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 back. Today we're going to tackle a topic that I hear a lot about, a fear of investing in your business after you've had a past investment disappointment. Honestly, this is the number one sales objection that I hear and it definitely lengthens my sales calls sometimes or my sales cycles and I think it's important to talk about because many stylists encounter this with clients too.

Sure, trust is at the heart of every investment decision a potential client makes with us but it's also at the heart of our own decisions with ourself and I think that's something we don't talk about a lot. So whether in your business you are trying to rebuild trust with yourself or you're trying to figure out if you can trust somebody else that you want to make an investment with, this experience of having had a bad investment can feel really, really overwhelming when you're trying to move forward and make your next steps.

This episode is about how to navigate those feelings, how to evaluate your future investments more effectively, and how to rebuild self-trust so that you can confidently move forward in your business. It's also going to be interesting to listen to this episode from the perspective of a client, because lots of styling clients have now worked with personal stylists. The industry has been around long enough.

There are a lot of stylists I talked to who tell me that they are experiencing longer sales cycles as well because people have worked with stylists in the past and so they're getting on the sales call, they're obviously interested but it takes them a couple of months to go forward and that's because they are really evaluating in a different way because of a past investment in a stylist that didn't work out.

Definitely be listening to this episode from your own perspective as you make investments but also as a way of educating yourself on what might be going on in the mind of a potential client. I think that's super useful.

Let's talk about why bad investments can hurt us so much. Failed investments can make it feel like we just had a triple loss: We've lost money, we've lost time, and we've lost progress. You invested in something expecting to solve a problem or to reach a goal, but instead you fell further behind. It can feel like a personal failure if you had to convince other people in your life to help support your decision.

If you had to ask for using family money, if you had to have a conversation about taking income out of your family budget, if you had to talk to a partner about it, if you have a business partner, if you had to make the decision not just factoring in yourself, but factoring in somebody else, I know that this can be really hard to get back on the horse again from.

It can also feel really vulnerable if you are the kind of person who really struggles with asking for help. Or if you're someone that feels like if you need to have to put yourself in a position to learn something, especially as an established stylist, I hear this a lot, that it's vulnerable because you feel like that disappointment may be cut you even deeper, because it's hard enough to ask for help in the first place maybe.

I think that this is a really good point for me to just say something about people that struggle with asking for help. They're usually very self-sufficient. Most stylists that have come to me and I can sense that this is a vulnerable act of just even having a discovery call, they really have done incredibly well and they're also the same stylists that don't give themselves credit.

So I want you to just take a moment to reflect if you are the kind of person that really struggles with asking for help. The other side of that coin is that you may not even be aware how far you've come or what you are doing well, which can also be a handicap in your business. I see a lot of the stylists I work with in Income Accelerator come in with this, and I really view my goal and my job as their coach and consultant to, yes, give them the business strategy that they need to move forward, but also part of that strategy for me is helping them believe in themselves more.

So I want you to consider that as well, that yes, you need the strategies and you need the tactics, but you also need to begin to soften a bit with yourself, to give yourself a little bit more credit, to spend some time reflecting, especially as we go into the beginning of a new year on how far you've come.

Even if you're exhausted, even if you're not sure about the future of your business, please do that for yourself. Because no matter where you are, no matter what state your business is in, you still have to learn a ton to get yourself to this point. I think that that is something that can really burn us out if we don't take a look at it so I wanted to just say that.

What I want to be really clear on though about past failed investments is it isn't about your intelligence or your abilities. It's really often a systemic issue and how programs are designed and they're marketed. Many courses, many programs were created to scale somebody else's business, not to deliver a result.

They may have gotten results for some people, sure, and obviously, results are all relative to what you put into something. So I'm assuming that anyone that feels like an investment failed them in this conversation, they did the work because obviously, the investment can't fail you if you fail it first.

The thing you need to know about a lot of online programs, because this is where I hear a lot of people feeling that they were burned most is that they historically online education has prioritized quantity over quality.

Hours of videos, endless downloads, promises of lifetime access, but without a lot of guidance for integrating or applying what you learn into your business, into your life, that's why there is failure because it's easy to be like, “Oh my gosh, I didn't get the result. I don't know if I can trust myself. I don't know if I should make another investment” when there are 90 other videos we haven't watched, but the reality is we're still maybe not getting through the first five and being able to implement them.

That's because there's a problem with the actual process. We're going to talk more about how to understand the best way to evaluate an investment before we go into it. But I want you to know that the online space has not been set up for people to succeed. It has been set up for people to profit off of education. Obviously, I profit off of education too, but I have also been burned by those models, which is why I create programs in a way that doesn't do that.

One of the things that a lot of programs don't have that is really, really important and why it's not fair to completely just be down on yourself about the fact that something didn't work out for you, is if there's not an ability for you to get personalized feedback and there's not ability and time for you to integrate while you're under the guidance of the person who created that course, what you're learning into your business and then get that feedback back to know, well, are you applying it properly? Is there something that you could tweak? Is there some way that you're interpreting the material that may not be accurate? If you don't have that, it's going to be really hard for you to succeed, especially when you're already running a business and you have a life.

So when the online education models out there came out, I mean, I got started as a stylist as a result of an online course. I have had great experiences and I've had terrible experiences in the online space in this way, which is why I was very hesitant to create a course because I wanted to make sure I didn't replicate so much of the trash that's out there.

One of the things that I saw was that I would get so overwhelmed. I'm also neurodivergent and most programs were not created for people that have different learning styles. Now a lot more people in the online education space are educating themselves about that, myself included. I have done a lot of research and taken some mini-courses on how to create courses for people that have different learning issues and integrate that into all of my work so that everyone can listen to, watch, and read every single module that I create. That's really important.

It also is just better for people's lifestyles. Some people want to listen on the go. Some people want to sit at their desks. Everybody has it differently and watch a module. I think that stuff is really important. There are just so many ways that the traditional model has not set up people for success. Again, if you have programs that have hundreds of people going through a year, it's really, really hard to feel like your voice is being heard or that your questions are being answered in those spaces.

I want to give you that feedback as someone that, again, started my own career as a result of an online course as a stylist and has done many since then, some of which were a good investment, some of them that were bad, but I continued to move on and invest even though I know how hard that can be because I used a lot of what I'm going to share with you today to be able to make investment decisions going forward even after something didn't work out the way that I wanted so that I could rebuild trust to myself.

These are a lot of the things I thought about when I invested $50,000 with my own business coaches and the kind of conversations I have when I'm on sales calls with people, so hopefully this will help you because it's literally something that I use every single day.

The first is to understand depreciating and appreciating investments in your business. To rebuild trust in yourself, you're going to really want to get these two types of investments so that you can be sure that you have a framework for figuring out when is the right time to make a specific investment.

So depreciating investments, they lose value over time. Examples of this are PR placements, their expensive photo shoots, custom websites. While they're necessary at certain stages and they're necessary to a certain degree, they're not going to drive consistent income or growth if you don't already have a strong business foundation.

I would also add that a depreciating investment, which we would never guess, at a point where you don't have consistent income, you don't know how to get people to buy from you, you don't have your messaging nailed, you don't know exactly what to say to get your ideal client to hire you.

Another depreciating investment is social media managers or ads, because the idea is that those things only amplify what already works to get buyers. It doesn't solve a problem that is foundational to you getting the sale in the first place, which is why it will be depreciating because it will usually make no money. I've had a lot of clients who've had this problem.

Once they've gone back, they haven't actually needed those things once they nailed their messaging. But if you're trying to solve a lack of sales, a lack of attention in your business with PR placements, but once people get to your website, your messaging isn't hitting or they go to your social media and you're not speaking directly to them, you're going to have the same problem you started with.

Photo shoots. Everybody needs a professional headshot. Everybody needs some photos for sure. But photo shoots that are $5,000, that is just not necessary when you're first getting started. Again, all of these things are things you may want to invest in later at a bigger scale when you have consistent income and you can afford a depreciating investment.

On the other hand, there are appreciating investments. At any time of your career, these are going to be useful for you. Depreciating investments are something everybody needs to do to some degree, but you can do bigger depreciating investments, if you will, once you have already nailed a lot of your goals.

Appreciating investments grow in value as you use them. These include skills. Sales skills, client research skills, marketing strategies that actually connect to buyer psychology, which all my programs are rooted in buyer psychology for this reason. Yes, algorithms change, but the way human beings make buying decisions does not. Of course, knowing what's going on in the world will help you understand which buying decisions are being more favored than others. But if you don't know that, good luck making messaging that's ever going to convert.

These are tools you can refine and apply repeatedly, and they have compounding benefits to your business over time. Learning how to run a sales call is never going to be a skill that goes out of style for you. It's never going to be something that is not helpful.

A custom website, when you can go and get a beautifully designed template for a third or even half or a hundredth of the cost if you're going on someplace like Etsy, is going to do just as well for you if it looks super pro, but it's a template versus somebody designing it from scratch. You're going to be better off getting the appreciating asset of knowing how to message and speak to your ideal client versus people getting to your website and it might be beautiful and it might be custom, but whatever's on that website isn't speaking to them.

If you don't have a lot of business experience, no one probably has told you that there are these two types of investments. I learned it probably about $50,000 into my well over $200,000 worth of investments I've made in my careers.

If you're not consistently making income right now, if you don't know where your next clients coming from, if you're not sure how to plan out how many clients you could take a month to survive, pay your bills, and pay yourself, then you really want to prioritize appreciating investments because they're going to be the foundation for a sustainable and scalable business. Once you get yourself to consistent income, you can really start to go deeper into depreciating investments.

The next thing I really want to talk about that's helped me so, so, so much is just understanding the difference between frameworks and plans. I'm telling you, this right here is one of the reasons why so many people go through my program, who have almost more than half of the folks who have done Income Accelerator to date have done other programs.

I would say it's actually higher than that, but I have not done a formal poll. I can just think of the people that have gone through it. I know half, when I make a list, have done another program specifically within the styling industry, specifically for styling businesses. I know that because of the conversations I've had.

When they end the program, I do like a little exit interview and that's important because I always want to make my programs better but what I learned from it is that they are floored by how many tangible business skills and actionable things they learned that they could do, how little of what we did was mindset work within the actual education.

I'm a big fan of mindset work, but only once I've seen what my client has done. When we address the mindset work, it's the result of reality and not just some mental masturbation of like, "Oh, I'm scared to do something." Those types of programs keep people stuck because so much of the work and so much of the intellectual capital that you put into them before you even get to the meat of the work is in mindset.

You're spending all the time and all the excitement up front when you're excited about the investment you made, thinking about mindset and creating these airy-fairy plans. But by the time you are halfway through the program when you're losing steam, which is something all course creators should be thinking about, you have wasted all of your intellectual capital on thinking about mindset when you really don't even know how to price your services or how many clients you need in a year.

I'm just going to be honest, that's a real problem. It's one of the number one problems I see with people who make investments in the styling space. If people understood that there's a difference between learning how to do a plan and learning a framework, it would change their lives when they were making decisions on buying.

I want you to think of a business plan as a printed set of directions. It's going to work until there's a detour or an obstacle, and then you're going to be stuck, and you're going to be in traffic, you're going to have to get rerouted and not know how to get there.

You'll only have one path forward, and if anything gets into that path of the plan, then you won't really know how to modify your actions to get to the result that you want. A framework, on the other hand, is like a GPS that has time updates. It's going to equip you with the tools to navigate changes and adapt as you go.

All of my programs and all the programs that I write, the programs that I invest in have got to have frameworks, or else I am not interested. Why? Because frameworks help you move, shift, and reroute when things come up. They help you become a better thinker, a better creative CEO, and a better businesswoman, which is the only thing I am ever interested in.

That's why I always say, I don't give stylists the plan that I used 15 years ago to get my business to six figures. I use the plan that I am always testing and updating and researching and learning more about what's going on in marketing and what's going on in the political landscape, what's going on in the economy, in the world, and the supply chain of clothing.

I'm thinking of so many different things that I don't even need to share the background of, but it's always informing why I tell stylists to do what they do. When people go through Income Accelerator, they have the opportunity to go into my next-level program, which is behind the scenes, and it focuses on sales and marketing only because that's the place where most people need more practice to find their voice and do all that.

I totally teach you the framework in Income Accelerator, but the next mini-mind program is really to help people ground into their voice and practice that with time and to get that support to continue to execute all the time in a longer form container.

One of the things that happen in that program that I see a lot is that stylists need to learn how to be able to stand out when things happen in the online market, when an election happens and it's really hard to get views on their stories, when we're about to go into Black Friday and holiday seasons and all of a sudden their story views go down and it feels like nobody will listen to what they're saying.

Those are the times when you want to use a framework versus a plan. The reason why I don't give you the plan that I used is because the world has changed. But frameworks are based on proven principles over time, like sales psychology and things like that.

Human beings are going to be human beings no matter what. But a plan does not factor in that specificity. It's like one moment in time, it's a snapshot. That's what a lot of programs are. That is really the case for programs that don't have a lot of individualized feedback. There's no way for you to really interface with the person who created the program.

That's where a lot of people get stuck. The prices are often lower, especially if it's a passive program, but what people don't realize is the price is actually higher because there's no way to implement it to get feedback and to know if what you're doing works or doesn't.

The reason why I feel so strongly about frameworks is that they help you future-proof your business. Well, a plan can leave you stranded when things inevitably shift, and plans also are not things that factor in lifestyle things.

I think that so many stylists build businesses from a place of using somebody else's plan, including me back in the day, but I had access to the person that made that so I could ask questions as my life changed and developed and that was just a matter of it was a small program and so it worked for me but she did teach me very much a plan.

In retrospect though because the field is so diverse now and you can be a stylist in so many ways I also find it problematic when I see people coming out of programs that give them a three-styling service structure. You have to have a high, low, and medium. No, you don't. What are your goals for your business? How many clients do you want to have? Those are the questions I ask before I tell people what kind of service menu they should have. It's also the reason why so many people struggle because they all look the same when they come out of plan-based programs.

Framework-based programs give everybody within it a different style, a different flavor, the ability to put their own spin on it and still be marketable, still be profitable, and still understand buyer psychology and how human beings are because those things aren't going to change, but you will change and the world will change and you will want to be able to know that the investments you made in your business are helping you roll with that and continue to thrive as a business owner.

Some of the questions that I want you to ask when you're considering your next investment because of the fact that a lot of the outdated ways that we have done online education aren't working, but also the outdated ways of making business plans aren't working as well, is number one, doesn't include any element of personalized support.

You're going to see a lot more of this going forward in 2025. I really argue since there is a huge backlash in the online world from people spending thousands and thousands of dollars and not receiving that support. It has become the norm. I actually think it's becoming unethical because a lot of those creators are not going back and updating their programs.

There are a lot of people that I follow who I started unfollowing because they're saying the same things today that they were saying when I started as a stylist 15 years ago and it is really disturbing because it ain't the same. Also, the field is just way more saturated, so it's deeply problematic.

You really want someone who's going to be able to give you that personalized support so you can ask questions, and get feedback as you're implementing. It also just helps with motivation. If you know that you're going to have the opportunity to talk to someone for six weeks, you're probably going to get more done than you would if it was like, "Well, I guess I will always be there."

I think that's just important to know about yourself, like what kind of motivation style you have. The second is, is there a time to integrate within the program or the course? Learning is one thing, but practicing and applying a concept is what drives results.

That's why in my program, Income Accelerator have five weeks of education modules, but six weeks time together so that there's a whole week to integrate. Each module has integration inside of it. It's not a workbook for the workbook's sake. It is absolutely an opportunity for you to go take exactly what I told you and practice it right now.

I tell you, “Try these three clients. Try these Instagram Stories. Try these posts. Then you come back to the call and tell me if it worked or it didn't.” Now, if there's a mindset issue, there's a reason for us to talk about it in a real way that isn't just a waste of everybody's time talking about mindset for the sake of it.

Integration is the reason why most people don't get results from online programs. It's why I have not gotten results and it's why I will never do programs that do not include an integration aspect of it inside them. The third one is the content delivered in a way that fits your learning style.

Because I’m talking to a group of people who are neurodivergent, it's important that you know not all programs are set up to support those needs. Programs should cater to different learning styles. They should have audio, video, and written materials. If you are in a program and you feel like you're not keeping up for that reason, you can tell the person why, for example, someone said that in my program and I knew they were doing the work and I saw that they were actually completing their homework and their action plans, I would go and figure out what I needed to do to make sure that it was being accessed by them.

That is not a big deal when you are a creator who's inside your programs in a way that is in integrity with the goal, which is to get people results. That's another reason why really, really big programs have been problematic for people because if a lot of your calls are within a program are really about the person reiterating what you just learned, then you don't have the chance to get the support you need and you're not going to be able to know whether or not they can answer your questions in a way that would lend them to be able to deliver that content in another fashion in order for you to be able to get the most out of it for your learning style.

Definitely ask about the different ways that program information is delivered so that you can feel like all of your needs are met. Then the last one, which I think is probably the most important point in this whole episode is, is it teaching you a framework or a fixed business plan or plan for whatever?

Maybe it's a marketing plan, maybe it's a sales plan, but it's the difference between somebody giving you a sales script and teaching you sales skills. One, you can bob and weave depending on what happens in the conversation when you have the skills. The other one, somebody brings up an objection that's not in that script, you are screwed.

That is the part that matters. Frameworks are going to give you flexibility and really train you to be a CEO, not put you in an outdated business plan or marketing model or plan that is not a reflection of broader principles that are going to always carry you forward in your business.

Now that I've given you some of those ways to evaluate future investments to understand why some of these programs haven't worked, I want to talk about self-trust. Because a bad investment does not define your ability to succeed. I have been there, I have made big investments and felt like, “Oh, my gosh, I'm so dumb. Why did I do that? This was a mess.”

But it really is an opportunity to learn when you understand how to go back and evaluate why something didn't work for you, which is why I wanted to do this episode. I want you to be able to go back and say, “Wait a second. Was it that I was basically plowed down with a million modules to provide ‘value’ but no opportunity to integrate? Did I have the opportunity to really ask questions in a substantive way in the courses, programs, and coaching containers that I was in? Was I able to access the information in a way that met me where I was as a learner, given my learning style?”

You don't even have to know your learning style, but you can know that if you didn't have multiple ways to access information, then you can be guaranteed it didn't have a way for you to do that. When you are able to look back at things and evaluate them, “Was I given a plan or was I given a framework?” now you can stop focusing on the belief that you did something wrong, that you have something to make up for and go forward knowing, “Okay, I get why that wasn't a success. Maybe I can even go back and access some things now because I have a different frame of reference toward that investment and I can go forward to make a new investment knowing that I can trust myself to look and see if this does or doesn't have what I need, to have the sales conversation that I need to have, to really look at that sales page from a place of, ‘Wait a sec, is this going to give me what it's promising that it's going to give me.’”

When you reflect on past mistakes, you move yourself out of a place from feeling stuck and beating yourself up to actually be able to get to your next level. Because the emotion I see tied up in people who have made investments that they didn't feel worked out for them and the way they hold themselves hostage as a result of that to their future success is something heartbreaking. I don't want that for people. Because spending money is not really the problem. You should always feel that you can make more money, but you can't get more time back.

That's another thing I want you to consider. If that investment left you feeling like, "Oh, now I have no money," the reality is you may need to spend more money to get a set of skills in order to earn more money. That's a normal view of business. There's nobody that gets ahead in business that doesn't need to invest to get to the next level.

It's called pay to play and everybody that's successful does it. Thinking that you're going to [inaudible] your way out of this problem ain't it. But you can still make better or worse investments and you can honestly sometimes make investments in something else after what you perceive to be a failed one and go back and get more out of that “failed investment” because now you have the eyes, the skills, the frameworks to look back at that information and see it differently and how you can apply it for you.

That might just be, “Oh, now I know that I need to read things versus listening to them to integrate them.” That is what I want to leave you with today. If you feel like you're ready to take the next step in your business after hearing this and really want to have a conversation about Income Accelerator, all of the things I've talked about here are how I designed the program because I have been in these programs and it took me a long time to create the program because I didn't want to be a failed course creator.

To me, that is one of the most embarrassing things. I'm always making it better. I'm always getting this feedback from my clients and I am listening to what's going on in the market so I can be sure I'm delivering top-notch. I've moved the program to an application process because I really do have a lot of one-on-one touch points with people and I want to make sure they're in the right space.

Fill out an application in the show notes and I will be in touch for a little chat to see if you have any questions, and talk about how it will be a good fit for you, but at the very least I hope you take away from this episode that if you sit in shame over past investments, the only person you're hurting is you and hopefully you can take some time to reflect on why that might have been the case that it didn't work for you and let yourself move forward because nobody deserves to be held hostage to their past failed investments.

Where human beings were all learning and you never know where that investment might come back and pay you back later. Also, I'm going to put an episode in the show notes of an earlier episode, episode five, that I did about making sure you always get an ROI on your investments, which is more about the mindset once you're in them. That's a really popular episode that I think will be helpful. Definitely have a listen to that if you haven't already and I will talk to you next episode.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me. It turns out that social proof is actually pretty important. So if you could help me out, I'd so appreciate it. If you just had a quick free moment and could leave me a rating or review on the podcast app, that would be killer. And even better, if you wanted to share this episode on Instagram and tag me, that would totally make my day and it would bring so much more awareness to the podcast and would help other stylists just like you who are looking to build lucrative styling business because the better each of us does, the better all of us do. Thanks for hanging out with me and I'll chat with you next time.