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.

One question I consistently get asked in DMs and on discovery calls with stylists is, when is the right time to launch a course or a passive product to scale my styling business? The default assumption in our industry is that scaling equals passive products. Making money while you sleep, who wouldn't want that?

But no stylist asking this has ever been able to explain exactly why or how an online course fits into the overall plan for their business. How that online course passive product is going to feed them high-quality, qualified clients into their one-to-one? The assumption is often, "Well, there are two different markets and I got to get money however I can."

Today I'm here to share something essential that I have learned from scaling both my personal styling business and now this consulting business. First, there's no one-size-fits-all scaling model. There's only the right way for you based on your goals, the market you want to talk to, and your vision for your future and your business.

This generic advice of launch a course, make a passive product, has made our industry—a creative industry—embarrassingly homogenous, and stylists are losing sight of why they even started this work. So if you are not consistently hitting $10k and $20k months, your first and only priority is mastering your highest ticket offer, your highest ticket one-to-one styling offer.

Most people won't even be that direct in their marketing and tell you that. So I'm just going to give you the answers to the test. We need to stop adding complexity from being anxious and uncertain about our business model, because all that it does is confuse us and confuse our audience more.

So today I'm going to show you precisely how perfecting your one-to-one service will actually allow you to scale your business in a more interesting, a more creative way that doesn't burn you out and actually gives you the information you need to scale correctly from a business model perspective.

So I wanted to do a really quick refresh here on what scaling is. Scaling does not mean adding more offers that you set and forget. Scaling means serving more clients at a higher value—meaning they come back more, with better results, again, they come back more—and less hustle from you.

Notice that nowhere in there says create a passive course? Nowhere. So stylists mistakenly assume that scaling equals passive courses, digital products, more offers. While those things—passive courses, digital products—are things I help my clients work on all of the time, we do it in a very, very specific way once they have mastered their one-to-one. Because it actually suits their personality, not because it is the default.

I scale clients' businesses in tons of different ways. That's why I'm a business strategist and not just a coach. Because personal styling, at its essence, what makes it so valuable and what makes it a luxury business—because it is, nobody needs a personal stylist—is not a volume business.

So if you don't understand how luxury businesses scale, you will try to scale like online course creators and coaches. That often makes zero sense for stylists. I'm saying this as someone who is now technically in the world of the online course creator and coach and was a stylist. It just doesn't even make sense.

I can't believe that we have come this far in a creative industry—I will not stop talking about that—and gotten so basic. It's embarrassing to me. Because courses are great if you genuinely love teaching and really want less client-facing time and it doesn't energize you. You know how to create a course or a digital product that keeps the right people in your personal service ecosystem longer so that they can graduate into your higher-priced offers.

But most stylists rush into this without understanding what is truly involved. What they don't know is that so many people that are selling courses online and selling, "You need a course, you need a passive product," you're not seeing what their actual profit margins are. You're not seeing how big the teams are that are helping them execute on that.

You have no idea that they may be having $100,000 launches and taking home $10,000 because there's a very low profitability margin in a lot of the online course world when you're looking at these big coaches that teach other people to do this. But they fail to explain to you that they have someone running their marketing. They have someone running their funnels. They have someone dealing with the backside of, "If a client doesn't like something or somebody purchases their course and it doesn't work," dealing with the customer service side. They're paying people a significant amount of money to run that "passive" engine.

That's really hard for stylists when they launch a course and they don't realize that they are going to need all those factors if they're successful, or what success looks like the first time that you launch something, because it's not 100% sellout. It actually takes iterations and months and months and multiple launches in order to get the messaging right.

I'm saying this as someone who's done this dozens of times in both business before that actually becomes an "asset" to you. It's not passive until you get the marketing right. So then you end up with the same problem that you have in a passive offer or in a course or in a program that you have with your one-to-one.

Honestly, because people tend to attract people that are so far outside of who they would be attracting if it was a one-to-one offer, now they're messaging two different audiences. They're messaging two different sets of sales objections. It's maddening. It's exhausting.

I'm so grateful that when I started in this world and started doing group programs—which I think is probably a smarter way to go into the more passive world—I had experts around me who had already done this in their business that told me how to do it as lean as possible. It looks nothing like what I see people being taught out there.

So I just think it's really important for you to know the truth of how these "passive" empires are being financed, because it may not be something that you have the ability to do in your styling business if you are not at a profitable point. If you don't have a strong and proven one-to-one service that you can then leverage in other ways that I'm going to talk about, you're just going to add a lot of complexity, confusion, overwhelm that drains your profit, your focus from your one-to-one clients—who will always be the people that make you the most money if you have a high VP client rate—and the freedom that you're actually looking for in your business.

Because that's what we're looking for. We're looking to have more breathing room. That's why the way that we scale has to work for us. Because if you're scaling in someone else's model, but you don't like to teach or you don't want to deal with the customer service side of things because that doesn't interest you, then you may actually end up exhausting yourself more.

This is why it's really important to understand the foundation of business so that you can know, "Okay, if I do this thing that is going to work for my personality, it will also be profitable in the market." Because that's how you build an interesting business and also stay creative, which is, I know, something all of you want.

You want to be creative. You want to be relevant. But if we just do the same thing that everyone else is doing, there's no way that you can look different, unique, or stand out. So real scaling means perfecting one exceptional offer as a stylist so powerfully that bigger opportunities naturally flow to you, and opportunities most stylists don't even realize exist are the result of what I'm going to share with you today.

So when I say dialed in, you need to get your highest-priced styling offer dialed in, here's precisely what I mean. First, you need to know how your messaging for that offer consistently converts. You're not guessing. You know, "When I say this, my ideal client with time instantly knows that I am their solution."

Second, your operations to put that offer out, to actually take it from sales call to completion and offboarding—usually that looks like a lookbook, but everybody does this differently—need to run seamlessly behind the scenes. Your systems have to be helping you scale. They have to be helping give you time.

Most stylists, even ones that are making a ton of money objectively, have the worst systems to no systems. I've seen stylists have no client intake form, make a million dollars, half a million dollars. Like what? Would you go to a doctor that doesn't ask you to write down your information? Would you go to a lawyer who didn't ask you to give them the details of your case? No.

What kind of a person goes to an expert who doesn't expect that person—the client—to share the information that's relevant? This isn't about being like, "Oh, I'm so high touch." Your clients don't want to have to repeat things back to you. You have to have systems that capture the information and let them know what's next.

A lot of my systems module in Income Accelerator surprises people because it's all about psychological safety and creating psychological safety within the container. Yes, I give you the forms. I give you all of my own systems that I built over the years working with other high-end luxury consultants, but it's really about why you need those systems for the client to transform.

It's about you not having to repeat yourself or have to consistently, awkwardly put up boundaries with people because you weren't communicating it from the jump, what was expected of the client.

So your behind-the-scenes systems, which are not complicated or hard, I have people that are doing this in Google Suites. You have a Google Gmail account. You have Google Forms. You have plenty to run these systems. I have people doing it in Dubsado and HoneyBook like I am. It doesn't have to be fancy. It can be. It's up to you.

I have people running their business just doing these systems with Calendly and stuff like that. Eventually, they may want to move up. But for now, we can make it work at any price point, including free. But you still need to have the systems. I don't care how fancy the applications running them are, you need to have them.

So if they're not moving the client along in your process and answering to and dealing with any of the hesitations that make a client ghost you, check out, then that's the first thing you need to deal with in your scaling. Because scaling is about keeping clients longer. Most stylists haven't even figured that out before they're trying to go to a passive product.

Then the third is you need to know which sales objections are relevant. You need to not be scared or put off by sales objections. I freaking love a sales objection—and you should too—because it tells you everything you need to know about the psychology of that client.

If you know who the right people are for your business, you know which ones you should even take seriously. So when someone says, "I'm unsure about the investment," you should know, because you've anticipated and you prepared how to handle it. You should know what sales objections are valid and which ones aren't because of your ideal client.

So if someone says, "I just can't afford that because the price of gas and milk and eggs went up," that is not your ideal client. That is someone who needs to deal with their basic life expenses before they have money left over. That means you, if you're getting that objection a lot, you're talking to the wrong people.

So when you understand that, you need to fix that messaging first. Because fixing that messaging in your one-to-one is going to make you way more money than a $297 course. It's going to change your life.

Then if you want to do a $297 course because you know what topic that needs to be on to keep the person in your world that wants to spend $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 on a styling offer, that's fine. You can do that. But first, know how to sell a $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 styling offer.

That's what's worth your time, not making a course you don't know if it's going to sell.

So when these three things align—your messaging is consistently converting, your operations behind the scenes for that one offer at a minimum are running seamlessly, and you know what sales objections are valid and how to handle the valid ones—you're going to start to see that you are actually scaling.

That is going to make you a lot more money than a low-priced course, because then you're talking to the wrong people and not keeping them in your world.

Let me show you exactly how I mastered my one-to-one offer creation as a stylist and how it led to breakthrough opportunities that absolutely changed my career after years of trying to figure out what the hell was going to get me to consistent income months.

So I refined my niche probably three or four, maybe even five times in my career. The second to last niche I had before I closed my business, I committed fully to women in male-dominated industries. These were mostly women that were in the corporate world, but some of them were public speakers, like scientists, but mostly it was women in the corporate world.

I was the only woman in my philosophy graduate degree program. I have a master's in philosophy and ethics, and I was going to become a lawyer or a professor. So I understood firsthand the struggle to gain visibility and respect in these environments because I was the only woman in my undergrad. I was the only woman in my graduate program. Another one came in halfway through, but there were only two of us.

I almost had no women professors my entire career in the actual field of study that I was in. I didn't anticipate that. I came from all-girls schools. So it was quite a culture shock. Never guessed that I would be that way because they had philosophy classes at my school. It was pretty normal for me to be around other women talking about these things. But that was not the case when I got out there into the world.

So when I was working with different types of clients, my heart really broke when clients would say things like, "I want to look in charge, but I don’t want to look intimidating." It just killed me that these women were always trying to make themselves fit into these constraints while also wanting to be reputable, like they were doing a mental gymnastic act that men didn’t have to do.

So one day, because I had a blog post I had to write that day, I wrote a blog post about decoding casual dress codes in male-dominated fields. I was showing women how to use the shoes and accessories that men in their industry wore as status markers, how to convert that into status markers for them in casual wear.

Because there was just a lot, especially in the tech world, being missed. "Oh, they can just wear a T-shirt and jeans and sneakers, and people still listen to them in meetings. But if I did that, nobody would." But what they were missing was some of the details of those T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers that were giving status signals.

So I was teaching them how to take those status signals and put them into outfits of their own. It was a piece of content that I would call authority content. That's what I talk about in my marketing framework, to help people understand that I understood their world.

This post, as imperfect as it was—it had typos, it was not what I would say my best work—it makes me want to cringe. I wish I still had it. That website doesn’t exist anymore, but I really wish I had kept it because it was such a pivotal moment in my career. When I look back at it, it was probably at best like a B minus. Honestly, it was not my best work.

So I published it. I went about my life. About three weeks later, a senior person in marketing at ECCO Shoes International approached me directly, called me and emailed me within one day to get my attention. That blog post landed me a $39,500 contract to produce their first set of online marketing videos and style their Spring/Summer 2019 campaign.

That one post, which I had zero expectation of doing anything but maybe helping somebody that found my website think, "Oh, she seems to know what she's talking about," led to multiple high-paying speaking gigs, going from $2,000 for 30 minutes to $10K training sessions that were an hour and a half, consulting roles with fashion startups, and connections with clients I never dreamed possible.

I got invites on podcasts that had huge audiences that definitely would never have invited me on before given my social media numbers. At the time, I had fewer than 1,500 Instagram followers on my styling account. I don't have that account anymore. I wish I did. I had no publicist. I had some respectable press credits on my website, but certainly not anything that was going to make you wonder if I knew somebody in high places to get them.

I wasn't a celebrity stylist. I was exactly where most of you are now. And some of you are even better off, quite frankly, with your followers or opportunities you've had in the press. But because I deeply understood my clients, and I had my signature offer—and how I even talked about that offer on my website, which the marketing people noticed—it offered me incredible opportunities. Things found me that never would have found me before.

I'm telling you that this happened from a B-minus at best blog post. I think I'm being nice. Honestly, if I was being my true perfectionist self, I would say it was a C. But over and over again in my career over the last almost 20 years, I have learned it is clarity, not perfect action, that will truly change the course of your life.

These are not just my results. These are not just something that I have seen. My clients see this work for them too when they dial in their offer and their positioning.

One of my Income Accelerator stylists perfected a $3,500 styling offer that was really geared to C-level executives. Six months later, the CEO she worked with in a one-to-one offer brought her back for a $15,000 corporate styling project and consulting container. Her excellence in her one-to-one styling offer and getting clarity on that made a scaling opportunity like this an easy opportunity to land—and easy to find—because she spoke with such conviction and certainty about people in the C-level world.

It's not that I'm saying you don't have any other styling offers. I'm saying if you can sell publicly your highest-level styling offer, then when people get on the phone with you, if they're not right for that offer, you put them in a different offer. But most stylists are burning themselves out not knowing what to sell.

If you just got good at your highest-level offer, it would change your life. Because if someone got on the phone with you and that wasn't right for them, you could just put them somewhere else. But most stylists right here are not speaking well to anything. So then they don't have anybody getting on the phone with them that is the right fit for the thing that will most likely lead to styling clients that are going to hire you again and again.

Because if you have enough money for your highest-level styling offer and the cost of clothes, and you have a need in your life that's more than just, "I want to look cute," but a visibility need, the likelihood that person comes back to you season after season is very, very high. So you're going to at least start calling in the right people to have the right repeat client rate.

Another client shared one Instagram story that she worked on for a while. I'm not going to say this all happens overnight—about her unique process—and immediately landed three high-value corporate inquiries. So corporate consulting inquiries because of how she talked about her service.

She wasn't launching anything new. She had the same offer she had before she came into my program. She simply showcased her mastery and her ability to talk to the right people because she decided to go all in on being clear with herself about how she was showing up and how she was talking about her styling offers so that the right people could find her.

So if you're serious about scaling your business, there are three things that are non-negotiable and exactly what we master in all of my processes, but specifically in Income Accelerator.

Number one, your signature process. Most people already have this, but they're not good about talking about it. So your method must be repeatable, meaning you can get results for the people in your niche consistently, which is something stylists fail to do often. It has to be documented, and you have to be able to confidently articulate it.

Without this clarity, premium opportunities will never find you, including the opportunity to be known for something so that you can make a passive offer that is so unique and different people actually want it. If you're just packaging your styling process and putting it out there to the masses, they can get that for free in books, by the way.

There are literally books. This is why you have to know your own industry, because you don't know what's unique or interesting if you don't. So nobody wants that. But they do want something that's targeted for them or that helps them do one little unique or small thing.

This is just a random example, but a course to help somebody find their style as an executive is not going to be as attractive as a mini course that helps executive women dress during pregnancy and right after so that they can continue to feel good about themselves and feel confident walking into rooms where they're in charge.

That's a very micro offer, but the woman that buys that offer is probably going to then hire you in a one-to-one situation because you get her so much. But if you're just putting out general styling courses, no one's going to even see that. Because number one, you can get it for less on YouTube even. Number two, it's too much for people. It's too much for the right person. They don't want to do this themselves.

When stylists don't understand that, they create way more work for themselves and end up burning out and then feeling like, "Nothing I'm doing is working," when really they just did not have the business skills to put an offer out that would make sense for their audience.

Number two, you have to have systems rooted in client psychology. Clear communication is non-negotiable. Clients must feel guided and supported at every step because you know what they're thinking, not what you're thinking.

This builds trust and increases referrals, which is also how you scale a business. You build trust, you become the person that they can't live without, and then they refer you to other people. They become your referral machine if you get your one-to-one dialed in.

Number three, your pricing and your positioning. Because pricing is not just about numbers or about what's in your bank account. It's about calling in the right people who will take this seriously. It is what positions you in the market, which is why you can't look at what other stylists are doing, because you don't know what they're trying to communicate. Honestly, they probably don't either.

So hesitating or undercharging to a premium market makes them doubt you. Premium pricing confidently communicates and elevates you from a commodity to an expert. When you're an expert, as I showed in the case of my ECCO Shoes story, you get opportunities that absolutely transform your life.

From there, I then launched a group course that was my more scaled offer, if you will. That was a live course that I did twice a year, like I do with Income Accelerator. It was live. I was in it. Because I had created the notoriety around my name for this group of people. If they couldn't afford my one-to-one, they would go into the group program, still have limited access to me, which helped me sell it.

Because people that are really serious about this, they don't want a passive product. They want some element of you, another thing stylists don't get. So from there, almost all of them became my one-to-one clients.

Again, this is why you have to understand your pricing and your positioning will give you opportunities that, if you don't take that seriously, you will never get. So if you don't take that seriously when you launch a group program, you will never get clients that are actually interested in growing with you and staying with you over time.

So you just spend all this time working with people that you're never going to see again.

Here's the hard truth from coaching and consulting with hundreds of stylists over my own career. The people that rush into passive offers without mastering a core offer in their one-to-one world first spend months—and if I'm honest, actually years—stuck in exhausting hustle.

They waste money, they waste their energy, and they lower their self-confidence chasing one-off solutions and the next shiny thing. Then they wonder why scaling feels impossible and they get angry that they took all these courses or hired all these experts to help them grow, but they're not seeing any results.

That's because they haven't looked at their whole business. They haven't gotten an actual understanding of how the business of personal styling works to ground their moves. They just keep reaching for random one-off solutions to a problem they have not properly diagnosed.

But in contrast, stylists who invest in perfecting their foundational one-to-one offer—to positioning it properly, to making sure the other offers in their offer suite at least allow somebody that comes into their world to build up to that if it's right for them—they build businesses that scale naturally and creatively based on what they actually want for themselves.

They work less. They earn more. I'm not going to say their lives are perfect, or they never lose a client, or they never don't have a sales objection. I'm not going to say it happens overnight, because that's a lie and I don't lie to you guys.

I'm saying that it takes time to build credibility and authority, but you have to market anyways. So you might as well do it anchored by something that is proven, powerful with the right people, and actually is profitable for the long term.

There is no way out of this that doesn't include you having to think thoughts that feel harder than just putting out links to outfits. So if that's not for you, this isn't going to be for you either.

But if you're like, "I really care about these people that I work with. I want to have processes that are based in psychology. I want to get higher and better, more repeatable transformations for my clients," you've listened this far, you are very clearly serious about scaling your styling business the right way. Maybe you just don't know how to do that. Fair. Nobody tells you.

So if you're ready to take the hard work you've put into becoming an exceptional stylist and turn it into a strong, scalable foundation that you deserve and actually reflects what you want to do—not what everyone else is doing—I would love to support you in doing that.

You can find the link in the show notes of this episode to apply to my next round of Income Accelerator that starts September 29th, and learn more about building a lasting and successful styling business that opportunities flow to you easily from because you did this foundational work. 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.