PODCAST SHOWNOTES

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

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

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

Today, I'm going to walk you through the exact order I would invest in in my business if I were starting over with some clients under my belt, but no consistent income and no clear path to six figures, let alone multiple six figures. This is not theoretical. It is based entirely on hindsight that I earned from spending well over half a million dollars in business expenses as a stylist.

A lot of the tactics I am going to share with you today are how I got the styling consultancy to multiple six figures in under two years. This includes bad investments I made, unnecessary investments I made, and those I was not ready for.

Because here's the thing: the order of your investments matters so much more than the amount of investments that you make or how much money you spend on those investments. The issue here isn't if you should invest. It is what you invest in, when you invest, and why you invest, because you do have to invest at some point.

Most stylists, my former self included, burn cash on things that look good before they know who they're serving, what they're offering, and how to convert interest from potential clients into income. That kind of spending doesn't grow your business. It is just hiding behind pretty design, but still being confused.

Let me explain why the order of what you invest in matters in a very, very vivid way. A new client that I started working with last month spent $8,000 on a complete rebrand. A custom logo, website, multi-day photo shoot. This was an established stylist. This was a stylist who had been in business for several years and she got zero new client inquiries in the six months that followed that redesign.

Why? Because her messaging wasn't clear and she was expecting a rebrand to do something that wasn't its job: fix a messaging problem. Because no design team can fix that. Aesthetics are not what converts. Messaging and connection is what converts styling clients.

So if you invest in visuals before the foundational work that makes a business actually run, you're essentially designing a billboard for a business that you don't actually understand. You don't need a $10,000 rebrand or an $8,000 rebrand before you get a website. "There is an in-between here that you need to understand."

So you need to get clarity first. Here are the things you absolutely need to know before you are spending money on copywriters, SEO, ads, any other investment that includes anybody but you and maybe a URL for your website.

Who are you serving? What do you care about? What keeps them up at night that makes them choose you specifically over another stylist? And what specific problems are you solving for those specific people?

Once you know that, then and only then should you go ahead and spend on branding or ads or more visibility. Because otherwise, you're just creating a very polished veneer for a business that isn't actually a business because it's not earning money.

Here's the part that I really want to get totally, totally just honest about here. The reason why it's so deeply problematic to be spending thousands upon thousands of dollars on websites before you know who you're talking to is because it's not necessary. There are things called Etsy. Canva has an entire section that has a website that you can design for free except for the cost of Canva.

There is absolutely no reason why you can't drop 50, 60 bucks on a website template that looks beautifully designed. I mean, I spent $500 on one and it looks like a multi-thousand-dollar website. People have asked me over and over again, "Where did you go? Who did your website?" It's just a template that I bought.

And when I started this business, I hosted my website on Canva to get to my first hundred thousand dollars. As a matter of fact, the majority of that time I was just using Instagram and a PDF. And so you can spend 10 bucks, you can spend 100 bucks, and look like a million bucks in your branding.

I'm not saying don't go hire a designer. I feel very strongly that designers are a necessary part when you have your messaging right. But there's no designer out there that doesn't agree with me that's worth the amount of money you're going to pay them that's not going to say, "It would really help if you knew your target audience," because your website isn't just for you. Your branding isn't just for you. It is also for the people that are going to encounter it and hopefully resonate with it.

But if you don't know who they are, then that designer cannot do their job to the best of their ability. So start with things that look polished. I'm not saying your branding should look like flaming hot garbage. You are stylists. But it's not thousands of dollars or nothing. This is where stylists hide because they make it seem like it's only those two options. It's just not.

Stylists that are spending thousands of dollars to make their business look legit with design still have hobby businesses. Let me be very clear about it. If you don't know how to convert sales, you don't have a business, you have a hobby. Even if you sometimes get clients once in a while, right? Because all that is is luck.

When you don't know what services are the right fit for the target market you want, you are still playing hobby business, okay? The brand may look good to you, the messaging might seem good to you, but you are not your ideal client. So you are the last person we should be running that by, quite honestly.

The next area that I see letting stylists down when it comes to investments is chasing visibility before clarity. Visibility is absolutely the most sexy spending trap. PR, SEO, ads, they all sound like the solution.

I cannot tell you—I don't know what it is about husbands and ads, I really don't—how many people have been like, "Well, my husband really thinks I need to run ads." My husband had a thing about ads too. I don't know why husbands love ads. Would love to hear how the wives feel about ads. But they have strong opinions on ads.

Yet every single person I have ever talked to in the ad space, including my old coaches who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads, have all said the same thing: "Do not spend money on ads until you know what converts because it's too expensive."

I think people have this idea in the online space that you spend money on ads and it's going to be like you spend $1 and you make $5. That's actually not the math on it. It's a one-to-one ratio. You're pretty much breaking even on ads. But the goal here is to keep them in your ecosystem longer, which is where it gets even more problematic when you don't understand your business model.

Because you're spending money on ads, but you have no upsell-downsell situation happening. Most stylists do not have really robust, established client services behind the scenes to keep each client longer. So every amount of money they spend for an ad ends up actually just being one-to-one, and it's a wash because they're not retaining clients long enough.

So with ads especially, you need to be able to not only know what's going to convert at a 95% accuracy rate from your organic messaging, you also need to be sure that you have a robust business model that's going to retain clients that are a good fit longer, or else you're never going to make a profit on that ad.

This is where, again, business acumen really matters. Because the other areas that I see people investing in way too soon is SEO and PR.

Let's get to PR first, because that one's pretty cut and dry in terms of why it's a problem.

If somebody comes to you and is like, “I want to feature you in an article,” take the PR. I'm not going to tell you no.

But when you're paying a lot of money for PR and placements, again, the placement really matters. So where a publicist puts you is going to all be relevant to where your target market is actually going to be. A lot of stylists don't understand that magazine or digital placements in magazines are not actually going to last that long. So the amount of money they pay for that PR is pretty high for the amount of attention they get for it.

It just has a really, really quick watchout rate. People see it once, maybe you get to put it on your website, but it doesn’t usually hold enough value for someone to hire you just because of the PR placement if they don’t feel a connection with you.

So again, if your messaging isn’t working, it may attract more people up front, but if you don’t know how to close the sale, if you don’t know how to talk about why your services are the right fit for the right people—because you’re actually maybe not getting PR placements in the right places—then it’s really not worth the money.

Now again, if somebody reaches out to you, like a reporter, or you're doing posting on HARO, which is Help A Reporter Out, and you see somebody that’s like, “Oh, I need a stylist for this story,” definitely do it. It’s free. Who cares? It’s not going to hurt you.

There’s nothing wrong with having press credentials on your website. It’s just not going to help if you don’t already have a good sense of who you're talking to, or you're attracting the wrong people with that PR. But if you get free coverage, go for it.

I think stylists would be better off pitching podcasts because it has a longer shelf life. People listen to it longer. So the chances of your discoverability is much longer. But again, you also need to know who you’re talking to and be sure that if you’re pitching those podcasts, you're able to write a pitch that gives their audience value based on the fact that you share the same audience.

Again, general styling tips and stuff like that, they don’t do it for podcast hosts anymore. There’s just a much higher expectation. So you being able to have a really strong point of view and have something to say that’s interesting, that doesn’t sound like everybody else, which, I don’t think we’re always the best at understanding that we’re actually blending in.

Sometimes we think that saying something like, “I don’t think your body size should dictate your style,” stylists think that’s really groundbreaking. It’s not. Everyone’s saying that. Everyone’s saying things like, “Your style doesn’t fit the person you are today.”

I get it. Also, nobody hears that. That’s not how people think about their style. So you really need to make sure you’re working with someone that can help you know if you have an original idea. Because otherwise, you’re going to be pitching, pitching, pitching to podcasts, and no one’s going to say yes.

Let’s talk SEO. SEO is interesting because you can do SEO before you know who you’re actually talking to. I did this back in the day. What ended up happening was I also didn’t have sales skills. So I would get a lot more inquiries, for sure. So it felt like it was successful.

But then when I look back at the income I was making, it was actually the same. I wasn’t retaining or signing as many clients because it was just very “anybody that Googled on the internet.”

The other reason why SEO right now is a little bit problematic—and I wouldn’t suggest stylists spending a ton of money—is because how people search is changing. More people are looking to ChatGPT and other AI models to get recommendations. So getting your business inside those models is going to be a better return on your investment.

I’m seeing a lot more SEO companies begin to turn to that and will probably be offering that more in the future, in addition to the traditional Google SEO rankings.

Now, what you need to know about SEO is that it takes a while, number one. Number two, same issue as all the others: if you don’t know who you’re talking to, just because you’re getting people on the website doesn’t mean you’re going to convert the right people.

And for every client you do convert, if they’re just an okay fit, you’re going to end up spending a lot of time with people that don’t stay in your ecosystem very long, when you could have been spending time with clients that actually were good fits and would come back.

So you’re going to get a lot more price negotiations. You’re going to get a lot more general sales objections. But they may not be valid sales objections. This is really important because they’re not actually coming from the right audience. They’re only valid sales objections if they’re the people you actually want to be talking to, right?

So stylists are out here getting more clients from SEO, for sure, but not necessarily the right ones. Then questioning their prices because they’re being told they’re too expensive, when the reality was that person wasn’t the right fit for their business.

So I would go with Pinterest first, because Pinterest is going to help you get your SEO up, but in a really educated way. Because you’re going to be pinning content that the person has to read to see if they’re a good fit. That content has to speak to the right people.

At least if you’re doing SEO through Pinterest—again, takes a while, this is not a quick fix, none of these things are—but you’re going to at least be getting people that will reach out for a sales call after they’ve read some piece of content that resonated with them. So it’s less of a cold lead.

But again, that means you have to know what to say to resonate with them to begin with. So if you can’t convert the people who are organically watching you, then adding more eyes through PR, SEO, ads—whatever that is—is just throwing money at a problem that you don’t actually know how to fix yet. So you’re making the problem bigger.

This is what frustrates stylists. This is what makes them doubt themselves. This is what makes them start to consider money objections and other issues that are really not legitimate issues in their business as really serious problems, and then chase solutions to those problems when they were never talking to the right people to begin with. So they’ve misdiagnosed the problem.

I just don’t think most people that want to get to a million dollars—from the people I have talked to in my career—have told me: do not go ahead and spend money until you’re at a million dollars on ads or PR or stuff like that.

Because A, you don’t need it. You can do it organically. And B, if you’re not able to get there, then you have missing parts of the puzzle that you need to fill in in order to get the most out of those investments.

So what should you invest in? Let me walk you through the order. Number one: clarity on your niche. Not demographics, psychographics. That’s the clarity you need.

Who do you want to serve? Who will pay for your styling services? Because those are not always the same. This overlap is your goldmine.

When you get this, you can change your niche as many times as you want because you understand the basic things that need to be in place for there to be market demand, and your service is actually meeting that. This is where most stylists never do the foundational work. This is why I start here in Income Accelerator and in my one-to-one.

Services that match your market, number two, stop copying other stylist services. Your services should solve specific problems for specific people. You going ahead and copying what someone else is doing literally ensures you’re not doing that.

Your offers for a working mom should not be the same as your offers for a retired woman who is traveling a lot. If your offer ladder doesn’t evolve with price, you’re charging blindly. You will burn out. You will wonder why nobody seems like a good fit or you’re not able to consistently get great results for your clients.

It’s because there’s a mismatch between the service you have, the people you’re calling in, and that’s going to impact your repeat client rate, which is going to make you work harder and make you eventually resent your business.

That is how serious I take copying other stylist services, because you are not committing to your clients when you do that. You're committing to taking a shortcut and hoping that you can cheat the system. That's not how it works. That's just not it. So pay for that problem forever or do it right the first time. Totally up to you.

The next one is you need to understand pricing based on value. Style is undercharged because they're unsure of what they're actually delivering. They can't often say, “When you do this package, this will be the outcome.” That’s a problem because without that ability to say it with clarity, you can't upsell or down-sell people, which means you will not keep your leads as long as you could.

When you know the transformation you provide at every single level, you stop feeling like your rates are just a shot in the dark. You stop being willing to compromise on your prices because you actually know what you're talking about.

That’s another reason why copying other people, looking at other people's pricing is irrelevant. Because when I tell you the majority of the industry has no idea where they're getting these prices from, I really stand on that 100%. I talk to about 18 to 25 stylists a week. A week.

There's no question that most people are just flying by the seat of their pants.

So the last thing you need to have before you start investing in expensive design, PR, all those things is sales skills. You need to learn how to convert people, and you need to know how to get paid, whether they convert or not. Meaning that if they hire you, you get paid, but if they don't, you use that messaging to call in right-fit clients. I've talked about that on here before.

That means vetting leads, handling objections, and leading a sales call like an expert. You're not good at sales just because people say yes to you. You could be good at marketing, maybe, but if you can't close both cold and warm leads—meaning people that have just found you out of nowhere and people that have been watching you for a long time—consistently, your sales skills are not where they need to be to get to a multi-six-figure styling business. Period.

At some point, it will plateau. Sales skills are non-negotiable. Most stylists have better sales skills than they think because they're actually good at convincing people to try things they would never try before. But they just have a really wacky, messed-up view of sales.

Last week, I had three sales calls. Two of them signed. Both of them thanked me for selling to them. Another one I told was not ready. Then she wrote me an email later to say she really appreciated my honesty.

So when you have sales skills, you're not just saying yes to everyone. This is another reason why most people don't understand that just because a lot of people say yes to you doesn't mean you have sales skills. It just means you know how to get people to say yes to you.

You're not vetting people if you're not able to turn people away. That means you're not leading a sales call like an expert. That means you're out of integrity.

If I had those things in place, I understood clarity on my niche and what makes a service profitable, two different niches, services that match my market, pricing based on value, not what I thought it should be, and I had sales skills that allowed me to always get paid for a sales call whether somebody signed with me or not, then I would start investing in things like design and branding. That would be probably the first thing I would do.

Then I would also include a photo shoot in that. I think you definitely need a photo shoot when you get started, but you don't need like a 15-outfit, multi-location lifestyle shoot. You just need a couple of lifestyle shots and some headshots, and that really should not be coming in at more than a thousand dollars.

Then you really want to be thinking about copywriting and admin help. That is the next best investment. Obviously, if you're doing your website and you want to get copywriting help—again, knowing who you're talking to, knowing what things convert—are going to radically speed up the process. Probably make it cheaper too, because you're able to help that copywriter get to the finish line without as much original work on their end. So that would be another great investment.

Any admin that's going to free your time up so that you can just stay doing the things that you're really great at, like styling and converting clients, is also going to be a good investment.

Then the last thing I would invest in is PR and SEO. PR, absolutely last. SEO, I would try.

Right now, I'm saying SEO only because of the way that AI is changing the way people search. So I would just wait. I think in another six months, we're going to have a clearer sense of this.

I would absolutely go for SEO for Pinterest first. Because again, a more educated SEO platform where people have to read your content and then get on a call with you versus just a Google search. Then I would try and see in a couple months if I got a better understanding of how an SEO agency would get me to show up on Google, but also get me to show up on ChatGPT and other AI models, I would go with that. Because then you're actually going to be able to get the most up-to-date and modern SEO.

The other thing you need to know about SEO that’s changing drastically is that Google just put out some announcements saying that they will be using social media posts and longer video transcripts to help people's search come up. So if you're not posting on social media, it will impact your SEO. That's no longer going to be an option for people.

So if you thought that you could get around being consistent on social, or some social platform, in order to sign clients and you could just hide behind SEO, those days are over.

Everybody’s going to have to get on board with understanding how to talk to clients. Which, honestly, it's unacceptable that that was ever the case. You could do that because it just doesn't make you a better stylist to avoid talking to the people you're supposed to be helping. But those days are over. So you should probably know that.

If you're delaying this work, you are not just losing money. You are losing belief in yourself. That erosion is what's truly costing you. Because you can always get money back, but you cannot get back the years you didn't believe in yourself, coming from someone who has a lot of years of not believing in herself behind her.

Stylists who skip this foundation end up in a loop of rebranding, rewriting, and relaunching, only to build the same ineffective business year over year.

The ones who commit to finally getting this right, whether it's in year five or year one or year two, they stop second-guessing themselves. They stop bouncing between offers that don't talk to anybody, and they finally feel in control of their business.

They build businesses that they run instead of businesses that run them. If you want to be one of these people, I highly recommend it because it will change your whole life.

The final round of Income Accelerator for 2025 is now open and taking applications. It is a small group with just 10 stylists. It's hybrid one-on-one support with group coaching, and we cover everything we just walked through step-by-step so that you can make the best investments and earn the most from those investments after the program.

Application link is in the show notes. We are already almost half full. So submit your application. If you're a good fit, you will get an email to set up a call and learn more. That's it for today. 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.