PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Welcome to a fresh episode of the podcast. You're tuning into an episode in our special end-of-the-year series where we're taking a deep dive into the health of your personal styling business. In these four episodes, we'll explore how to assess key areas of your business, including your business model, your pricing, your marketing, and your sales skills in order to identify what's working, what's not, and where to make shifts for major growth and success in 2025.

But a quick heads up before we dive into today's episode. This series was created for personal stylists running transformational personal styling businesses, where the focus isn't just on helping a client buy some new clothes or do a one-off styling service, but on guiding them through a deep identity-based style journey.

Whether you're already thriving and have six figures or beyond, or you're feeling a little stuck, these episodes will provide clarity, perspective, and actionable steps to ensure your business supports the life you want and the client you love. Let's get into it.

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 back to the podcast. Today we are diving into another episode of this special series, Profit Power Moves, a six-figure business audit for transformational stylists. In this series, we've been exploring key areas of your business to help you assess what's working and what's not so you can bring in some serious growth in the new year.

Today's episode is a big one, perhaps the most anticipated topic because we're talking about why your marketing might not be turning followers into paying clients. Also works for subscribers, and works for your newsletter, anywhere you're showing up, you're giving talks about why that might not be generating leads for your business.

Let me guess, you're putting in the work, you're showing up on social media, you're sending out that newsletter diligently, and maybe you are growing your audience, even if it's slowly. But when it comes to booking clients, something is not clicking. If that sounds like you, definitely stick around because we're going to impact why the gap between marketing and sales exists in many stylist businesses, especially for those of you who are running transformational personal styling businesses.

I'm here to share some actionable steps to help you close the gap and start converting your followers into high-paying clients. Ready? Let's dive in. First, let's start by looking at how transformational marketing differs from transactional marketing and why this distinction is so critical.

If you're offering transactional personal styling services, your marketing can focus more on specific task-oriented outcomes. Clients know they need a shopping session or a closet edit and they're probably looking for something quick and convenient. In this case, your marketing might emphasize the speed, efficiency, and immediate value of those quick wins.

But if you're transformational as a stylist, you're offering something a little bit deeper, often much deeper. You're helping your clients connect their personal style with their identity and guiding them through a journey of self-expression, self-discovery, and longer-term personal growth.

Your work isn't just about the clothes. Of course, they're an important part of the equation, sure, but it's about aligning your client's external appearance with who they are on the inside and who they aspire to be. The clothes become a tool for that transformation to take place and if you're transformational, you're offering something that needs to speak to the deeper transformation in your marketing, which can be hard to do.

I totally understand that and really this is why when you are a transformational stylist in some ways for a little while until you master marketing, your marketing kind of becomes your main gig, your main job. Once you master it, once you really get good at it, it doesn't burn you out anymore.

I think that's one of the things I see with stylists, they're a little bit like, "I've tried all the things. I don't want to keep learning more about marketing. I just have to market myself forever. I just want to give up." But when you know how to market your business and you know what to say that leads to sales, it doesn't feel the way that marketing the way your marketing now does.

It almost feels like a completely different situation. It feels like a whole new relationship with your business. Because ultimately, that is what stylists get frustrated by; the relationship, the doing things that aren't working in their marketing is creating between them and their business.

I'm telling you, the more you think of your business as a relationship you have, the more knowing what the right next step is for you to fix everything in order to feel good in it so that you can earn money becomes clear. Because the clients you want aren't just looking for new clothes or the latest trends, which is why sometimes when we don't know what to post and we go for trend posts or we go for attacking trends, you're talking about something that a lot of styling clients, they're just not even aware of.

They have no idea what you're even talking about because they're not even spending time caring about those things. Stylists are because that's what you guys care about. You're looking at clothes, you're looking at what's in season, you're looking at all that stuff. That's great. I'm not saying you shouldn’t. You need to educate yourself. You need to even talk about that stuff.

But it's really important to do it for a dialogue place instead of this concept of like, “You need trends,” or, “Trends are bad,” or, “You shouldn't have trends.” It needs to be from more of a dialogue place where you're clear what your audience and the people you want to work with, what is their stance on trends? Are they busy executives that literally don't even know what's in style and that's exactly why they want to pay you?

This is where the transformational aspect of your marketing is so deeply informed by the identity of your client, which is why it's so much easier to be a marketer when you do transformational styling if you learn the skill. Because you have such a deep understanding of your clients, it starts to just flow out of you.

The thing that's hardest to remember sometimes when you feel like you're at a loss for marketing materials when your business has been a little bit slow is that you're not actually marketing the styling. You're marketing an experience that helps people feel more aligned and authentic in themselves.

The stories that you tell have to reinforce that. Of course, you can mention the clothes but it has to come at it from that angle if you want to be successful. If your marketing is focused on how much time you're saving people, how many compliments your clients are getting, that kind of thing, that's externally led.

That's something that's not going to make someone who wants this deep transformation that's super connected to self-growth, changing, and becoming the next version of themselves because they're not doing it for the compliments. They're likely not doing it to save time because they view where they put their time if they're a growth-oriented individual into what they value.

Doing something fast does not equate to this group of people who want a transformational stylist as high value. It doesn't mean they want it to go on forever, it doesn't mean they want to be inefficient, but it does mean that they expect, and this is great for stylists too, because now you have people that are full partners in the relationship, which is what you need to be successful, you have people that expect they're going to put their time into it.

Your marketing has to reflect that. It has to almost program people to either be attracted to that type of way of looking at the styling process or repel them. This isn’t something that requires you to be really controversial or anything like that. It's just, you say something like, "The best clients for me tend to look at styling as XYZ."

You're literally just putting it out there that if you want the best results working with me, this is who I'm a good fit for. That's something stylists are not willing to do because they're not willing to toe the line enough. Again, not in an offensive way, but just in a direct way, they tend to just not attract anyone.

Speaking of this, do you know if your marketing is speaking to the right people? The first step is to audit your content. Take a look at what you are currently putting out there. Is it focused on immediate outcomes like a new outfit? Or how quickly this is being turned around or the quick, fast win and the compliments that a client got.

Those are fine once in a while, but if that's the majority of your marketing, it's not going to work well. If you look and on the flip side of that, you see that you're reflecting the long-term transformation that you help your clients achieve, that you are talking about the conversations you're having before you're shopping, not just showing people the outfits, you're not just showing me a picture of a dressing room and being like, “Shopping today,” I mean, that's fine in stories, but am I seeing where that person started from emotionally and where they ended when they're in that fabulous outfit that you're either showing me in their lookbook or showing me a picture of or however you're demonstrating me after?

The thing is, in order to even get to the position to feel like they're ready to buy the clothes and invest in you and do all of the things it would take in order to get their style put together, people have to feel seen, understood, and empowered by your content.

They have to feel like you are the guide to get them from where they are and their identity and their outfits to where they want to be. They're looking for someone to help them express who they are on a deeper level through their style. But if your marketing isn't addressing those emotional needs, and I'm just seeing some photos of you shopping or a rack of clothes, then we're missing the mark in terms of what people need to see in order to go through with the sale.

Here's a really good question to ask yourself: Does your content show the value of the long-term transformation, not just the conveniences that styling offers your clients? Again, those things are good, but we tend to attract people that are the wrong fit. If we want to go deeper, we want to charge more, and we want to get the kind of client who's going to talk to us, this is a critical part of choosing to be a transformational stylist, you earn more, you have deeper clients, you keep your clients longer, and the cost of that is that you have to do a little bit more thinking, if I'm going to be totally transparent here.

This is not the type of field if you want to be like, "I just like cute outfits and I just want people to look good for brunch. I don't quite care what the deeper conversation is,” then this is probably not for you. That's totally okay. There are still other types of business models that are a good fit for people who are in that world.

I've helped many stylists build that. But this conversation is really for the stylists who I see want and crave and have these deep relationships with their clients and they are creating amazing work.

They're undervaluing their prices, they're not keeping clients as consistently because they're being so timid in their follow-up and in their sales strategies, and in general, they are not making the level of impact on people's lives that they could be because they don't have some of the skills that they are completely capable of having.

These are some stylists who are already at six figures, but they're still keeping it very high level, very transactional, and again, that is fine, but the business model is burning them out. It's just really important to remember that the higher the price, the more transformational people are expecting, and that doesn't mean inefficient, it means efficient and deep. Both things are possible.

Are you positioning yourself as someone who can help clients discover their personal style in a way that aligns with their values and aspirations? Or are you just promoting the next shopping trip? Or are you just showing me behind the scenes and not helping me in any way get who the behind-the-scenes is of what you're shopping for, what the lookbook is about, and who the person is behind that so that I can know as a potential client if you and I are going to be a good match?

When your content services on surface-level outcomes, it's really time to shift gears, especially if you're not earning what you want to be. You have to learn to speak to your clients' deeper desires, the ones that may not even be fully realized yet, and they have, and maybe they don't even want to say out loud.

For example, I work with a lot of stylists who work with women who are in menopause and perimenopause. Do you know what the thing is? We were just talking about this in the Income Accelerator the other day. It was such a powerful conversation and a couple of stylists went and created amazing content out of this conversation.

It was just so moving. One of the stylists in there was saying she's not really sure how to speak to issues around perimenopause and how clients feel because a lot of women will hire a stylist at that point and it's not that they're held back by their weight.

They may not like the weight gain but they're not going to let it stop them because they're in their 40s or 50s, and they know, they've gone through that cycle of gaining and losing weight, they know how to do it, and they're either just like, "It's not the right time right now," or whatever, they're trying to figure it out, and they're not going to let themselves suffer on the way there.

But there's still something missing in the conversation we were talking about. The irony is this stylist was in that age group, I am in that age group, multiple stylists in there, we're in the age group of women that are in menopause. This is a good example of how we know, especially as transformational stylists, that we actually know what to say, but we step over it.

Some of that is because we are shut down as people. We are not tapping into our own human experience and bringing it to our marketing, not in a way that's overly fake, deep, and inappropriate online. I'm not saying to be fake authentic or bring things that are personal to the internet, I would never tell you that, but you can still borrow your own experience in your 40s and 50s, in your content. You don't have to say it's about you, but there's a depth of understanding you have that's very different when you've gone through something in your style or you've experienced it than if you're helping people that you've never experienced before.

I'm not saying you can't help them, I'm just saying it's a different level of depth. What we were talking about is a really real conversation about our own experiences of your body changing and the way that you feel mentally when you deal with brain fog, you deal with having a hard time as I stumble to get my words out, which is a hard time with your memory and making sure that you are putting your thoughts together and making sure that you have everything you need in a day because it feels like you don't have the mental capacity that you did before and doctors have talked about why this happens to the hormones.

But these are really serious life things. On top of the sort of mental and cognitive things that happen to women at that age, yes, your body changes, but it's not just that you gain weight, you gain weight often in places that you never have before. You have to figure out your body in a different way versus, “You know what, the same 10 pounds that come and go, I kind of have a sense of what shapes work.”

All of a sudden now the same shapes of clothing don't work anymore. You're at a point in life where you have the most responsibility, you probably have kids, you probably have aging parents, you probably have friends who are going through divorces, and people are dealing with illnesses. You're at a serious life stage.

We're not in college anymore. You have all of these things. Then on top of it, you have the fact that around your 40s, society really starts to talk about, particularly depending on the circles you're in, I've edited all my social media so I'm not around this anymore, but some people don't even think to do that where women are diminished because they're no longer considered as attractive or as important or whatever or as desirable.

That is a real loss for many, many women who don't know how to work on themselves and change their view of what's happening to them. I have spent a lot of years working on that way before I turned 40 because I knew it was coming because of being a stylist for decades.

Because of that, I knew that I had to change the way I consumed media, who I talked to about things, and the kind of women I looked up to. But many of your clients don't know that. When we talk about, for example, transformational marketing to this group of people—this is just an example niche that I'm talking about today, but it can really apply to any of the niches you work with—it's important for you to be thinking about the different factors that are hitting someone at the stage of life they're in when they hire a stylist because that is how you get to the crux of the marketing that makes the difference.

What I just did and laid out for you there was I talked about the cognitive load, the body changes, the societal view, and the self-perception. Those are four different angles you could talk about with women going through perimenopause if that is a group of people that you often work with.

It's weird because even if you're in the situation and you are in that stage of life yourself, you will feel at a loss to talk about it because your brain doesn't want to do the hard work. This is why most stylists don't realize, as I didn't even realize this about marketing until I started working with my current coaches, is that it would be really easy for me to give up on content at certain times when I felt like I wasn't getting it right right away.

But that just means you're probably grappling with an idea that actually matters. That's what transformational content requires of people until they get it down in order to really start converting to sales. If you were the kind of stylist who could talk through all of those points really elegantly and create an argument for your services being the answer to all of those facets of what somebody goes to, that's like five posts, four posts.

That's a bunch of content right there. If you could then relate it back to your services in a way that really made a difference to the person reading that or watching that, thinking, "Wow, she really gets me," you wouldn't have sales problems. This is why there's a gap between our messaging and our sales, often not because stylists don't have everything they need, that's specifically why I work with established stylists because they're the ones that are the most tired and they're also the ones that have all the answers to their own problems.

They just need a framework to take what they have done, to have somebody tell them, "Hey, you're doing a great job. Let me talk you through how to go in there and mine the gold and get rid of the crap.” That is the secret because all of you who have stayed in the game and kept at it have what you need.

Now the decision is, do you want to take a little rest, go a little deeper, and learn how to speak this way to people so that, again, once it's a skill, I just literally did that off the top of my head, I coach people through this type of thing every single day in my programs.

Not because I was a genius at this right out the gate, guys, exactly because I wasn't and it took me years to get it and now I can teach the stylist so much faster because I can adapt what I've learned from other industries to you and to what you experience with clients because the greatest thing about having a transformational styling business is that people are willing and excited to tell you what they need to hear to hire you and then you can apply it to other new clients later on.

Sometimes there are points when it feels super, super easy, almost to the point where it's like cheating. When I learned this, I honestly kept myself in content purgatory for a while because I thought it couldn't be that simple. But it is. It's really just a skill like any other skill.

Unfortunately, so many stylists have told themselves the story that are established that there's really nothing that I can do because I don't want to live that life of constantly just turning out content. I don't like how it feels. It's not the kind of business I want to run. So they don't go all in.

What they're avoiding is learning a skill that makes the way you market and how you feel about your marketing completely different. It's not even a concern anymore that I have. I used to spend hours dreading posting things, I used to delete my stories, and I used to re-record all my podcasts.

I'm not saying I never re-record a podcast, I have my days for sure, but they're days, they're not weeks, they're not months, they're not obsessive thought loops anymore because I just understand and have capped myself in a place in all of my clients there here when they're having a hard time of like, “Focus on the people that we're here to serve and then you can get yourself out of that space and get yourself into really, really great content that converts super fast.” Another great way besides really digging into the life experiences we just went into with that perimenopause group is to talk about your client stories and your testimonials in a way that aren't just quotes up on the screen.

I get it. I've done it too. 100% guilty. Been there, done that. But when you're sharing more case study like testimonials, this doesn't have to be all that deep or all that hard, but it does make a big difference in the person that's watching that testimonial being able to know if your services are right for them.

Talk about how your clients felt about themselves and how they interacted with the world before working with you. Where were they unsure of themselves to show up? Where were they second-guessing their outfits? Where was it particularly hard? In what context of their life was it particularly hard for them to feel like they were showing up as their best self? Why did that matter to them?

How did your work together change their confidence or the way that they approached their style? Were there skills that they got? Because I think a lot of stylists think if they teach people skills in their styling sessions, they won't come back, but that's actually not true.

It's often that some people, particularly people that are very high fact finders, these are the people that really need the details, they read the whole sales page, and they ask you a lot of little minutia-type questions, which are honestly totally legitimate, but on a sales call, some people will never ask you, "Well, what days do you do appointments?” They'll just hire you.

The high fact-finder person is going to ask you the specifics of what days, what hours, and all these things before they sign. That's how you know they're a high fact-finder. That person, for example, is probably going to have a situation where if they understand why you're giving them a specific color or specific cut of clothing, if you explain it to them—which is really the heart of transformational styling—they're going to integrate the style that you're giving them into their lives way more quickly and feel better about their investment in working with you.

Share situations where you do have a high fact-finding client and you can say, "Hey, so-and-so really enjoyed learning how to be able to style outfits to show her waist on days she felt good about her body and not on other days," or whatever you want to talk about, her ankles, her wrists, whatever.

It seems simple to you, but the fact that you're signaling to your audience, "Hey, I teach people how to live in these clothes. I don't just hand it to them," that makes a big difference when you're giving a client testimonial or sharing a client result for people who also identify with, "I'm going to spend that much money. I want to understand how to live in these clothes."

I do think that's an area that a lot of stylists step over, and it's a simple one to just add that little bit of context to a client quote, a client testimonial, or a client case study. That really helps people understand what they're getting on a deeper level and it signals, “Hey, I totally know how to help you figure out how to live into this next version of yourself.” When you're telling your clients stories, definitely focus on the emotional shifts, the things they learn, and the identity alignment that happens through the magic of your work together.

Okay, so let's get practical for a minute. I want you to go ahead and audit your content to see if you're truly aligning with the transformational journey that you want to offer. Here's a quick exercise. Take a few minutes and scroll through your social media or your website.

Are you speaking to your ideal client's emotional and identity-based needs? Are you communicating the value of the long-term transformation? Does the content show the full journey that you're taking your clients on from where they are now to where they want to be?

Last and probably most importantly, are you positioning yourself as a partner in the personal growth of your clients or are you positioning yourself as someone who's going to give them quick solutions to their busy, stressed, and overwhelmed life? Because if you do that—and I had to learn this the very hardest of ways as a stylist—you will attract the busy, the overwhelmed, and the bad communicators of the world to your business.

How you talk about the type of people that you work best with that you attract is really going to be critical in your messaging. It is about showing off your styling skills. I want you to do that. I want you to do the fun posts. I want you to do the things that make you excited, but I also want you to become someone who is excited to market and talk to your audience in a way that gets them to buy because that is what we're here for.

This isn't a hobby. It's a business and each of you is so talented in sitting on so, so, so much to give to the world, and learning this little skill called marketing, especially in the world of transformational styling is going to be a game changer. What happens if your marketing isn't aligned after you do that alignment audit? What happens? Do you give up? What do you do? Where do you start? Let's talk about it.

Your messaging speaks directly to your ideal client's deepest desires and emotional needs when they can see exactly what your offer is going to give them in terms of the daily lived outcome of that service. That's what makes them ready to invest.

What we really want is for your content to position you as the expert in their very specific style issue. Whatever stage of life they're at, whatever stage of their styling journey they are. Some people have a virtuous style and some people don't. There's a whole lot of style savviness out there and a lack of savviness as well. There are all ends of the spectrum when you are talking to people. You just want to make sure that if you want people who, like I said, are really engaged [inaudible] maybe they've actually tried a few things before.

One really fast way to get your marketing on track is to begin to outline ways and things that you know that really ideal clients have probably tried before they hired a stylist and to really explain why those things that didn't work, they had to have already tried them.

You can't just tell them, "If you try this, it won't work for you." You need to know the things people have actually tried and then speak to, “You probably tried this. Here's why it probably didn't work for you.” Because they may not know why it didn't work. They just know it didn't.

Oftentimes clients decide that it's because of something that's wrong with them. But it's not. It's usually that they just don't have all the information they need. They didn't do the style discovery beforehand. They didn't really have anyone to hold their hand through the process when it felt overwhelming. There are a million reasons why other options don't work.

Be sure to talk about the things you heard past clients tell you and start with that in your marketing. Because when people say, "Oh, she gets me in that way," then you speak about your own services to explain how it will make the difference that that other thing didn't work for them, how you're closing the gap, basically, that the other option didn't, it will change the game. It will change the game in your sales.

The thing is, when you learn to do this, you will not have to sell as hard as you may think you do because your marketing will be positioning you as a solution to their problems. By the time a potential client reaches you and gets on a sales call, they're not just looking for a stylist. They're looking to see if you are the stylist for them, someone who's going to be able to make that lasting change in their life because people invest in services that they believe will transform their lives. The level of transformation that they are looking for will be a reflection of how much they are willing to pay.

If your marketing doesn't convey that level of transformation, you're going to struggle to convert followers and you're going to struggle to convert sales calls, no matter how many likes or comments you're getting, no matter how many people in your DMs telling you that they love your content.

If you're feeling like your marketing isn't quite hitting the mark or you're not sure how to shift your messaging, don't worry. That's exactly what we're going to be working on in my group program, Income Accelerator. The next round is launching in February 2025, and we're going to deep dive into how to create marketing that resonates with the transformational experience you provide as a stylist, helping you convert followers into high-value long-term clients.

In the program, you're going to get a framework to structure your marketing so it converts your clients on a deeper level and drives conversations and conversion. A couple of the conversations I mentioned in today's episode are examples of things we talk about. There's one-to-one coaching. There's group coaching. It is truly, I believe, a transformational program.

I guide people through creating transformational services because it's not easy, but it is so, so worth it. It's actually really fun. The more you get to see what an expert you are in your own clients, which is something I really love drawing out of a stylist.

If you're ready to elevate your messaging and start attracting clients who are really excited to invest in the transformation that only you can offer, get on the waitlist in the show notes, and definitely be here for our next episode. All right, that's all I have for today. I hope this episode gave you some clarity on why your marketing might not be converting and how you can start to align your messaging with the deeper transformation that you are so, so capable of.

If you found this episode helpful, leave a review or share it with another stylist who could benefit from this series, and don't forget to check the show notes for the link to get more information on the Income Accelerator Program and the earlier episodes of transformational and transactional styling that laid the groundwork to the conversations we're having in this series. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you in the 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.