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.

Today, we're diving into a topic that resonates with not just personal stylists, but with business owners across industries. How easy it can be to get stuck in the endless cycle of overhauling things in your business in an attempt to earn more. Recently, I stumbled upon some old notebooks from my early days as a stylist, and these notebooks were filled with plans: new services, website redesigns, and constant ideas for starting over fresh.

At the time, I actually really believed that this is how you build a successful business, always striving for something better and reinventing yourself over and over. But looking back, I can see that this mindset was a trap. It's not just something stylists fall into, the overhaul mentality is so common in businesses of all types, from tech startups to retail giants.

Today, we are going to unpack why this happens and the cost of constantly starting over and how you can shift your approach to unlock real and sustainable growth in your styling business. The overhaul trap isn't just like a small business phenomenon. It is a pattern that we see across industries because the human brain loves new. It loves the idea of a shiny new start.

That is why everybody makes a New Year's resolution, even though they want those things in their life today and they could start today. We all push things off till Monday. We all think “I'll start that workout plan next week.” In business, you see this the most with tech companies.

For example, how often do we see tech companies launching new features or completely rebranding, thinking that it's going to solve a growth challenge? Or retail brands, which we're all very familiar with, that overhaul their product lines every season or get a new creative director, or they chase trends out of nowhere without truly understanding if their core customer base has any interest in those trends.

The allure of the overhaul is strong because it feels productive. It's exciting to dream up new ideas, to launch fresh campaigns, or to redesign your website. But too often, these efforts are a distraction from what's already working. In my own business, I spent years chasing this feeling, this newness, this freshness, this “It's all going to be different this time.”

I thought if I wasn't constantly reinventing my services, my marketing, then I wasn't moving forward. But what I didn't realize then that I know now is that I was burning valuable time and resources and typically not seeing any results for all that time and energy and often a lot of money I was putting in.

So I want to talk about one of the biggest but rarely discussed costs of regularly overhauling your business, especially when you're a solopreneur or you don't have a big team that can support you full-time in carrying out these changes. The real risk lies in not recognizing how close you are to achieving your goal.

When you fail to properly assess your business strengths, you end up discarding the good with the bad. This puts you back at square one, even when you might actually be three-quarters of the way to the finish line. That was absolutely true in my business. Before I hit six figures, I could have hit six figures so much faster.

As I said before here, it took me seven years to hit six figures. That is not an exaggeration by any means. I did pretty well, but I stayed around the 60-70 mark for a long time. A lot of that was mindset for sure. But even more of it was the fact that I kept starting over, and especially my messaging, but even in my services.

When you constantly burn everything down to start fresh, you are not just wasting money on new branding and new websites or hiring people to redo your copy, but you're losing the momentum you've already built. Companies that grow sustainably focus on this. Evolution, not revolution.

Instead of tearing down their entire strategy, they refine what's already working and get rid of the things that aren't. For example, Starbucks didn't become a global powerhouse by reinventing coffee. People have argued that Starbucks coffee isn't even that great. What they did is they doubled down on creating consistent experiences and introduced incremental innovation to their client experience like mobile ordering to enhance the customer journey, they didn't even touch the product.

In my work with stylists, I see this all the time. One client I worked with last year, particularly comes to mind on this, was on the verge of her third complete business overhaul in four years. Third. She had already invested in a new website branding in countless pricing changes and packages by going to multiple different coaches who gave her very, very different feedback on what her personal styling packages should be.

But what she didn't realize was that she was really just a few tweaks away from doubling her monthly revenue. In the 90 days of working together consistently, the strategic work that we did to refine her existing packages, to refine and double down on her messaging that actually was getting her some traction, the strategic work of looking through what was already there, from doing that in 90 days, she went from $4,000 a month, which is what her baseline was when she came to me, to $8,000 a month as her baseline. That was just her normal periods.

But when she had higher periods, like busier times, like fall and spring, she recently told me she started to hit between $10,000 and $15,000 months. We were really not needing an overhaul. She didn't need a new logo to do those things. She didn't need really new packages. We did tweak some of the pricing because it was too close together, but even that wasn't that big of a deal.

I gave her a few strategies for her, not just attracting clients, but from doing some outreach that was pretty minimal, and pretty quickly things turned around. So we doubled her base income and again, we skyrocketed her busy periods. She was getting to around $8,000 a month during her busy periods and we, in some cases, doubled it.

It's really important to understand here that the key wasn't an overhaul and it absolutely wasn't new photos and a new website. It wasn't any of those things. I mean, I'm not saying you can't get new photos, but I just think it's important to know where that's going to fall in the actual things that move the business forward.

The thing about this is I totally get it. I am this person too. I love a makeover. We're stylists, duh, of course. But the cost of it is that we start to beat up on ourselves and think that the time we're putting in is not a reflection of us getting to where we want to be. I hear a lot of stylists who do the makeover approach to their business pretty frequently, telling me that they're really close to putting out or leaving the industry or whatever. They have years of experience under their belt.

This stylist I just mentioned that I worked with had almost eight years under her belt when we talked and we worked together. I think it's really, really important for you to understand that you're just not leveraging the expertise, the experience, and the strengths you have built and the amount of time that you have worked as a stylist when you use this method.

So what will feel like you have all these years behind you and nothing to show for yourself when really it's about mining through all those years and pulling out the parts that were going to catapult you forward. Before we dive into how to refine within the styling world your business, I want to dive into some brands that you know and likely have purchased from that have iterated their products or their positioning instead of overhauling it to get it to have more success and profitability in the marketplace.

Because it's often the case that when it's our business, our industry, we can't see this principle as well as when it's somebody else's, when it's outside of us. Because a lot of the brands I'm going to talk about you guys are so familiar with, I think it will be interesting and you'll have enough real-life experience to be able to assess this idea of iterations over overhauls being the thing that got these brands to everyday household names.

Apple, if you think about it, Apple doesn't release entirely new products every year. Sure, most of us that are listening to us, remember when the iPad came out or the iPod or the Shuffle or the first laptop that Apple made or the ones that came in like all those different colors. I remember I had one of those when I went to college. It was orange, it was tangerine. It was the coolest thing I ever experienced at that age.

Most people have iPhones. But if you think about it, they don't create, they've created a handful of products. They haven't created a new product every year. Instead, they iterate on their existing products like the iPhone. They know their core customers focus on making incremental changes to what their deeply loyal customer base wants.

They enhance—and this is the critical part we're going to talk about—they enhance the user experience, they don't start from scratch with the product. They get the product better and better. They then make updates to the existing hardware and software, and then they focus a lot on the experience of it with the updates that they have when you download the latest operating system update.

That is the customer experience, those updates that your phone does. They're not like, “Okay, now come in and get a new phone.” Now, I know we all know that those phones break way too soon and that's a whole other conversation, but you get the idea. When was the last time Apple put out something that was brand, brand new? It's been a while. That is how they got to be where they are today.

Another one in luxury fashion space is Hermes. If you know them, they are not trend chasers. They have made their market and they have stayed in their lane. Instead of thinking, “Okay, let's create runway shows that always have the latest and the greatest of whatever's in trend or constantly running with trend cycles,” that's not their vibe. Instead, they double down on their brand story, their brand experience, the heritage, the craftsmanship, the timeless design.

They don't keep changing their Birkin bag, they don't keep changing their Kelly bag. They may make it in new colors or whatever, they may iterate, but they don't redesign it. It's not like, "Oop, we're not going to have that one anymore. It's over." That's not what iconic brands do. This focus on consistency builds trust and reinforces the position as a leader in their industry. That is what's so important.

I'm not saying you're not going to change things in your business, and of course, they have. Of course, luxury brands do get rid of things. But when things do work for them, they don't go, "Oh, we're so bored by a Birken." No way. They double down. They probably are sick of talking about the Birken. They probably don't even think it's their best bag. I've heard that argument before from people.

But the idea is that they made it more difficult to get. They made waitlist. They created even more lure around it. They doubled down on their existing story as a brand and made it more sexy and attractive. They didn't try to write a new one.

Then the last one, which is an everyday name is Gap. I think when I was writing this episode, I saw a lot about Gap. I think Gap is really, really interesting, because I remember Gap being like the bomb when I was growing up, that and limited too, so that gives you my age bracket about. Thinking like Gap sweatsuits were the best quality. I remember my mom always talking about that a ton.

But then there was this period where Gap fell out of favor and they were not a brand people were talking about. It always looked sad in malls, back when I was a stylist and I was in malls. Most of you listening to this will remember that they hired Zac Posen pretty recently to be their creative director. They have certainly done a lot of things to try to change the perception of the brand.

But what has actually held Gap stay competitive, more recently, I just found out by doing a little bit of research was by focusing on smart incremental changes, but keeping their core offering, their core style, classic, casual American style consistent. They haven't changed that. They haven't changed their logo. They haven't changed any of those things. They haven't changed the recognition, the brand recognition of their visual identity.

But to regain relevance, what Gap has done, because I was trying to understand what was it that got Gap back in? Did they just have good marketing? Was it the Zac Posen thing? Because I don't know. Did they hire better influencers? What did they do? To regain relevance, I read the Gap enhanced its supply chain by cutting product development times down from 22 weeks to eight weeks, they got back into favor in the retail space.

These refinements allow them to respond faster to trends and to meet consumer expectations without overhauling their business, changing the brand and the vibe of the store, and ensure that their staple products remain at the heart. They're still known for the same thing, but somehow, Gap does feel more relevant in the fashion industry. You'll see more pieces if you read actual magazines anymore, I still do, you'll see them featured in things.

Yes, some of that is paid-brand placement for sure, but some of it is you'll see more people in the fashion world talking about specific pieces that are just considered really good design. What it was was the Gap had such a long window to get their products out to the masses that they were missing the mark and they didn't have that back and forth with their customer base.

Again, they went back to the client experience. They didn't change who they were. They went to their client base and they said, "What is it that's happening?" And people were like, "You know, it doesn't feel fresh." So in order to do that, they changed their supply chain. I mean, they have changed their stylists to a degree, but it's not like now they make tuxes or something. They still make jeans and T-shirts.

I think that is a really, really important example of these types of iterations because we can all say we understand and see these things in Apple or May and Gap. But it's harder to see that sometimes in our own brand when it's so close to home. This common trend that these businesses succeeded by building on their strengths, not abandoning them, is something that we are going to talk about how you can do in your business.

One of the first things that I teach at my Income Accelerator program is how to audit your business for small wins. It's not even clear that that's what I'm asking people to do, but that is the underpinning of the first section. I'm having stylists look at “What is it that has worked? What is it that you like? What are your strengths? What are the things that you've enjoyed doing, whether that be the actual parts of a specific styling service, whether that's the types of clients you've worked with, whether that's the way that you work, virtually in person, a hybrid, something like that? What have you liked?

Here's how you can start from what I teach some of my clients. You can identify your dream clients. Think about your favorite clients. What made those relationships work so well? What did those clients come into the styling container with? What kind of mentality? What kind of an attitude about their body, money, their relationship to their style, and basically transformation?

What was their attitude towards those things? What kind of things did they say in their intake form, and in their sales call form? That's why I am so big on systems, not just because it makes your life easier, but because it's the way that you figure out how to do things even better and why I create and put systems into my programs and give you all of the systems you need.

I give you every form you can need, every question that you need to evaluate these things. Every touch point you need to have with a client in order to be able to reflect on things. Because one of the reasons why we burn things down, particularly when it comes to niches and services is because we haven't actually captured things properly in our business to even keep track.

I'm not saying you have to look at this every day. I certainly don't in my own business, but at least every quarter I go back and say, “Who did I work with this year or this quarter and how did it go?” After every single launch, I do a launch debrief. Yes, I make it better and I change it every time, but I just build on the things that are working.

The biggest place stylists throw out things and disregard things that are so, so important to the success of the business is in their clients, in what their clients are saying to them before they hire them, when they hire them at the end of the experience so that you can be doing more of the things and saying more of the things that get and attract those people.

You have all the data you need. You probably don't need a new service. You need to make the services you have better so you can make your marketing better because everything in your business should go together. The next thing you want to do is you want to really pinpoint the strengths that you're bringing to the business.

If there are parts of your process that you know you are amazing at, like I have some clients and I've talked about this here before but it's so interesting for me, I think one of the most “controversial” parts of being a stylist is how people feel about the closet edit.

I have always felt like it's an important part of the process but don't love it. But I have other people who were like, “I live for a closet edit. If I can only do a one-off anything, it would be a closet edit.” I think those are the things that I see stylists telling me what they like, what they want to do more and more of, but then they throw that out when it comes to building offers or they shrink the things they enjoy down.

Whatever you enjoy is usually going to be a strength in your business. We want to maximize that, not minimize it, nor do we want to just disregard it altogether. That's another place that you can be thinking like, “How can I make the things I do like, even more impactful? How can I maybe do more of that in my business, whether it be with individual clients or pulling that out and making that a part of a service, its own standalone service?”

There are a million ways you can do this, but really doubling down on the things you enjoy, because they're likely the strengths that you're not even really giving yourself credit for.

Then reflecting on the results, if you are seeing that there are certain ways that you get clients, but you're pushing to get clients in a whole other way, a good example of this is, I see stylists who think they have to have a certain freebie or a certain kind of opt-in, but they don't really think about like, “I've created them in the past. Did I get any results from those?” They don't even know. They don't even know what all the things, all the marketing, all the messaging, all the things they put out if any of it has actually led to a result, good or bad.

You really want to go and look at the things that you have put out in the last three months, six months, the last year. What did you put out last year that you don't even know what the result is? Maybe you know how many likes you got, but you're not even clear that of the 30 sales calls that you had, you don't know which pieces of that content moved somebody to get on a sales call with you. You have no idea.

Sometimes that's because we don't look at the right metrics. We look at likes and think, "Oh, that many people liked it." But we forget how many times somebody mentioned something in a sales call to us that we said really resonated with them or how many people saved a post or shared to post, that's actually more indicative of it making an impact on someone than a like.

When you don't know the parameters of success, and how you should be measuring them, you are more likely to throw things away instead of iterating on them. I see this a lot with waitlist programs. Lots of stylists launch a program, they get two or three people in there and they think they did a poor job.

You didn't. You probably have never launched anything before or had to fill a program like that. It's not easy. It's a whole different skill set. In order to get yourself from going from, in cases that I've had, an $8,000 launch to a $30,000 launch, I had to iterate. I had to make the emails better. I had to create new lead magnets. I had to tweak my messaging.

I didn't throw out the program. I changed the way I talked about it. Especially if the program got those three people's results. Don't ignore the people that are in the room. That's something I see a lot of stylists doing unintentionally. I'm not saying that I haven't been guilty of this too, for sure, but we forget.

We think, "Oh, it's only three people." It's three people who decided that they were going to trust you to style them with their identity. That's huge. But we forget because we don't realize that if you get three people in your first launch and your goal was 10, you did better than most people, especially if you didn't have a waitlist of 300 people because numbers matter for these things.

But if you don't know that, then you're going to tell yourself, "Oh, I'm never going to do this again." I've had so many stylists come to me and say, "Well, I'm just going to get rid of that group program." I'm like, "No. You had three people. That's three people that we can get information from to make this better."

If they stick with me and they just choose to go forward, they usually either sell out their launch or double what they do the next time. That's just because they're willing to put in the work and they're willing to take a look at both what didn't work, but also, and most importantly, what did.

When you ground yourself in your wins, you are not just creating a roadmap for growth, you're also building your confidence to go back and do it again. That is the part. That is the part that matters the most.

Hyping yourself up and getting to be someone who gets excited about the iterations because like I said before on this podcast, it is not the sexy stuff that gets you where you want to be. I record this podcast every week, week in and week out. It's always coming out. This podcast is always going to be a thing.

It doesn't matter what else is going on in the business, it's always happening and that's because I am committed to it because I wanted to get better and I think it has but not because I was like, “Well, those first 10 were trash, I guess didn't work out for me.” That's how this works, guys. When you get excited about iterations, it completely changes the game.

Let's talk about the shift in your mindset that you can make today and cost you nothing that will change how you approach your business this year and honestly, this could be one of the most important episodes I put out this year to be totally honest with you because trying to assess a client for me is trying to figure out: are they the person that can actually handle iterations or are they so interested in the big attention-getting stuff that they are not completely bought into the business fully?

Because If you are truly bought into having other people get a full transformation, this is the work that it takes because client experience is the thing and creating messaging and marketing that hits people in their gut, so they're like, “You're the person for me,” this is the work that gets you to the true transformation. It's not the close. It's getting people bought in so they feel safe and cited by the time they bought from you to trust you with the close.

If they're at one foot in and one foot out, it will not be a real transformation. All of the work that you do, these little tweaks is what makes the difference. The interesting part about this is that you already have all the answers as an established clients.

The simple question that I want you to ask yourself is “What is already going right right now? What clients have I had that have been wonderful? What messaging did I put out that has started conversation even if it didn't create a sale? What have I been told on sales calls that I have said that have resonated with people?”

That is the focus I want you to be absolutely obsessed with. It doesn't matter what level you're at. I don't care if you're at six figures or at multiple six figures. This is the way I approach every client's business because there's no other way to look at your business that both hypes you up psychologically and focuses on the client experience and the client in a way that produces profit.

This is the fastest way I know to do it because it keeps people energized. This simple question, what is already going right, is going to change the energy, like I just said, around your business, because when you focus on your strengths, you are not coming from a place of lack. Instead, you're building your business that is rooted in your unique talents and success.

The other secret to this, to be totally honest with you, if I'm being completely transparent, is the reason I like this approach is that nobody can leave my programs—because this is the approach of my programs—with the same messaging, the same services, the same niche if you go about it this way, because I have no interest in everybody looking the same in this industry. It's absolutely embarrassing, quite frankly, the extent to which that happens.

How do I create things that help people get results, but also don't create copycats of one another? I make some audit what works for them, and there's no way two businesses would be the same if this is what you're doing. This is also going to help you get around looking like everybody else.

This is what Harvard Business Review calls the strength-based approach to leadership. If you listen to the transformational and transactional episodes, this is aligned with that view of transformational leadership. Part of transformational leadership is strengths-based approach to leading people. That's what transformational styling and that whole definition that I gave you came from. I borrowed it from that model of leadership.

I've said before, I didn't make up the transformational definition, I just applied it to styling. That's why I am a believer in iterations and not overhauls now. Because when I saw the research and I saw the data, I was like, “Oh, it's very clear why it doesn't work to completely overhaul.” It also makes a whole lot of sense when you're a transformational stylist, this is a bit of a tangent, but when you take this approach to your business, it’s really easy to also take this approach to your styling container.

I'm going to be talking more about how to be a really solid transformational stylist. But please know that everything that I'm talking about here, this approach is something you could also use with your clients and have them start with what they like and what's working instead of what they hate about themselves or what isn’t working.

One of the biggest lessons that I have learned and something that again I feel so strongly about stylists that I work with getting is that client retention is your golden ticket to consistent income and so your existing clients are more likely to give you honest feedback about why they hired you and why they love working with you so get into those conversations this year, make it a priority because that feedback is invaluable for refining your services and creating a client experience that keeps people coming back and iterates on what's already working.

Companies like Amazon and Netflix don't achieve success by constantly chasing new customers. They focus on retaining their existing ones by creating seamless personalized experience and putting out new content inside the container for the people that have already hired them. Those new dopamine hits.

Same thing in your business. You can do the same as a stylist because when you build your business around the clients who are already loving what you do instead of focusing on the people that aren't hiring you yet or the people on social media who are not talking to you when you post something, not only are you going to increase your retention of the clients that you love, but you're creating brand advocates who are going to refer you and act like your very own sales force because you asked them something as simple as “What did you like about this experience?”

Guys, this is not rocket science, but if you slow down and stop burning everything down, you are going to be shocked at how fast and how far you can go. If this method of improving your business really resonates with you, I want to invite you to consider joining me in my next Income Accelerator program.

This program is designed for you to break free from this overhaul cycle and build a business that feels authentic, sustainable, and is successful, and quite frankly, is unique. It's a highly personalized program with a very, very strong one-to-one component. We talk every week one-on-one.

There's also a group component to help you hear what other stylists are thinking and to actually experience how unique you are because when you see other people talking about these things in their business, you realize you don't have as much competition as you think because everyone's so different. This is the method that has helped so many of the stylists I've worked with get to the next level.

Because of the hands-on nature of the program and how much insight I give into your business specifically, it is now an application-only program. Spots are limited. If you're ready to take this approach to your business and just feel amped up because you're looking at your successes, not your failures, then please head to the link in the show notes and fill out an application and I will be in touch.

I strongly suspect that if you are an established personal stylist listening to this and this idea that you have enough experience behind you to collect your wins and iterate on those to get to your next level feels good to you and really resonates, then you are not as far away from whatever income goals that you want to hit as you think you are.

So I just want to leave you with this. It is not about starting over. It is always about refining what is already working if you can just slow down enough and remember that the dopamine hit of overhauling things is never going to give you the sustained results and the success that you started this business for. It's fun, it seems great, it seems exciting, it seems like putting on a new outfit, but it's not because we're dealing with other people. That's complex. So we need to build on our wins so that we can consistently win. Thank you for spending this time with me today. Until next time, keep focusing on those wins.

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.