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 to the show. Today we are going to tackle a piece of business advice that just does not seem to want to die, specifically in the online space. It's this, that you're not making sales because you're giving away too much in your content. I really used to believe this, but after nearly 16 years in two businesses, I can confidently say that it is total garbage.

Not only is this advice wrong fundamentally because it doesn't take into account the world that we live in and how much information is out there on just about every topic, but it can also hurt your business if you believe it. Today I'm going to break down why this thinking is outdated, how it can sabotage your marketing, and what you should be doing instead to attract premium high-paying clients in your styling business.

I want to start this episode out with a quick story. When I launched the styling consultancy in early 2023, I used a simple strategy. I was highly engaged on Instagram, I used it as my website. I did not have a website because I was trying to prove you could get to $100.000 without one and I did.

I ran free monthly roundtable calls for stylists where I gave away tons of coaching and connected with my audience. I was sharing insights, strategies, and answering real business questions in Instagram stories. By September, after formally launching in April, I was fully booked and I had a waitlist of one-to-one clients.

At the time, I didn't have a group program. But then I want to fast forward to February 2024. Suddenly, there were crickets. I had no sales calls, no inquiries, and I was panicked. What did I do to my business? I truly panicked. Everything was going so well that I assumed I had done something wrong.

I had the mentality that I am responsible for my results, and so it must have been me. I was getting on sales calls. I had sometimes up to 40 to 45 people attending my free roundtable calls. People were sharing it. I didn't have the podcast yet, so that's an important piece of information.

I thought that I was taking “responsibility” by saying, "Oh, no, I broke my business. I gave away too much." But what I didn't do that would have been actually taking responsibility was analyze what had changed. What had changed my behavior, what had I done differently?

When I first started the styling consultancy, I launched the Instagram account in January of 2023, but it took me a while to wrap up my styling clients after 14 years and go full throttle into the consultancy. I hired some marketing and growth experts right off the bat with the income I was making for my styling business, to help guide me in getting this business to go faster.

A lot of folks told me not to do the free roundtable calls. They said I should charge for them. They thought that it was a crazy idea that I would give away this much information for free, but my gut kept telling me to do it. Because I had consultants who had warned me not to, I thought, “Oh, my gosh, they were right. I messed up.”

I'm sharing this with you because it's such a tangible story of an example of how it wasn't even that long ago that I believed that it might be possible that your content could be so good that it eats up your sales. I scrambled to fix things. I, again, thinking I was taking responsibility, which I don't think is inaccurate, many of us do this, lots of people hire me from this, I went ahead and I hired my coaches.

There are sales coaches, the sales girls this past year. It was an incredible experience and one that I really, really don't regret at all. But it turned out that the reason I had that dip in sales that then did lead me to hire experts wasn't because I broke my business and it wasn't because I gave too much away.

When I had my first conversation with them after I hired them, I told them, “Look, I think I did this. I think I ruined my business. I gave too much away. I had been told by people not to do this.” Their first response to me was, “Absolutely not, you didn't break your business. Let's look at what you were doing that you changed and how you were showing up.”

Because they slowed me down and got me out of my panic, what I realized had actually happened was this. Number one, I had stopped doing the roundtable calls in January, remind you it's February when I see all my self-calls dry up. That had been a major driver of trust and visibility and of sales, to be honest with you.

I had stopped the roundtable calls because A, they had gotten so big that it was really hard for me to make sure I was helping everybody as best as I could. Also, it was becoming increasingly clear that there was a desire for something deeper and more. Actually, the request was that the calls became paid calls because more people wanted to join.

They wanted the recording, I wasn't recording it. But I stopped those calls because I was about to begin the launch of the podcast. It just felt like it was giving away way too much information and too much of my time, to be honest with you, to be in all those places all the time. So I'd stopped around table calls, which was a huge driver of revenue and visibility.

The second is that I was no longer posting my daily agenda stories, which, if you follow me on Instagram, I still do. That might sound like a silly thing, who cares, but that helped me stay top-of-mind with my audience and it allowed them to see how incredibly busy, in all honesty, the styling consultancy was and it drove a lot of my sales.

It's actually not why I did that. I did not do and didn't start the agenda posts on Instagram stories every day that I do now from an idea of sales. I did it from a place of connection, but I had stopped doing it because the mirror broke in my room, and one of the reasons I was doing it is because it was helping me stay accountable to getting dressed, and I was secretly using those agenda posts every day to help me get dressed as a new mom when I first started the style consultancy.

Even as a former stylist, I was struggling with that. It ended up being a sales tool I was using, and I didn’t realize it. I stopped doing that, but I never thought it would be leading to sales, so when I stopped it didn’t occur to me that it could be why I wasn’t getting any.

Last and most importantly, January and February are naturally slower periods in the styling industry. If you're working with a group of people that already don't have consistent income, it's not wild to think that they would be a little bit more hesitant to spend on a high-ticket one-to-one service during a slower period.

In fact, what happened? Once I adjusted and looked at what I had done in my own actions and got back into the rhythm of building relationships in my marketing, because this froze me and made me nervous, my sales picked up again, and also it was March, which is spring. What happens in spring? Stylists get busy again.

All of my sales came back, the business continued to flourish and the rest is history. But not paying attention to and taking actual responsibility for my actions in my business and what I had literally done in my own behavior and how it had changed was what caused my sales to dry up, not my content being so good that people took it, snatched it, and went and did it on their own.

I want to share that story with you because I think what happens is that this idea that we can give away so much and it can in turn cannibalize our sales and ruin our business is so incredibly toxic. First of all, the energy around it just feels crappy. Doesn't it just feel like very constricting instead of expansive?

That way you have to gatekeep everything because you don't want everybody getting the best of it. That doesn't feel good to me personally. I know what I'm capable of in terms of helping people transform their business, how they look at themselves, and the results they get in the world.

Why would I want to come from a contracted view in my marketing and then try to get people expansive results? Those two things cannot coexist. That's the first thing that I just want to point out energetically. But second of all, why are people saying that giving away too much kills sales? Where did it come from?

How, in my case, does it keep us from looking at what literally and actually matters to us getting sales, which is our actions and how we're engaging with our audience, how we are engaging with our audience, or not engaging with our audience in the cases that I just mentioned.

I think this comes from an outdated view in the online space because in some industries, like in business coaching, people can piece together enough free advice to make some progress. It's also true in the styling industry. People have whole YouTube channels, there are books on styling that I have even had clients, when I was a stylist, read and come to me a lot better off than they were if they hadn't.

They had edited their closets. They found their colors. They had done their silhouettes. They had their measurements. They had their style words. There's a book called The Curated Closet, it's right now $14 on Amazon, that I had several very high-achieving women clients do, but they still struggled with the shopping piece.

What I learned from being a stylist was that lots of folks had already watched YouTube channels, read books, done lots of stuff, but they still needed me to execute on it because they didn't have time or they felt overwhelmed by the shopping or they had stories about shopping that got in their way, and there are other reasons people don't do it. Sometimes they read it, they just can't get the steps together, they don't have the interest.

But the point is, this stuff has existed for a long time. Information has existed that people could get results with forever, and right now, the amount of information online that helps people get results has never been at a higher point. But I actually think that as a result of that, more people want experts and want guidance.

I think that there is a large sector of business coaches who went very quickly to the online education world that started having courses and started having on-demand downloads and stuff like that. People were taking that information, they were disseminating it in places that they shouldn't have, and people were losing sales.

But they weren't losing sales because of the free content they were giving away. I think that a lot of business coaches have let this idea leak out into the people that they consult with, and it is actually a sign that you don't know the appropriate market for high-touch personal styling services.

You most certainly as a coach, don't know anything about transformational styling clients. What it shows me is that the reality is when you're a coach, and I can say this now that I am a business coaching consultant, I can't do the work for my clients. There is a level of DIYing, or actually needing the client to do the work that is not the same as in styling, especially if you are a one-to-one stylist.

Most of the people I work with, even if they have group programs, they do have a higher ticket one-to-one. If somebody is the right fit for that, they are not the same person who's going to dig through all of your Instagram tips and tricks and hobble it together.

Because most business coaches don't have any experience with people where they're doing the work for them, like stylists are, they're getting the clothes, they're picking them out, they're editing the picks and the polls if things don't fit with sizes or styles or for the client's budget.

Stylists do a lot more hands-on work than any business coach, even if you're doing virtual. That's where I see, really, as I sit in this scene now, how many business coaches failed me, because they didn't understand the nature of the work I was doing.

Because of that, they didn't understand the nature of the person and the psychology that was on the other side of the transaction. The idea that my clients, as high-end personal stylists, were behaving in the same way as maybe even a high-end coach's clients who were trying to get the information from their freebie and then make it work themselves, it just wasn't compatible.

They were not the same type of buyer because they weren't dealing with the same circumstances. That wasn't the same thing. The coach can't do it for them. Even if I give you the information, you still have to put the stuff on your website. You still have to have the sales conversation. It's not the same.

Yes, the client has to put the clothes on them, but most stylists do all the editing, all the styling, all the shopping, or at least do the picks for that. Then the most the client has to do is the returns. The most the client has to do is say yes or no. The only implementation they have to do is again, the returns and putting the clothes on their body, not the same psychology.

This is critical for why I think it is, and I can say I have had terrible coaches as a stylist because I was willing to do whatever they said, but what they said did not make sense for the market. Here is why this fear is so illogical for personal stylists, that you're going to give away so much information that it is going to make all of your one-to-one styling clients dry up because your ideal clients are nine times out of ten busy professionals.

They are not scouring your Instagram collecting tips in DIYing their wardrobe, or if they have been doing that, then they are actually at the perfect place to buy which is why I talk about sales triggers in my programs. Because it's not the person who's done all the things is looking to do more of it, it's that they're exhausted from it by the time they're ready to hire you.

It's fine if they've done those things. It's actually good because they are more likely to walk into the process as a partner and fully buy it. The other thing that is really critical is because of the way of the world is now, people that know how much information is out there, they know that there are people with $20 PDFs that will tell them, “Buy this. Buy that,” but if you are transformational, there should not be a PDF somewhere or a particular catalog where someone's going to feel that they are getting all of their needs met in terms of their self-expression by a bunch of random picks that somebody did for them, whether that be an influencer or a stylist.

This is why lots of people confuse stylists and influencers because so many stylists are out here being told, "Oh, you should have this catalog of things that you charge $20 for and everybody can buy it all the time.” That's fine. You can do that. But you've got to be clear in there that that's not the same thing as your one-to-one service, that that's a different experience.

That's why people are paying so much more for their one-to-one service. Because you're custom picking people's things so that the inside and the outside feel coherent. You're doing style discovery. You're doing all that stuff. None of that is involved when someone gets a catalog of clothes to just randomly shop.

Again, nothing wrong, just not transformational, transactional. Again, there's a place for it in lots of people's business plans. Some of my clients had that. But when you want an expert to curate and help you integrate your identity in your wardrobe, you want an expert because it's very hard to see yourself.

You don't want to spend the time spending hours trying to piece together random content, which is why giving away tips and tricks doesn't help stylists make sales. If someone is DIYing your content, they were never going to pay a premium service price in the first place, period.

This is why so many people that have low prices wonder why they can't get premium clients. It's because premium clients don't trust your low prices, and they don't trust your tips and tricks because it's not what they want. If giving away content isn't the problem, and why people are not making sales, what is it?

Here are the three things that are actually the problem that have nothing to do with giving away too much content. The first is that you're just not seeing anything that stands out to your ideal client. If people aren't booking, it's not because they took your free content and ran with it. Most people say things to me on sales calls, stylists, “I don't know, I just can't get anyone to pay attention.”

Holding the view, as I did, that people are taking your content and running with it, and then also holding the view that you can't get anyone to pay attention means that you're holding too incompatible and illogical beliefs at once.

You both believe your audience doesn't have any attention span, and you believe they have the attention span to click through and find all of your tips and tricks, or even your freebie, and do it. Most people don't even open the freebie that we give them. They download it, [inaudible] programs that don't even open the content.

That's a crazy view. It's more likely to be the case given human nature that they're not paying any attention at all. It's because they don't feel like your content is speaking directly to them, regardless of what you put in your Instagram bio, regardless of the fact that you say, “I work with professional women,” it's not enough. They don't feel themselves as professional women.

They view themselves as a professional woman who's a busy mom, who also has philanthropic activities, and has a certain psychographics about her wardrobe. That will be the thing that makes her buy, not your Instagram bio, not the fact that you told me that you have nine other clients that are professionals.

They're going to buy from you when they feel understood by you. They don't buy from you when they understand you. That's a Simon Sinek gem, by the way, and I'm obsessed. Clients don't buy because they understand you. They buy because they feel understood by you.

That is critical because so many stylists are on their Instagram trying to get their ideal client to understand them, to understand their services, to understand why they have a closet edit that's followed by a shop and then styling. That's not what people care about.

They care about knowing that the specific services you have are for them, which is why you have to know why you have the services you have. It's more likely the case, and I think this is actually, well, maybe doesn't sound like it's the more hopeful option, it's better to have people that are just not paying any attention to you than coming from the belief that you just put in so much work to content that you tanked your own sales.

It almost feels like you're in a negative when we look at it from the perspective of like, “Oh, I just gave away too much content.” The feeling I have of that is now I have to get myself out of debt with my audience. Versus the more neutral, your audience doesn't even realize you're there because you're not speaking to them.

I know that both of them sound terrible, I get it. You're putting all this time and work into your content. But it's that you are missing a skill set in your marketing. Marketing isn't just putting out content, it's putting out content in a specific manner and strategy to get people to pay attention. If they're not paying attention, then your marketing isn't working, but it's probably not putting you in debt with your audience, meaning they're taking it and running, and now you're behind the eight ball and they're not going to hire you.

That actually is the good news because you can make people pay attention, but getting yourself out of that feels a lot crappier, I would think, in terms of the emotion of that. The second reason why you could be putting out content but you're not getting sales is because you're not making it clear enough that you're selling something.

If you're just giving away tips and thinking people should get the idea because it says that you're a personal stylist but you're not actually inviting people to work with you, you're not showing them how to take the next steps, you're not enticing them to take the next steps, which is not the same thing as just throwing up a book a call link, if you're not repeating your offer enough that people remember it when they are ready to buy, because we think like, “Oh, I'd stay once a week.”

But sometimes people take longer times than others to buy. This is why understanding sales triggers and what I call belief bridge, like where people have to be in their psychology to buy from a stylist is incredibly important because it's not the same place and it's not the same series of steps for something under $500 as it is at something at $3,000.

There are different considerations. It's not that people necessarily take longer to buy at $ 3,000. I don't think that's true at all. I think it's the people need to be told different things. Why it's not hurting your business, but it's certainly not helping it to be putting out advice and tips and tricks, is because when you do that, you are doing this third issue, which is you're not talking to the correct audience for a high ticket transformational service.

If your content is attracting DIYers or people that are very price-sensitive, it's because you are speaking to those people and you are giving them the things they need to make them feel like they're in the right place. If people don't feel like they're in the right place, they don't raise their hand.

When I talk about taking responsibility in your business, it's really about going back and auditing your own actions. In my case, it was about what I stopped doing that changed the behavior of my audience. In this case, if you're doing the marketing and you don't know why this isn't working, you need to look at what you're saying to attract the kind of people that are raising their hands to get in conversation with you.

Because everything that your audience does is a reflection of what you're giving them, even if it's unintentional on your end. If you have people that are asking you for a lot of links or tips and tricks or want to DIY it or are very price sensitive, it's because you have a marketing problem, not because you're giving away too much.

Think about it this way. If you know that you want to redo your website, but you also know that you have zero interest in doing it yourself, like it's not for you, you don't want that headache, you've saved up the money, you have a budget to hire someone, how likely are you to take action and hire a graphic designer whose content is full of tips and tricks and teaches you to DIY your website?

Are you likely to reach out to them? Are you likely to spend a lot of time assuming their content? Or are you more likely to pay attention to them if they're going to show you the latest, drool-worthy website that they just created for another creative entrepreneur who has a similar clientele as you do?

Wouldn't you be more likely to book a sales call with that designer if she told you that the project that she just finished for someone who has a similar business to you and similar clients increased their bookings by a specific percentage, 30% say because it attracted the right types of clients because of the work she did with them?

Wouldn't that make you be more likely to sign up than it would be if she told you how to design the perfect color palette for your website? Obviously, you don't even want the extra information in your brain. It would be a deterrent for you to hire them if you knew there's no way I'm going to DIY my website.

You'd be like, "I don't want that extra information." Because the point of the fact that we hire experts is that we don't want the mental labor that comes with the outcome. Now, it doesn't mean that people don't have to do any self-reflection and all that, but mental labor is trying to find the right brands, trying to make sure you understand the sizing chart, trying to know if this brand runs smaller than that brand.

That's what stylists bring to the table. They bring a lot more, but you get the point. Stylists forget how much extra mental work people do when they try to DIY things themselves. That's why people that would ever DIY are not in the same headspace psychologically as someone that wouldn't.

Because they don't want the extra tips and tricks, they want to know you're the right person for them and you can get results for people like them. The question is, what results did your clients get after you worked together, not immediately, but within weeks and months that followed that you can share that is tangible and goes above and beyond the typical marketing speak of stylists who typically stop in terms of their marketing language at, "I work with this group of people and this person that I worked with got a brand new wardrobe. She didn't have to think about what to wear. She got a lot of compliments and she felt confident”?

That's really not enough in terms of results. That's what you're already promising. But what are the lived experiences that the client had that weren't accessible to her before your work together? In the case of the graphic designer, for example, when we take it out of our industry, it's that they're seeing that people get an increased booking in sales, 30% percent because of their new identity, their new visual identity.

Well, that's really tangible. I can get that, but I don't understand with the compliments. I don't know if those compliments are from the right people that we even care about. Compliments mean nothing to me when they're somebody else's. They don't matter to me as an outsider.

It's usually the case that we're talking to the wrong audience and we're giving them information they don't even want, which is then pushing away the sale. It's not that we're giving away too much amazing information. That ain't it, because if it was so amazing, they would hire us.

How do you create content that builds trust and leads to sales? Again, like the example I just gave, it really needs to be specific instead of general tips, tailor your content to your ideal client. You can still give a chip, just wrap it in the wrapping paper of your ideal client's identity.

Instead of “five ways to mix prints,” you want to say something like “five ways to mix prints and appear more powerful as an executive female” or something like that. See how I might be giving the same content, but the context around the content is for my ideal client.

The other thing that I think is a very underused type of content that I use often is helping people realize and self-diagnose. You want to help people almost like a quiz, but there are lots of ways you can do this, you can do it through asking questions, you can do it through client stories, you can do it through workbooks, but helping people understand where they're falling short in the way they're either looking at or approaching their wardrobe.

This is self-diagnostic type content that I talk a lot about in my programs, but more stylists don't know about that or are not comfortable with it so trey over-give in their tips and tricks when in reality self-diagnostic content helps people take action because they become aware of the gap between where they are and where they want to be. The problem with tips and tricks is even if people save it or like it, it gives them the dopamine hit of thinking, "Oh, I got the information. I'll eventually take action on it." I think all of us probably have social media accounts full of saved content we never went back to so we can relate to that.

That's why when you give people self-diagnostic content, it shows them the uncomfortable reality that they're sitting in that they may not be aware of every day when it comes to their wardrobe. That will go much further than giving away other types of advice as a stylist.

The last one that I talk about a lot with my clients is that your content should be showing them the “what” and the “why,” and you want to save the “how” for your paid services. Your free content should look like this. “Why a signature style makes dressing easier.” Your paid content, “Working with me to build your signature style is going to make your mornings faster to get ready by 30 minutes.”

Okay, I just made that up, but you get my point. Working with me gives you this specific result. Understanding this will help you understand why you need this. “What” and “why” in your content that's free, and “how” in your paid services.

Here's what I really want you to take away from this episode: You cannot break your business by sharing great content, especially with the right people. Never. But you can slow your sales if your content isn't speaking to the right people or making them take action because they're aware of their own discomfort in terms of the results they're getting in their own life with their style.

Instead of worrying about giving away too much, focus on giving away the right things to the right people. That's why we're always talking about relationship-driven sales here because in order to do that, you have to know your audience beyond the very basic demographic stuff that we often rely on to hope people notice us.

Because your free content helps your audience see why they need you, the right people will not only take action, they will run to work with you because they will see that you put in the time to understand them so that they can feel like you are the expert for them.

Thank you for listening. I will chat with you next time. If this episode resonated with you, screenshot it and type me over on instagram. I would love to hear your thoughts and any ahas or takeaways you had.

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.