an army of stylists that come through the styling consultancy that help one woman at a time rewrite or at least quiet or at least quell some of that head trash so that they can go out in the world and not let that be a distraction. I certainly want to do it as a mother, but the ability and the possibility of helping other stylists help even more women do that is what gets me up every day.

I always had visibility. I thought that because I started when I was in PR and I helped women that were professors at Harvard University go on television, that was actually one of my jobs back before I was a stylist, I would style them because I was in communications. It was just like, “Oh, you have nothing to wear or you're not going to go on camera because you feel bad about yourself today?” That was one of the things that triggered my decision to be a stylist. I wanted women to have more visibility.

That why continues to stay with me. It wasn't really because I wanted to be a stylist, if I'm being honest. It was for the visibility and styling was the way to get there for me. That's just my story. That's still there for sure.

It's even deeper now as I work with stylists and as I was trying to become a mother, it became clear to me that it would be amazing and almost miraculous, I think, kind of, if I could help be a part of a society where women could to these experts who are other women and they would experience a whole different world than they met on the outside where they could actually be like, “Oh, there's a whole experience for me where I don't have to hate my body to fit in, where that doesn't have to be the conversation, where I could show up somewhere and people could clap for me because I look good instead of feeling like I have to shrink.”

That is the reality and the world that I want to be a part of creating. I think most of the stylists I work with do too. If that's you and you want something like that or body acceptance is important to you or you have this deeper why, first of all, you have to talk about it in your marketing. Stop hiding it. Nobody cares about you liking styles since you were seven. Talk about the things people really care about.

But also you may have to keep re-anchoring and re-reminding yourself why you do this. I know I have, especially when your marketing starts to lag. I have experienced this in both of my businesses. It happened. It's normal. The more you can get fired up again about your purpose and your connection to styling beyond the clothes and beyond the word confidence, your internal landscape should not have the word confidence in it at all.

You should have such specific examples in order to stay anchored to your "why" that have nothing to do with the word confidence, that you can just tap into that when you start to feel discouraged or when no one is clapping for you on the outside. That takes a little work. I'm not going to lie to you.

I do this exercise often and I know as soon as I start to feel like, "Ooh, maybe I'm not getting the results I want," I get right back on the horse and I sit down with myself and I think, "What is my deeper purpose? What is my why? How can I say it to myself in a different way? How can I give myself a different angle? How many ways can I think about the way this impacts the daily life of the stylist that I work with, but of their clients?" Because if my stylists show up better, the world gets better. Period.

I have to be the generator of that experience. That's how I think about my business. When you can think of it that way, you will be in a whole different headspace to create content and it will be way more powerful and you will stop thinking about what's happening to you in your business and instead think about what you can do for your business and for the people that it touches even if they never hire you. That is expertise. That is being the leader. That is being a businesswoman or man. Period. That is one of the first pieces of advice I would give you.

The second piece of advice is really just looking and sitting down and looking at your own content and saying, “Did I get way too transactional here when I was promising a transformation?” I see this with stylists.

This is probably the thing that is the hardest to get people to leave behind is because I think, and this to me really is the sign of a true expert, a true expert in the styling industry is willing to sacrifice some of the comfort in the admiration and the likes and the validation that they get from the links, the tips, and the tricks that do not lead to sales because sales and how much money you bring in is a direct correlation to the level of transformation.

Why? Because people that pay a lot of money or pay a significant amount or pay in a way that can actually allow you to survive, truly value it. I'm not saying people can't get value out of styling services that don't make an investment, but the depth of the price reflects the depth of the desire of the client.

Those two things are connected. The more you have people walking around in the world and outfits you created for them that they are so committed to because they're committed to something bigger than the clothes—which is usually the secret—when you have that, you can look in the mirror and say, “I'm really doing it. I'm really walking the walk. I'm not just running a little styling business. I am changing lives,” so you need to make sure that that is your desire.

Now, if it's not your desire, we need to talk about that. That is perfectly fine. There are some stylists that—and I have spoken to several lately—who really want to be more in the transactional world. They want to show their outfits. They want to give outfit guides with links, which can be transformational if you do it, but they don't want to give the education behind it, they want to show you what they are wearing every day without making it about the person watching and that's fine, but what you're going to attract is people that want to look like you, not people that want a transformation, and that is perfectly morally acceptable.

That is a neutral situation. That is not a moral problem. But you cannot also say that you're here to change people's lives and help them step into their own style if that's how you're operating because nothing is showing me that you're here for them, it's showing me that you're here to provide links to look like you for them. Again, not a problem. There are a billion people or more in the world—I probably should have looked that up before I made this comment, but you get the point—there are a lot of people in the world, everybody gets to do this the way that they want to.

It's simply a matter of the fact that if you're promising a transformation, and you're slipping it into your marketing, and you're saying, “I'm going to change the way you feel about yourself,” but you're only showing me things that relate to you, there's no evidence for anybody to hire you to be their guide. There's just not enough.

The trust that is involved in being a transformational stylist between the client and the stylist is so big, I think that most stylists are on autopilot and they are not giving the proper attention to that factor in their marketing when they're just coming up with whatever. If they were, they would be being a lot more strategic in what they say, because it would be so much bigger than them that an outfit link all the time constantly would not let them sleep at night because they would know it just wasn't good enough.

Again, transactional personal styling has a place, it looks a lot more like influencing, and that is a business model. It's not the business model I teach. It's not the business model I must stand for, but I'm morally neutral towards it. It's fine. This is where I think a lot of stylists don't sit down and think, “Okay, how am I acting such that it's not working?” What I hear a lot of stylists say is “My audience just isn't there. People just aren't buying. It's the election. It's the economy. It's whatever,” when I have all these other people over here that actually are making money and are making huge impact on people.

The difference is people that blame outside circumstances don't look at their own behavior so they can get better as experts. That's just the truth of it. If you are unwilling to slow down and to try new things and be uncomfortable, because we're always uncomfortable when we do something new, then maybe transformational styling isn't right for you and you should try to shift your marketing to more transactional so that the market and what you're saying can meet and you can find the right client for you.

Another thing that happens during this period is a lot of stylists begin to doubt themselves and they start to notice places where they don't think they're as good as other stylists or they get a little in their head. What I want you to consider here is that you need to be able to differentiate in your own head between, are you not good at certain things? I'm just going to use a really simple example. I hate closet edits. Someone would say to me, I did too, honestly, so I'd be like, “Okay, well, why don't we just do a closet review with clients instead of a full closet edit?”

There's a whole thing. I teach people about that. But whatever it is you don't like in the business once you got a lot of experience, nine times out of 10, there's a way we can actually make that your edge. It can actually be a positive, not just a negative.

But so many stylists spend time comparing themselves to other people that it slows them down and instead of sharpening the edges that make them different and unique by honoring their preferences as a stylist and figuring out other ways to get their client the result that they need to get in order to fulfill their word, they doubt themselves, they don't sharpen their point of view, they water themselves down, they continue to compare themselves and it just leaks their energy.

This is what I was saying at the top of the episode when I said your new kid energy has worn off. Even if you're not a new kid, it could just be your excitement, your enthusiasm, your passion. It just can't flourish when you're comparing yourself to other people and you're making yourself wrong for things that are actually the result of you getting better.

Because as you get better, if you are not thinking of ways to make the service better, to make the client experience more elite, to shave things out that are just a waste of everybody's time, or you start to get to know your market like I did, and I had clients that were so together and so high-performing and functioning, they already had hired an organizer, or they had someone that helped them with all this.

If they didn't have pieces in their closet that they didn't like anymore, there was a standard at a certain point in my career that I was calling in people that had standards for themselves that were so high that just wasn't a thing that they did. If they did, it was the rare person and it wasn't a big deal to do it for them.

I was calling in people and it became clear they did not need a closet edit, it was a waste of everybody's time, so I just cut it. If I kept doing that with people and wasting their time, then that would have been a sign that I was not growing as an expert. There's some version of this with you and your business that after you've been in the game for a while, you need to stop and look at.

Instead of making that a problem, make it something you're proud of that now you know enough about this industry to have opinions. Now you have enough information about the people you want to serve to make things better. If it looks different than someone else, oh well, because nobody truly knows what happens between the stylist and their client behind closed doors anyways.

Trust me, whatever you're seeing on people's websites, they ain't doing it most of the time, so don't worry about that. Stay in your own lane and sharpen your perspective, sharpen your message, don't water it down. That is going to be so, so helpful in these periods when you notice things aren't working.

Last, I just want to remind you that you just might not be asking for the sale. This is something that even I notice in my own content, and I have a very clear sales cycle in my business, and I have very clear messaging, and I have people that come to me at all different points, whether I'm launching or I'm not launching, because I'm so consistent in this podcast, but you still need to ask for the sale, and you need to ask for the sale in a way as you develop your own confidence as a person that sells publicly, because that's what marketing is, it's selling publicly.

Whether you're selling the idea or the identity or that someone should hire you, there's a million ways you're making a sale as a stylist in your content, whether you realize it or not. When you get good at selling in a way that reflects value, that actually the person can feel like you gave them the opportunity to work with you and you have shown them and shifted them in some way that they got value from that sales message, your whole life changes.

This is why I am so committed to teaching personal stylists through my business because transformational stylists have to sell so much more than transactional stylists in the sense that you really need to get people in the right mental space and in a healthy identity space in order to get the best experience for them.

That means you have to sell a lot of different mental and identity shifts in your marketing in order to get the sale. When you do that, everything changes for you. But if you're not saying, “And you can hire me, and if you want this,” then you're not selling. People are not so smart, or not so tuned in or dialed into your marketing that they're just going to figure it out.

Some people will and those will be people that are much closer to a buying decision than somebody who's still trying to figure that out. What we want is our content to take them closer to a buying decision, whether that's a yes or a no in our content. If this is stuff you want to learn, get on the waitlist for the next Income Accelerator because it is absolute gold when you know this and it changes your whole life.

But in the meantime, do look over your content and say, “Am I ever asking for the sale,” particularly in videos that you are talking in. If you are putting in at the bottom of an Instagram post, for example, at the bottom of a caption, people don't see the majority of your Instagram posts. You're probably not really selling if that's where you're doing it.

But if you are doing face to cam and you are not mentioning your offers and you're not weaving into the conversation in some way, you're not selling and you might not even know it. That's something for you to do a little bit of an audit of your content with and take a look.

All of these things are really the mark of a pro. When things aren't working, it is not necessarily because you are a failure. If that's how you look at your business, I want to invite you to look at it differently because all it's doing is slowing you down and it's not a reflection of reality.

True experts, true pros, people that are fully, fully, fully invested in the experience of transformational styling are people that have to grow with their business just like you want your clients to grow. The mark of transformational styling is growth for the stylist, for the person getting styled, and for the business model as a whole.

Now that doesn't mean chaos all the time or making decisions that require us to constantly be changing things, but growth is also uncomfortable. You need to stay actually with something long enough to become truly great at it. That's something I work on every day. In my opinion, no podcast is good enough, no Instagram post is good enough. I am always looking to get better and that's why I am coached and why I invest so much money in being better because I can't be a leader for other people if I'm not invested in being better.

I have to be bad to get better and you have to be bad to get better too. That's the game we're all playing as transformational service providers. Just be willing to gently look over what you've done in the past and reflect. Are you maybe not bringing your messaging with you as your expertise is developing? Because if that's the case, how very normal and human and what an opportunity for you to switch your view from nothing is working to, “Wow, I am growing and I can't wait to step into the next version of myself and bring my marketing with me.”

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.