PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Welcome to the Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast, the ultimate no-BS business podcast for ambitious personal stylists ready to build a six-figure and beyond personal styling business.

You won't hear the typical snoozefest business advice that most personal stylists get told all of the time. Nope. Instead, I'll be sharing business-building strategies that will help you create a killer personal brand, a cult following of loyal personal styling clients, and make a ton of cash while creating lasting style transformations for your clients.

I'm Nicole Otchy, your host and a former personal stylist of 14 years who built a lucrative styling business in three major cities, but only after spending years trying to crack the six-figure styling business code without burning out. And now I'm here to tell you how to do exactly the same. Let's get into it.

Welcome back. Today we're going to talk about how to have your best summer in business yet. Super excited about this because I spent so many years thinking, like so many people in the industry do, that summer is just slow for stylists.

It's only slow for stylists if you believe it's slow for stylists, it turns out. If you act in a way that will make your business slow. So we're going to talk about how to do that and how to create momentum even when you're taking time off, you're resting, you're being present with the people you love, you're taking care of yourself.

Because this episode is not about doing more, it is about understanding how your business actually works so that you can take care of it while you’re taking care of yourself. So important. You can absolutely be booking clients while you’re at the beach with your kids or on vacation. You can have sales lined up even if you’re not in your inbox for a week or two.

But only if you’re willing to think beyond the moment, let go of some pre-conceived issues that this styling industry tends to have about certain months that are not in fall and spring, and lead your business with a little bit of foresight so that you're not reacting in the moment or making blanket assumptions about sales prognosis that are not true.

So let's talk about why summer feels like a dead zone in styling, even though it's actually not. Because here's what I see happen every year: stylists assume that it's going to be a dead season anyway, so they might as well take it off, or it just happens to work for their family, which is fine. You can take time off. I take somewhere to the tune of between three and four months off, all in, in a year.

So I have no problem with that. But I continue to make sales during that period. And I, by the way, as of right now when I'm recording this, May 9th, I do not have any passive products.

So right now my business model looks very much like yours does as a stylist in terms of high volume of one-to-one. Or I do a leveraged group program, which I teach live, and I also have Voxer in it. So no matter what I'm selling, it involves me.

I'm also doing my own sales calls, answering my own emails. So I know what this looks like for you. That's why I'm saying it is totally possible to book clients for later while you are being present with your family, because I literally do it all the time.

So this assumption that "I'm not physically in my business, so why bother?" Plus, there's this added layer of, "It's slow and summer engagement is down on Instagram," which, huge misconception there, because if it is down, which okay, maybe it is, the people that are watching are your warmest leads.

So we're leaving sales on the table there. We're leaving sales on the table by not showing up in a way that's engaging our audience. Like, if we're just showing the behind-the-scenes of our vacation, which is like fine, but it's not a sales trigger for anyone.

So what happens is, there becomes this belief that it's okay to disappear, and you'll just pick it back up in the fall. There are a lot of reasons why that's problematic. Some of the assumptions that are layered in here is like, "Well, I don't have a passive offer, so I can't sell if I'm not live in the business."

So no email goes out, no content goes into your feed, and no sales conversations are being invited onto your calendar. The real issue here is not a lack of a passive product or that your business isn't "scalable" as a lot of stylists think, and we're going to talk about scalability soon because it's a hot topic right now.

It's a lack of strategy that accounts for how service-based businesses actually work and how your services and your marketing need to work together if you are expecting to consistently book high-ticket, transformational personal styling clients. And here is what it looks like: If you market today, you book the client later, as in potentially weeks or months from now. If you ghost today, your calendar will dry up for the next season. And that's a part of the sales and marketing that coaches aren't really clear about in their public-facing content.

This is something lots of people keep behind their course doors. You have to pay to get this information. I think it's incredibly damaging. I'm just going to put it right here, right now, for free: You don't market to get booked today or to get booked next week. You market to get booked 60 to 90 days from now. I did not make this up. This is a known thing in the marketing world. Anybody that's worked in strategy knows this.

This is why people in big brands, bigger companies, plan out their marketing campaigns several quarters in advance. It's just a blind spot in small businesses. Because especially when we're talking about transformational styling services that have a higher price point, a higher level of intimacy with the client, there is a longer sales runway.

Because a stylist has to build trust over time in their content with a potential client to have that client take the vulnerable leap to get on a sales call with them to begin with.

Now I have the exact same business model, which is why this podcast goes out no matter if I'm on vacation or not. Like, nobody even knows nine times out of ten when I'm off unless I choose to share that because nothing looks any different.

So when you understand that the way that marketing works is that there is a lag between what you say today and the money you get tomorrow or next week or next month—and usually, honestly, 60 to 90 days, so sometimes a whole quarter—you will change your behavior.

That means we're here to be consistent, but we don't need to make our marketing rule our life. It means that we know how to plan. It means that we've done the work, hopefully, to know how to activate our audience to buy. If we don't, then that's our work, not skipping out on our business.

When you do that, when you understand that what you say today impacts the money that comes in 60 to 90 days later, now we have a new view of what summer actually is about in the styling industry. The reason why 90% of stylists have an enormous lag in summer, including me back in the day, a decade or more ago, was because you get busy in spring, you put your head down, you are busy doing client work, client delivery, your systems probably are not in place like most of ours aren't, and then all of a sudden you look up and the kids are going to be off for school, it's summer, and now the majority of new clients have allocated their summer budget to something else, like a fancy vacation.

It's not that summer dries up everybody's money. It's that it's already allocated to other things by the time the stylist gets out of the spring busy season. That is the logical and honest reason why we have the slumps we have, and this is why strategy and working with someone that knows the industry is so important. Because lots of stylists work with just general business coaches and they get lots out of it, but somebody unable to explain to you why you keep having those things—because they don't understand the level of behind-the-scenes work that goes into styling—and they can't tell you how to use that behind-the-scenes work, head-down work, to advertise for the next season, which is what I feel very strongly about.

Like, you should be booking yourself out for the season before. Then when you're in the delivery of your seasonal clients, for whatever season it is, you should be using that behind-the-scenes to start booking people and advertising and warming people up for the next season. Without that, you will experience these dips in income and act like you don't know why.

But when you know that what you do 60 to 90 days prior to today is what gets you the money that you do or don't have now, all of a sudden we can handle that and change our behavior. So let me be really clear about something: you can rest and you can build revenue.

This is why I don't like stylists having a million offers. This is why I like everything being really simple and streamlined. Because this is not about pushing through or ignoring your real life. I don't build businesses like that, and I don't expect you to.

Most importantly because, A, I think it's inhumane. But B, you can't be a transformational stylist if you don't take time to take care of yourself. Because then you can't be fully present with your clients. And also, it's kind of not the best look if we're out here telling other people to take care of themselves.

So it's also in alignment with the transformational business to be having these seasons of rest and taking some time off. But it's not in alignment with a business that you treat as a business instead of a hobby to take your foot completely off the gas and not market.

So you can absolutely take a week here, three weeks away from your laptop, two weeks, a month, whatever. But if you want clients waiting for you when you're back, your visibility cannot disappear just because your physical presence does.

What shifts everything is understanding how to set up your business so that your content is working while you rest, your audience is being nurtured even when you're not on, your calendar is filling up while you're watching your kids jump off of a dock somewhere or make a sandcastle. And that is going to start with shifting out of short-term thinking.

Your summer strategy and getting clients for summer—as I record this now in May—if you haven't done that yet, if you haven't made a plan, you're a little behind, but we still have a tiny bit of time to get you back up, okay?

There may be a point where you're going to see that in the next 30ish days, if you start marketing now, you're probably not going to get a ton of new clients. You could warm up your established clients. You could do whatever you want. You could set up a waitlist for fall if you're taking the whole summer off.

But do not tap out of if you're going to be gone for a week or something, that's fine. If it's going to be a month, you might have to take two days of that month to do some sales calls.

You want to be able to stay top of mind during the summer so that you can set yourself up, honestly, for August and September and even October. Because if you don't start and get in front of people, what I end up seeing is that stylists over time start to see a dwindling of repeat clients.

And they come back in September, and now people's September, October, November revenue, because kids are back at school, they're paying for sports, they're doing all the things, is gone. Or they've gone with a different stylist because people are getting ready for "back to school" in July and August, and that includes their own wardrobe.

Because that is the sales trigger that we get to use from the marketing world in retail. I'm not saying you have to be taking clients. But you do have to be doing enough to stay in front of your ideal client's eyeballs so that they know they could be allocating some of their discretionary income, which is what styling is paid for with, quite honestly, to you instead of to something else.

Stylists who are doing the best in my world take lots of time off. They see their kids' plays, they go to the sports games, they're doing all those things, but they plan out strategically for the next couple of seasons. They are always thinking about who they're booking next, and they've learned the basic skills you need to make that really, really simple and a no-brainer, which is basic marketing and sales skills.

This is how I can have a $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 launch for Income Accelerator while I'm on vacation in the Dominican Republic with my family. Because the plan is done weeks before I go. And yeah, I did have to have a few Vox or chats about sales by the pool, so not a big deal.

That's why having the kind of skills I talk about in those positioning episodes is literally money in the bank and completely changes how you view your business. Because now none of these things I'm talking about are a big deal.

So here are the three things I just want to kind of put on your radar to avoid this summer, or another time this can happen a lot is during the holidays, right? Because we also have these assumptions that like nobody buys after the holidays.

So the first thing, especially since we're technically still in spring, is don't stop showing up when your client work ramps up. If you're in the middle of client work, show me it. Show me behind the scenes. Spring can get busy. Do not go quiet.

This is why you need to know what the bare minimum requirements to run a business are, and also what the bare minimum things are you have to say to your ideal client to get them to book. Because it's not that hard when you get it, but consistency through your busy season is going to set you up for your next season, which is why you’ve got to be working for fall in the summer.

Number two is don’t wait until September to “get serious” about your business again. Like I said, by September your ideal clients have already allocated a lot of their budgets elsewhere. If you want to do corporate trainings, it is too late by then because budgets have gone other places. You are late to the party.

In an ideal world, you are booking for summer or talking about summer or letting people know, “Hey, I’m going to have openings in April for the summer, April/May for summer, and then mid-July to August for the fall through the fall.” Now I'm not saying that you won’t continue to get people through the fall, but you have to talk about your offers, your specific offer, not just, “Oh, I have openings,” a specific offer with a name, up to 12 times, for people to remember it and even start considering it.

So that means that if people only see—according to Instagram algorithm stats—at most 8% of your content, and you're showing up only once in a while, or when you do show up in the summer you’re just showing me behind the scenes of your vacation, statistically speaking, no one heard from you because you didn’t mention anything. This is why we just have to know what to do to be able to be successful.

The last one that I just want you to be a little bit wary about is showing up online this summer without a strategy. So it's totally fine to share the behind-the-scenes of your life. I'm a big fan of that because it gives people an entry point into a relationship with you that is not as threatening as, say, responding to if they want to buy from you.

But you want to do that in a way that deepens trust, positions you as an expert, and invites engagement so that you are creating a conversation back and forth about something that you and your audience care about.

The problem with “lifestyle content” is it doesn’t work to just show me behind the scenes of random kids’ soccer games or whatever and expect that I’m going to feel a relationship with you. Now, if you have an audience and a client base that spends a lot of their time, for some reason, something about your niche is like driving the kids to soccer all the time, I guess that’s fine.

But what things do you have in common with your audience? And if travel is one of them, like I have a lot of clients who share a lot of travel, and I love that, but they always bring it back to something about their business. At least if they’re going away for a week, three days of those Instagram stories will show the behind the scenes and also say, “Oh, I love that when I go on vacation, I can use the formula from XYZ program that I created to build my outfits,” or whatever. Like they’re bringing it back.

It’s not just some random lifestyle content because that is the equivalent of static that waters down your messaging. I get it, you don’t want to just show and sell all the time. But you want to show it as an expert, and experts make their content about their audience or about things their audience care about.

You want to make sure you know your audience well enough to know if those vacation photos matter to them. Not because there’s anything bad or wrong with it, but because it doesn’t count as showing up and marketing your business. That’s not the kind of “get in front of people’s eyeballs” I mean, that’s going to get you booked in fall.

So we just have to talk about it. Lifestyle content has to align with your target market, and it has to make sense for one of the values that you're trying to embody in your content.

So sometimes I'll show a little behind the scenes of my life with my toddler, she’s four. Why? Because I want to show there’s a balance. Because most of my content is work-related, between what I say that I value, which is having a work-life balance and having a business that works with your life, and my personal life. But if I don’t show you my personal life, why should you believe me that I have that?

So I don’t just show my kid randomly for no reason. I show that I play with her and then I do crafts after school or that I get off my phone, and then I also work hard. Both are possible when you're a mom. So that's why I show that, it's not an accident. I show the things I read and the types of things I'm interested in because I want clients that have intellectual curiosity.

Intellectual curiosity creates great content. I don't have to cultivate that in them because they're already attracted to it in my content. Nothing is an accident, and that doesn't mean that all of it isn't an authentic reflection of me and how I really am in the real world.

We tend to think of lifestyle content like I just described as weird or inauthentic, but it's actually weirder to your audience not to do that. What it does is allow people to come and talk to me and create a relationship with me, people who are also moms or also love to read about something that they may hire me, they may never, but I have a relationship with my audience that is relationship-building. I talk about that a lot on this podcast. That's how your lifestyle content does that for you.

So I'm not saying that you need to work more. I'm saying you just need to think ahead. You don't even need to create more or different content, you just have to make sure that the words you carry to go with that content make sense for your sales goals.

So here are five ways to market your business this summer without being on all the time. Because if you know me, you know I'm not even on Instagram or any of the other places I show up online on the weekends. I usually take most of Friday off, but maybe I’ll show a little bit or do one or two quick stories. But I don’t post on the weekends. I don’t market my business. So I don’t believe in being on all the time.

The number one thing I want you to do to plan is to repurpose and preschedule your content. Take your best-performing content from earlier in the year, refresh it, queue it up, schedule it, and don't think about it. Then just go into the app once in a while, a couple of times a week, and reply to comments so you’re not ghosting people.

I want you to batch light-touch connection points. Record a few personal videos. Create a behind-the-scenes Instagram series. Set up weekly polls or DMs. You don’t have to be live for it to be personal. Put some notes in your phone about things you could throw up some polls about to keep your audience engaged. Keep the connection there, but don’t make it be the highest amount of brain calories you need. This doesn’t have to be a big orchestrated thing. Light connection points, that’s it.

Three. This would be a really great time to re-engage warm leads in your DMs before you go away. A thing that I think is really important to do is have it on your calendar, "Where can I reconnect if I’m going to be away for a while? How can I let people know when I’ll be available again that are warm leads to book?” People may decide to book now for fall. Take their money. It’s fine. People like to plan ahead. Find those people.

Number four: anchor to one clear offer. You don’t need to—and shouldn't—be selling a million things in summer. You can even pre-sell fall, but just focus on one offer.

We don’t need to confuse people or make general claims. People need to see an offer, like I said, between 8 and 12 times in order to buy from you. So just pick one that you want to pre-sell or sell so that you’ll have something to come back to when you're ready to get back to business. That will help you feel way more like a pro.

The fifth one is use your downtime wisely. I’m a big fan of this. You do not have to be, like I said, online all day in order to build sales momentum. One thing I do a lot—and I’ve talked about this and it’s changed my life completely—is I capture voice notes when I’m out and about. The other day, I spent half the day going to grocery stores to find this very specific salad dressing because I’m a little crazy and also working on some nutrition stuff.

I’m trying to get really good things that taste good and aren't super high in calories. So I decided that the best use of my time on a random Wednesday would be going to like 19 grocery stores in New York City.

And what did I do? I was like, "Okay, if I’m going to do this, I have a ton of content to create." I used voice notes on my phone to create three podcasts and multiple Instagram posts.

Then I just take that, edit it—because it’s a talk-to-text app I use called Notta AI (I’ll put it in the show notes)—and I do this all the time: during my morning walks, when I’m doing my makeup. All kinds of times, I create long-form voice notes.

Then I use AI, or I sit down with a draft of the talk-to-text in my phone and edit it down. Then I either stick it in Canva or do whatever I do with it.

So just because you're not at your computer doesn’t mean you can’t set yourself up for content. Maybe I watch a show for 30 minutes and throw things in Canva to make my slides. It's not that big of a deal. You can still be with your family and do that. That’s the kind of thinking I want you to have.

Again, the more you know who you're talking to, the more that flexibility becomes a non-issue, because you don’t have all of the head trash around, "What do I say? I don’t know what to do."

A lot of this stuff isn’t that you need a plan or some strategy thing in the sense of like you’re doing something wrong. It’s that you don’t know who you're talking to. You haven’t invested the time to get to know what you need to know about your audience in order to make this simple for you.

There’s no reason you can’t have this life. There’s absolutely no reason. That’s the only thing standing in the way.

So here is the bottom line. Taking time off is not a problem. Not planning for what happens after the time off is the issue.

You do not need a different business model. You do not need to "scale." You do not need a passive product to make money while you're resting because, literally, I do not. It works.

You just need a system and a plan that runs while you are living your life, and you need some of the tactics I talked about today to help you do that. Because you can absolutely spend time with your family this summer, or at the holidays, or whenever you want. Or if you just want to take care of yourself and not work, you can also do that.

You can travel, you can unplug, but we don't go silent and then act surprised when in September things feel slow or when no one's buying in summer, because momentum is earned before you need it. People's trust in their sales is earned before we should be expecting it.

That is part of the issue here. There is an underlying sense sometimes in this industry of, "Well, I marketed for like three weeks and nobody bought my offer," because no one's heard about your offer. Also, you said it once on an Instagram story. Nobody paid attention. Nobody heard you.

I would rather people think that the problem is that they didn't say it enough than that there's something wrong with their audience. Because one, you can solve, and the other one is none of your business, what your audience is doing.

Your only goal should be focusing on your actions and what kind of results they're getting you, because you don't know how it lands on the other side. But I'll tell you right now, transformational services require trust. Trust is built through consistency.

There is no other relationship in our lives that we would think it was okay to call relationship-building or relationship maintenance to text someone a picture of our iced coffee at the beach and say, "Out of office," and then wonder why they're not calling us a month later.

So think about it this way, your relationship with your business and with your clients. How would it feel if in any other relationship of your life, you were ghosted? And then that person expected you to go to their baby shower, go to their wedding, whatever. You wouldn't like that, spend money on something in their life. The same is true when we do this in our business.

So having that clarity of what you do today doesn't impact tomorrow or a week later. It impacts what happens 60 to 90 days from now in your business, should be the takeaway that you feel changes your life, if you did not know that. Because it literally changed mine.

And I would say it is one of the most foundational things that got me to six figures as a stylist after years of struggling. I changed my behavior almost overnight because I got it. I truly got how I was acting in my business gave me the results that I had.

Even though I wanted to believe everybody was slow in summer, wildly, after seven years, my summers didn't look like that anymore. Isn't that interesting? "It was me all along," right? Because wherever you go, there you are. I hate that, but it's true.

So please enjoy your summer. Please take time off. That is what transformational stylists need to do to continue to show up transformationally for their clients. But leadership looks like consistency.

All you need to do that is to thoughtfully plan things out. Enjoy your summer, take a break, rest fully. I'll still be here. But remember, we're marketing the summer for our fall season, and I want everybody listening to have their best fall yet.

It'll be an entire series on that. But for now, this is how you're going to get there all summer. I'll talk to 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.