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 to the show. Before we dive into the meat of this episode, I want you to picture something for me. Imagine you’ve spent hours searching for your dream outfit for the most visible moment in your career—the moment where you’re going to get a ton of press, a ton of attention on your business from all the right people. You finally found it. It is perfect. It complements your body shape, the vibe you’re going for, the tailoring is impeccable, the colors are killer. You love it. It’s incredible. It is exactly what you want to wear to make a powerful impression for this really important event in your life.

But instead of putting it on yourself in the weeks before and trying it on, you hire someone else to wear it for you. You ask them to strut around your house in your carefully selected clothes while you stand there and watch them, and your hope is that somehow you’re going to feel confident by seeing them in the outfit.

This sounds ridiculous, right? Also kind of sounds like the beginning of like kind of a creepy movie that might have some salacious parts in it as I speak it out loud. That got weird, but stick with me.

This is exactly what I see stylists doing in their business every single day. If a stylist is waiting for a coach, a consultant, an ad agency to hand them the secret to their business success, they're wasting their time, they are wasting their money, and they are wasting their potential.

This might surprise you coming from me, but I think you'll understand what I mean after I break it down in this episode. Because the very uncomfortable truth is that behind this outsourcing is the desire to outsource self-trust.

Self-trust, that is the foundation of confidence. Confidence is not something you are born with or something you can buy. It is built by doing the work, making decisions, and learning through experience. Sometimes those experiences require us to make mistakes. That is why I am so adamant that stylists can't say they make people feel confident.

And so today, we're talking about the way stylists try to outsource their growth and why it keeps them stuck. Often I see this in the name of scaling. I think this is a very tricky game people play with themselves. They call outsourcing the thing that they actually need to be doing to get better as an expert and a business owner scaling when it's actually hiding.

If you've ever thought to yourself, “I just need someone to tell me exactly what to do. I want to hire someone to handle my social media so I don't have to deal with it,” especially if you're not converting people right now. Maybe you think to yourself often, “I mean, I can just have AI write all of my content, right?” If that's you and you've had that thought, first of all, you're not alone. Who hasn't had that thought?

But persistently having that thought, or those thoughts, mean that you are likely white-knuckling your business instead of developing the skills that will actually make you successful in the long run. It will make you regret investing in things that could have actually moved you forward, but you were looking at them with the wrong lens.

I am all about people having frameworks and plans, because those things are critical for learning. I know that as someone who has struggled with learning disabilities my whole life. But in my years of coaching stylists and in the years that I struggled to be visible and make consistent income, I have noticed two distinct types of clients and I have been two distinct types of clients.

Those who take those frameworks, implement them immediately, and then come back with specific questions based on their experience implementing. Then there are those who won't even take the first step without checking and double-checking that they're doing it right.

I can tell you right now, with all the love in the world, that it is the ones who take these things and try them, who mess up, who learn from that and come back and ask questions, who hit six figures in a year or a year and a half. Because I don't know, my problem is anyone's going to happen in five or six months. I don't know where your prices started. But I can tell you, I've seen people do it in a year, who went all in.

It's really the other set of stylists, the permission seekers, who are stuck six months, a year later. I have had stylists I've worked with two years later come to me and say they're still in the same place, because it was never about the plan. It was about them trusting themselves to feel worthy even when they don't do it perfectly.

Success in your styling business requires practice. Real-world trial and error practice that no coach, no course, no algorithm can do for you. The wildest part of this is that it will not be something you do once, it'll be something you have to relearn over and over as you get to the next level.

I am scaling a business, and I can tell you right now that there are a million things I do in a day that I've never done before, that I get wrong, and I expect it to be part of the process. As a matter of fact, I am nervous if it did not happen in the process and things are going wrong, because how will I be learning how to get better?

I have brainwashed myself to believe that. I have brainwashed myself to not be embarrassed when I make mistakes. I have brainwashed myself to address my mistakes publicly and often with people. Because A, I am an example and I'm a model and I'm a person, so I make mistakes. As long as my heart is in the right place and I am committed to fixing those mistakes, people are usually fine with that.

But also, how will other people believe me when I say they have to test these things? We're out here trying to be perfect, and we're forgetting that we're telling other people to feel confident, and we are not practicing it. We are not showing them what it's like to do the messy work. You're sanitizing it and then expecting people to get transformational results.

Today we're going to pinpoint where you might be outsourcing your growth and what you can do instead. I promise by the end of this episode you will have clarity to know exactly what part of your business you should be hands-on with and what parts you can delegate to save time.

Because that is real. That is a real thing that I want my six and multi-six-figure stylists doing. We are businesswomen, that's real. But outsourcing the things that are going to make you feel like a successful businesswoman, that's not allowed around here.

I want to delve deeper into a recent client's story because it perfectly illustrates what happens when we finally stop outsourcing business growth and start trusting ourselves.

I have a client who just started my Income Accelerator program, and I noticed that she had stopped marketing when she entered the program, like after week one. She is a pretty consistent marketer. I had noticed since I first started following her, which is why I thought she would be a really good candidate for the program.

I don't work with people that are not showing up. That's just not an option. You have to have already started showing up. So she was a great candidate for this. Her Instagram all of a sudden started collecting dust when the program started. What's interesting about that is that one of the things I say at the top of the program is, “You're going to practice marketing every single module, but we're going to get to marketing specifically in Module 4. But practice while you're here.”

There's a lot of marketing woven through all of the Income Accelerator program, even though there's one week where we just focus on it. Because marketing is part of the whole business, and if you're going to get the most out of six weeks with me, you should be practicing the whole time.

That was part of the assignment, but I couldn't figure out what was going on with her. On a Voxer coaching chat, I asked her, “What is going on?” and she told me that she was unsure about her new service offerings that we had just built out for her.

She had been moving from smaller packages with lower price tags to more comprehensive transformational styling services with much higher price tags. Actually, technically, one of these services was already on her website, buried, and she just wasn't marketing it. Technically, she actually had the service, but she was not talking about it.

And so, what was going on here? Well, I think it was a combination of being in a room with lots of other folks who were charging a lot more for longer and just her own perception—I don't agree with her—but her own perception of how far she had to go by making these changes. It triggered a massive wave of impostor syndrome.

Suddenly, she kind of felt like her extensive expertise as a stylist had somehow evaporated overnight just because the number on her package changed. The price tag changed, and all of a sudden… She told me that she was waiting for the marketing module in week four. She said, "Then I'll know exactly how to talk about these new offers. I'm just going to wait."

Like I said, this was a pretty consistent marketer. But here is the thing—I told her that waiting was literally the last thing she needed to do. I coached her to start practicing her marketing, gave her some ideas of where to start, and to get back on social media that very day, because it was going to take some time for her audience to catch up to her messaging shifts anyway and start booking.

She was just squandering time. We were going to be doing that module in less than a week. Please start now, just so that you don’t get yourself out of the rhythm of showing up. Because we're not just selling when we're on Instagram stories in this case, or social media, we're building a relationship. We're selling people thoughts, ideas, and perspective shifts.

When I coached her on that, she was like, "Okay, okay," but I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't notice if she had done it or not because I had a busy week. Before I get into what happened, what was the real problem here?

She was waiting for permission to trust her own expertise and thinking that a marketing framework was going to give that to her. Because here's the thing—she was marketing without a framework. For a while, she was getting clients.

But she made the false equivocation that her pricing now had to be followed with "perfect" marketing in order to warrant people being interested. She somehow thought that charging more meant that she needed to be a completely different person who lost her credibility when her package prices changed.

I want you to fast forward with me a week to our group Q&A call inside the program. We have one every week. I ask people at the top of this call to share their wins. I love this. It’s literally like crack to me. If you have a group program, I highly recommend you start every call this way. It has changed the game, and it’s really changed the culture of my business.

This client unmuted herself and shared that she had not only gotten back on social media in the few days since I had spoken to her—it was, like, I talked to her on a Friday, and then this call was on a Wednesday. Not very long.

She started actually talking about her new services two days in a row. That’s actually not even what I coached her to do, but she went all in. Already, you could tell what kind of an amazing human she is.

The result was this: she had nine individual clicks to her website from her Instagram story about her highest-tier service, and the next day she had seven clicks to her website to her mid-tier offer that she talked about the next day. Which is really bold, because I usually don’t tell you to go back and forth on selling it all at once. She really went out.

Now, here’s what I want to say about that. Sales is a process. It’s not a one-time event. There are lagging indicators of cash in the bank. One of them is how many times somebody interacts with your content, whether that be clicking the link, liking your story, or commenting on a post.

Not saying everybody’s going to be a good fit. But if you have the right messaging for your target audience and you're starting to see an uptick in just that, especially clicks to a website, that's a very high indicator of future success and a future sale. You're in a pretty good position.

What's wild about this story is that she was playing this off like it was a little baby win. But again, sales is a process, not a one-time event. Because her accounts weren’t doing anything in the three to four weeks that we had been working together up to this point, there was absolutely nothing happening over there. That’s some pretty incredible momentum for somebody to have upped their prices, shared their services for two days, and gotten 16 unique clicks to that website.

So what changed? What changed? Not her expertise, not her ability to help clients, and not even her confidence level talking about her packages. What changed is that she stopped waiting for permission and started taking action, regardless of how she felt.

We still have three more weeks of this program with this client that I'm telling you about as I record this. Here’s what I can tell you for sure—that is the result I have. Given where she was before, totally paralyzed, that’s pretty amazing.

I know that if she keeps this up, continues to be visible, she will absolutely book a new client, add her new rates, while she's still in this program, as many people have already.

It's really not an if. It's a when. Not because she will do anything perfectly—she's a really good marketer, to be honest with you—but because she's trusting herself enough to keep showing up even when she is unsure of herself.

That is the essence of what I am talking about today. Your clients don’t need you to be perfect. They actually don’t even have a concept of what that would look like because they’re too busy thinking about themselves, not your marketing.

They need you to be consistent. They need you to have a unique perspective. They need you to have your specific expertise honed in on them. And you need to have your authentic approach to solving their style problems front and center every day. You just can’t outsource any of that.

You have to develop it yourself—through practice, through trial and error, through showing up even when it’s uncomfortable, and through trusting that your experience as a stylist at any price point has value even if and when you are still growing.

I would be way more concerned about you if you were not growing. That is actually a sign of weakness. Not getting something wrong because you’re trying to be better, you’re striving to be better.

I want to talk about the fundamental issue and examples like the one that I just shared. Because the biggest misconception I see in the styling industry is this, especially when people start thinking about scaling their business. This idea that they’re burnt out by one-to-one, which—usually—people are not burnt out from one-to-one. They're burnt out from their marketing not working, and they're blaming the business model.

And while it's all connected, if they were getting clients every time they marketed, then I would be like, "Okay, you probably are burnt out." But if you ain’t booked out, it ain’t you. It’s not one-to-one styling that’s the problem.

Lots of folks think that’s the problem, so they tell me they want a group program or whatever, but they can’t even get one person to hire them, so why would they get eight? That’s wild to me. But people think that they can hire their way out of uncomfortable parts of business right now in the online space.

Just because you put up the cash, you should skip the problem. You should skip the discomfort. If they struggle with marketing, they want to hire a marketing team to do it for them. If they're afraid of making mistakes, they want a coach to approve every single social media post that goes out.

If writing feels hard to them or they have a story about that from growing up—which, hey, I get it, I have stories about that too, but oh well, here we are—they want AI to do it for them.

If sales conversations make them nervous, they want to implement automated systems that eliminate any type of conversation, or they tell themselves that the coolest people or the highest net-worth coaches aren’t doing sales calls.

What they fail to understand is that those coaches don't have one-on-one. They don't have any kind of high touch. They're selling you a bunch of PDFs. Of course, they don’t do a sales call. No one's going to do that.

Those are the critical things that people tell themselves and say that they're being efficient in business. But here's the problem: if you don't develop these skills yourself first, nobody can do it well for you.

Think about what you do as a stylist. Can you style someone who refuses to look in the mirror and give you feedback on what you just put on their body? Can you help somebody develop a signature look if they don’t share anything about their lifestyle, their preferences, what colors they like or don’t like? Of course not.

Because a stylist can't make a client feel confident if they refuse to see themselves differently. A business owner can't become successful if they refuse to take ownership of their own growth. There is a profound parallel here between what we do for our clients and what we need to do for ourselves.

When a client comes to you, they're essentially saying, "Help me see myself differently." They're not asking you to see them differently. They're asking you for the tools, the perspective, and the expertise to change their own self-perception.

Similarly, a business coach—me or anyone else—can't make you successful. They can provide tools, perspective, guidance, and expertise to help you change how you see yourself as a business owner. But you have to take the action that will lead you to see yourself differently.

This is the biggest mindset shift that I want you to consider today. Growth will never come from avoiding discomfort. It comes from moving through it with purpose. I think a lot of us are so stuck in our anxiety, myself included, in other areas of my life. Do not think that I am above any of this. That's why I can talk about it in such great detail. Because we think that there’s something about our discomfort, our mistakes, our humanity that there is to be ashamed of.

When we don't slow down to create our purpose, to think about, "Why are we doing this in the first place?" it's very hard to be okay with the discomfort. Nobody’s excited that I know of about childbirth. I’m sure there are some weirdos out there because, you know, the internet. But in general, no one can wait for that pain, that searing pain, the most horrific pain.

I mean, I hear—I immediately got an epidural, obviously, because, you know, I’m here talking about avoiding discomfort and how it’s bad, and I got an epidural. That felt like unnecessary pain, if I’m honest. That didn’t feel like something I needed to have. So there’s that. I'm just going to be straight with you—nobody goes into it excited about that, but they understand that there’s a higher purpose to it.

Or at least people that choose not to get an epidural, which, bless you, that’s not me. Every successful stylist I know, the ones making multiple six figures, the ones I've worked with who in just a few months have doubled, tripled—I have one client that 10xed her rates, which is so wild—they all went through periods of awkward marketing, imperfect sales conversations, and content that made them cringe when they look back on it.

Seriously, if you are not embarrassed by your old marketing, your old website, your old—in my own case—business cards, you are doing it wrong. That is the mark of growth. That is actually the mark of success. But you got to keep going. You can't outsource the learning process. You have to expect that it's part of it.

You have to let me help you brainwash yourself, like I have to myself, into thinking, "Something has actually gone wrong if something doesn’t go wrong and I’m not learning from it."

Let’s break down three areas you could be outsourcing the wrong things and what I’d like you to do instead. In light of this little chat, stop looking for coaches, consultants that are going to approve your every move.

I'm actually changing my business model so that this is not even something people can expect from me anymore because it doesn’t work. I get people to pay me a lot of money to hold their hand at this level, and I would literally be doing something unethical—truly unethical—because it's not going to help you once I'm gone. "Dude, give me all this money, and now I have the skill, not you."

A coach is there to guide you, to give you the tools to run your own business, not to run your business for you and not to make your decisions for you. If you're waiting for approval before posting something, launching something, or changing a service, ask yourself, "What am I afraid of? Is it judgment? Is it failure? Is it being visible?"

You cannot transform anything that you don't acknowledge. Name the fear so it can be addressed directly. Don't say it's in the name of scaling. You should be wanting to go to a coach to learn a skill set, to solve a problem in your business, to learn how to create a business model.

I think my programs are a little bit different in that they're very actionable. Every single week, you're literally doing the work that you would have to do—rewriting the services, pricing things. I'm not just telling you broad ideas. In the coaching industry, I’ve definitely worked with coaches where they’re just like, "So what do you think about that?" It’s kind of like having a therapist.

If that's not what you're looking for, then make sure that you're asking people about their approach. But if you want someone who's going to tell you if every social media post that you are putting out there is acceptable or good enough before you hit post based on the framework they've given you, you are robbing yourself of that investment.

If you think a program should guarantee your success, remember, a program only works if you work. The most valuable programs give you frameworks and formulas so you don't look like everybody else, so you can be competition-proof, and so the business can be more yours. Most stylists have created Frankenstein businesses based on what they see out there, and that's great. I love that scrappiness, but when you're ready to start making real money, you have to act like a real business person.

I gave you frameworks, and the best coaches I have ever hired gave me frameworks so that I actually could stand out and become more myself. You don't give all of your clients the same outfits—of course not. They're not all trying to do the same things in the world.

If you find yourself constantly seeking validation from multiple sources—"Let me check with this person, let me check with that person, maybe one more time I'll just put this scenario by them again"—it is a clear sign that you are avoiding the discomfort of making a decision. There is work to do, not on outsourcing, not on scaling, on trusting yourself, on trying to figure out what you are so afraid of about making a mistake.

I can tell you from personal experience that up until about six years ago, I had to check in with so many people before making a decision. I don't even recognize that person anymore. This shocks a lot of people, but my husband actually wrote me a really beautiful card for my birthday. He said, "I can't believe how much more sure of yourself you are. When I look back to even five years ago, you needed so much more approval, and now you just move through the world without needing that anymore."

If you're someone who just can't even imagine that this is possible for you, I'm going to be honest with you and tell you that you probably don't need a business coach—you need a therapist. You may need a trauma-informed therapist.

I'm not going to get too into that, but I see a lot of perfectionism and fear of failure coming out of sometimes trauma. I think we don’t always realize what actually is legitimate trauma. We think that we have to have been terribly beaten or abused for it to qualify.

So again, that's not what this episode is about, but it doesn't feel right for me to step over the self-trust issue without saying that just like you can't make a client see themselves differently if their family of origin was always telling them they were unattractive or they could never be stylish, if they have a pattern in their life connected to primal safety that is off because of what happened to them as kids or how they were communicated with, you outfits are not going to fix it and my business planning isn’t going to fix it for you.

I don't think we talk about this enough in the online space, and I am certainly not an expert about it. There are definitely people way more qualified, but because it's at the foundation of so much—of people I’ve experienced myself, of my friends, of a lot of other women, and I’m sure men too, but I can't speak for that personally—it’s because of how we grew up and what we saw.

If it wasn't okay to stand out, if it wasn't okay to make a mistake, if it wasn't okay to—well, we all have a different story. But I think it's really important to remember that, because usually people don’t just do this in one area of their life, they do it in all areas of their life. It may be that you want to work on getting some skills to build self-trust, which ironically has a very similar cadence to this. You have to do things when you feel uncomfortable before you can bring it into your business.

In my case, doing it in my business did help me personally, but I have to admit, I didn't really apply it to my personal life until much later. That's all I'm going to say about that, but I told you I was going to help you actually make progress on this, and so it didn't feel right to not mention it. If you're not in that case, if you notice you're just doing it in your business, you gotta remember that business is a game of trial and error.

Most of the time, literally no one is noticing your mistakes. Your audience is not analyzing your every move. They're focused on their own issues, mistakes, problems, and—if they're even thinking about you at all—whether you can help them. Instead of making everything about needing to be perfect, I want you to just make a decision, test it, and adjust it.

You will never get yourself into a position where you can only make a decision one time in the majority of your business. You're not just going to market once, you're going to market all the time. If a post flops, oh well. If your story doesn't get any likes, okay. Tomorrow's a new day. That's just how you have to build trust in yourself when you're building a business.

Another place I see stylists really struggling or thinking that they can outsource their success is using AI to replace critical thinking. AI is amazing. I use multiple AI sites every single day. I think especially if you are neurodivergent or you struggle with certain things, it can be incredibly life-changing. It has certainly been that for me.

AI is really great for structuring ideas that are already brewing, for helping you with grammar and spelling, for optimizing your workflow, for helping you when you're overwhelmed, and prioritizing tasks. But it can't think for you, and it can't build relationships with your clients, which is what the foundation of your marketing is.

If you let AI write all of your content, your messaging will sound generic. I mean, have you ever had ChatGPT write a post from scratch for you? It's the worst. It's trained on the average internet content. It's not trained for specialists. It's trained on what the average conglomerate of information is out there about personal style, which I think most of us know—it's not rocket science, but it's also not the most cutting-edge and innovative right now.

Do you want your content to be average? Because when you ask it to start with its ideas, it will be average, because that's what most people's idea of personal style is. That's why they need you.

Also important to note that a lot of social media algorithms are now penalizing AI-written content. It's actually probably hurting your reach more than you even realize if you didn’t know that. Both Instagram and Google have updated their guidelines to prioritize human-created content, and they're spending a lot of money to be able to detect that.

So, no AI platform—none that you pay for, none that's free—is going to know your audience better than you do. It hasn't sat across from your client while they teared up talking about how they felt invisible since having kids. It hasn't seen them in their underwear like you have. It hasn't heard the relief in someone's voice when they finally see themselves in the mirror and feel like, "Yes, this is how I want to look for this life-changing interview that I have coming up."

Here's how I want you to use AI instead. I want it to refine your content, not replace critical thinking. Write your first draft or talk into a talk-to-text app, which is what I do, capturing the essence of what you want to say. The client story, the specific pain points, the unique approach that you want to highlight, and then let AI polish it. Or write an outline so that you have to write the actual sentences.

Suggest places where it can improve your points or clarify them, and ask how they would change the general idea for different platforms. Say you're going to do an Instagram post, but you're also going to do a script for a podcast or YouTube. That can be helpful. Have it outline it, and then you write the sentences. They can be partial sentences, and then you're making them full sentences, which is going to make the biggest difference in it not sounding like AI.

The last one I want to address here is something I kind of touched on, but it’s a really big red flag for me when stylists tell me this because I have a lot of experience working with stylists who have done this, which is outsourcing social media before they know what works.

I have several stylists who are at six figures who are paying anywhere between $1,000 a month to $2,000 a month to social media agencies. Here’s what they’re ending up with by the time they get to me, and they’re like, “What am I going to do?” This is not “I don’t have any money.” They’re getting more followers but no sales. They have generic content that isn’t converting, and they have a really big bill that is not giving them any ROI.

Why is that happening? Because if you don’t know how to turn followers into clients, no agency will either. They can be an expert in every single industry, and even the ones—and this is important because I know some of you are thinking it because I have clients who have worked with “the best” social media agencies for fashion and lifestyle.

But you know what the majority of their clients are? Influencers. Because who makes the most money? That. Social media agencies are really, really good at a few things—trends and engagement. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to get sales. Engagement that leads to sales can look very different than engagement for the sake of it.

But you are the expert on your client. You are the one, again, who sees them in their underwear. You are the one with access to the confidence they share with you when they are vulnerable in their styling experiences. You are literally holding the keys to the exact business you want because you are having conversations with the people that matter most to your business—your clients.

That should be the foundation of all of your content. But unfortunately, most agencies don’t start with a process that is proven for sales. They start with a process that is proven for engagement, for visibility, for growing the numbers of the account.

Here's what I want you to know about business that has changed my life. The person who closes sales calls—which for most of my clients that I work with is the stylist themselves—is the person who will always have the most control over the content that converts in a business. You might not know how to use that information yet because you have a skill deficiency that you need to learn how to fix in your marketing, but you and only you have the answers.

Other people can help you be more efficient. They can help you grow the account faster, but they cannot create sales because that would require successful messaging, and they don’t have access to that information. If you don’t have any evidence of what gets people to buy from your social media or from your newsletter because you’re not being thoughtful about the kind of content you’re putting out, I promise you, trending sounds are not going to fix the problem, nor is putting out more content.

What I want you to do is pump the brakes on that investment if that's what you're thinking your next move is. Instead, I want you to learn what works first. Do less in some cases, because if you're burned out, I would rather you go deeper.

If you have great posts, that'd be better than putting out five posts a day or a week, and then outsource efficiently. Because what most stylists are looking for is help getting more of their time back. They think that it’s all of the marketing and handing it to someone else, but it's usually playing around in Canva.

It's usually feeling up for doing the B-roll and all that stuff. You need to write the content, you need to have the conversation with your clients, you need to think of the topics, and then you can give it to maybe a VA or somebody else to put it in Canva. Because that's what's taking most of us a long time.

Go for a walk, get a talk-to-text app, and just download as many ideas as you can into that app as you go for a walk. That's going to be better once it's refined and put into a better you got a good hook on there, whatever, than anything that AI or some agency that doesn't know your people is going to create for you.

Here's the thing, you don't need high numbers as a stylist. You should be able to hit six figures with 30 new clients a year and then existing clients. What does it matter if someone's getting you thousands of new eyes on your content if you don't know how to get any of these people to book with you? That's a vanity metric. That’s not going to transform any lives and certainly not your bank account.

Really think about, "Do I want these people to come into my business and do content for me so that I can run away and blame someone else for skills I'm not getting?" I know it's harsh, and I love you all, but I gotta tell you the truth, because I hate seeing clients spending $40,000, $50,000 a year on something by the "best people" and not making any money.

Technically, it's really not the fault of the social media agency, because their job—and they will always say this—is to get you more visibility, not to close the sale. They're not on the sales call. Again, that gives you the evidence that because you're the person on the sales call, you should be closing them earlier in your marketing.

All of it makes sense when you think about it properly, when you're not running, when you're not being reactive. If you're there, if you’re already knowing how to close sales, that is when it's fine for you to go to an agency. Because if they're not doing deep enough work or they're giving you advice that's bad, you are the expert and could say, "No, that's not going to work for me. That's not going to work for my clients. That idea sucks. Give me another one."

You're in control. I'm not saying never work with one of these agencies. I'm saying do it once you get the skills you need to be in control of the relationship so they're working for you, not the other way around. Because at the end of the day, that's what most people are doing. They're working for the people they're paying money to because they're hoping these people are going to tell them the right thing to do, when it should be the other way around.

They should help you figure out what trends are going to make sense. They should be giving you ideas that you're vetting. They shouldn't be telling you how to close a sale. They don't know. If you put in the effort and spend a little time learning how to market yourself properly, and think of this as building relationships and sales as not a one-time event, but a process—that’s why showing up consistently is so important. Because we're building relationships with people. This is not a transaction—if that's the case, once you crack that code, you will feel a lot better about that aspect.

If you only take this away, and there's only one thing you remember, it's that you can't outsource your self-trust. Get into the practice of asking yourself, "Is that what I'm trying to do here?" when you're making a decision. It's okay to be nervous. It's okay to be anxious. It's even okay to want somebody to give you the answers, as long as you're committed to carrying that forward with action.

It's okay to be interested in coaching. It's okay to be unsure, that's fine. We want you practicing enough that it's not your default. When you stop outsourcing the work, it will change your life. Most importantly, it will change how you feel about yourself. You'll be able to pass that on to your clients in an even deeper way as a stylist. That's it for today. If this hit home, share it with any friends you have that are stylists who needed to hear it. I will see you next time.

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.