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.

Okay, today we're going to talk about one of the biggest traps that personal stylists fall into and was my favorite trap that kept me stuck for way too long and is embarrassing, honestly. But I'm glad I had that experience because now I can really speak in a very targeted way about how to get over this.

That is relying exclusively on word-of-mouth referrals or SEO in your business to grow. Look, I totally get it. Referrals from your clients feel safe and they also feel very, very validating. It's validating that someone loved your work enough to recommend you. I love that for you. I want you to keep them. I'm not going to say don't get referrals, but you really need to understand that relying on referrals, whether it be through SEO or for word of mouth, means that you are constantly surrendering control over your income, your client quality, and ultimately your own experience of your business if you don't have a business strategy in place.

Because running a business on referrals only or SEO only or a mixture, it will get you to six figures. I am not going to sit here and lie to you. But let's be clear. Often, it is six figures that is earned from misaligned clients, inconsistent booking, low repeat client rates, and way more stress than is necessary, all because you are hiding in your visibility work. Because I was too.

I would make any argument possible because I was so afraid to be on social media. So I often work with stylists who have hit their six figure mark and beyond that are relying entirely on referrals. They're really not marketing. If they do, it's once in a while, but they are consistently and constantly exhausted.

A lot of that exhaustion comes from not knowing when they'll actually get another client. So their income has some of the biggest peaks and valleys I have ever seen in the industry. They tend to deal with more clients who expect things that are not in the scope of work or are emotionally exhausted because their marketing and their content, including the things that are on their website, do not qualify their clients, and because they don't have strong messaging via social media, via their online reputation, that will allow them to qualify the people that are coming their way. Not every lead is the right lead for you.

The only reason why you think every lead is the right lead is because you have no idea how to get clients on your own. So you're going to have these low repeat client rates that look nothing like the repeat client rates that I see with stylists who maybe they haven't even gotten to $100,000, but they have way, way higher repeat client rates through their organic marketing. It may mean that stylists who are not at six figures but are using organic marketing get there a little bit slower and are not as booked out and consistently busy.

But over time, they attract more of the right clients, and they end up knowing pretty quickly, "Okay, I know how to get the right people. Now I can add in SEO. Now I can tell the right clients that I work with and incentivize them in how to refer me to more of the right people." This is what I teach in Income Accelerator through my referral and online testimonial systems.

Because imagine constantly feeling like you never know when your next client is coming and you have no idea what to do to be in control of that. You have no idea. So you're just playing Russian roulette with your business. I'm not even sure if that's really running a business.

When I look back at what I was doing, I was expecting other people to do all the work for me, and that's not being a business owner at all. So spending so much time with client after client who was statistically very unlikely to come back, when you could be working with people, if you learned how to message, that will and will also refer the right people to you, is like mind-blowing. It's like two different realities.

When you're relying on other people or a constantly changing SEO environment in order to get paid, in order to actually do the thing that you say that you love, that's not really being a business owner. That's, I think, why I feel most upset about my own behavior on this, to be honest, is because I really was so selfish I made it about me.

"I don't want to be visible. I'm scared." But I didn't think about how it was impacting the people that I was working with because they didn't really know how to get the most out of the experience because I wasn't fully qualifying them. I wasn't acting like an expert. I also wasn't refining all of my processes and my systems and in the way that I wrote in my copy on my website to at least give them a better sense of what was going on.

So just because you can close a lot of sales calls doesn't mean you're good at sales. It means you're desperate often if you don't know how to actually qualify people. What basically happens is that years of unpredictable income and outsourcing your power to other people, whether that be an algorithm, the SEO company you're hiring, or whatever else, referrals is 100% going to mentally exhaust you.

Because you will always have a little piece of you that wonders, "How will I ever be able to do this myself?" I have no control over this thing that is so essential to my identity, my income, and what I actually care about.

So you really care about something, really care about your child, you really care about your spouse, really care about significant other. Do you outsource the attention and the love you give them to somebody else? No. That's actually what your marketing is. It's a way of showing that you're an expert.

So you want to educate your audience to get the most out of this experience that they're about to spend thousands of dollars on. They deserve that information up front. The fact that I did not take that seriously is something I take real seriously now because it's so selfish when we have these visibility blocks. We only think about us, and that's not what being a transformational stylist is.

When I got out of that in my life, it changed everything and it also changed the quality of the clients I had. So here's why leaning exclusively on referrals is really problematic, whether it's through word of mouth or SEO.

Referrals never guarantee ideal clients. The only thing that guarantees ideal clients is your ability to qualify people on sales calls. But what I see and what I know from being this person is that stylists who don't bother to learn how to message to ideal clients because they don't want to show up online also don't have sales call skills.

They may have a lot of people that they can get to say yes because they're desperate and they don't know where their next client is coming from. But they're basically saying, "I'm just going to take whatever I can get." That doesn't mean you're closing quality clients.

Sure, people love your work enough to recommend you, and that's great. But that doesn't mean that your clients who are referring you fully understand the right psychological headspace that their friends and family have to be in to get the most out of the unique transformational work that stylists do.

And so you need to be able to qualify people, and your marketing is a qualification tool. So when you run your business this way, you don't even realize how you are saying to people on your website or wherever else, "You deserve quality," and "You deserve this and that," but you're not actually doing the things that would help them know if this experience is going to be a quality and good experience for them.

Because you're just saying yes to whoever will take you. You're not figuring out if you are the right fit for them. Are there stylists who end up booked solid using SEO, especially like a few years ago, and word of mouth from clients? Yes, I am not going to sit here and lie to you.

But they are booked solid with clients who are not aligned, people who expect discounts, they don't value their expertise, and they're often more stressed than they're worth. So if they get three referrals, one will be a dream, but the other two will be a nightmare.

Meanwhile, they could have been working with all three clients that were amazing. So your referral source is not likely communicating the depth of your expertise, the transformation you provide, because it's not their job to. Quite frankly, how would they know how to do it if you don't know how to do it in your marketing?

So now you're spending time re-educating or managing crazy expectations from clients who came to you without any work from you, true, but now you're going to make up the work on the other end. Because they were never aligned with your work in the first place. You're stuck in a constant cycle of "trying to keep people happy."

But if your business was set up to attract the right people, you would not be wasting your time trying to keep them happy. You would know who was going to be happy from this experience and weed out the ones who weren't. Even with strong referrals, here's the thing that kills me now when I look back, your messaging still matters a lot. A lot, a lot.

Think about it. What's the first thing that most leads do when they're referred to you? Or what's the first thing you do when you hear somebody recommend something, whether it be a service or a product? You visit their website or you go to their social media. Think about how you buy.

This is what's also critical, the more you get and are curious about how you buy, the better you become as a salesperson. So they visit your website, they look at your social media to validate that recommendation, even if it's their best friend.

So if your messaging isn't clear and compelling, or it's just not there at all online, those referrals are slipping away from you more than you may even realize. Your messaging has to clearly paint the transformation that a client gets with you. If it doesn't, you are losing more warm leads than you realize.

So yeah, maybe you're getting clients during spring and fall, but what about the rest of the year? That's why we have these wild ups and downs. I really focus with my clients on refining their messaging throughout all of the modules of my Income Accelerator program, not just the marketing module, because you need to be able to clearly articulate your unique value at every step of your process.

Most stylists are like, "You'll end my closet edit with an organized closet. You'll end my shop with outfits. You'll end my styling session with a lookbook." But they can't say how they prepare you for these things. They can't say what each of those offers gives the person psychologically that leads to the end transformation.

So ensuring every referral, no matter how they find you, understands exactly why you are or are not the best choice for them is going to skyrocket the usefulness of those two tools. I'm not saying SEO is something you should get rid of, though we're going to talk about why it's changing. I'm not saying you should never get referrals from clients. I have a whole system to get them in my program.

But they have to be the right people. Otherwise, you will never feel legitimate as a stylist because you will have no control over how your income works. They have to be the dessert. They cannot be the main event. They cannot be your entrée. They cannot keep you full because it's not other people's job to make your business successful. It's your job.

So one of the biggest things with SEO that I had the unique ability to have back in the day—which is why I have a very different set of advice for how stylists go about SEO now than what I did, because I don't teach people what worked 15 years ago, I teach them what works now—is that SEO falls into a really similar category of word-of-mouth referrals.

Because for years, SEO felt like the magic bullet, like when I was in business. You just show up high on Google results, and the client comes in. But SEO is not the same as what it used to be when I was a stylist. It is a great way to attract people without you having to put in extra work. So I'm not against it.

But the investment needs to happen once you're able to know what actually converts people in your messaging—the right people—when they land on your website. Otherwise, that SEO is absolutely useless. I've told so many stylists this just, like, for free business advice. They're like, "Well, what about this SEO? What about that?" and I'm not even working with them.

They think I'm trying to sell them into something. Work with me or don't work with me. But there's nobody that's worth their fee as an SEO specialist. I've just talked to a bunch of them. I've been interviewing them in order to help some of my established clients.

They're all like, "Yeah, if nobody knows how to message and get the person to stay, then don't buy ads and don't get SEO because it's useless." So this is not even my opinion. This is what experts say. But they'll still take your money. Let's not kid each other.

I also see that the same issue stylists have with clients who are unqualified that come from SEO also come from things like Thumbtack and Yelp. It's the same thing. However you're paying—whether it's an expert or for ads or whatever—if you don't have messaging in multiple places beyond that that helps people see if you are for them or not, and what the expectation is going to be of them as a partner in this process, you're just either losing people that you don't even realize or getting people that are not a perfect fit but you're okay with that because your standards are low.

Meanwhile, stylists are telling people they should expect more from their clothes. People aren't even creating processes that have them being able to qualify their clients, but people are supposed to know how to create high-quality outfits? Come on. That's crazy talk.

So with the frequent updates to Google's algorithm, there is a lot of emphasis right now on user experience and quality content. If you're also using AI to do everything, it will just dock your SEO. So that's something you need to know right now.

Now Google has announced that they're going to be pulling from social media accounts as well as websites and other referring websites to factor into your ranking. So if you're not producing social media content, you're not going to be ranking as well—or at all—soon. This is happening really quickly.

The next thing you need to know about SEO and these types of referral platforms is that people are increasingly looking to AI platforms, like ChatGPT, Claude, things like that, instead of Google for service recommendations.

So you're about to see, and some people are already seeing it, a huge dip in traffic coming from Google searches. Because people are sick of going in and searching for things in Google and seeing those AI-generated options come up first over people's websites. So people are getting sick of it, and now they're searching in new places.

So very soon, not only will SEO require you to be showing up on social media, but people aren't even using the traditional forms. Last, this is just a fact in this industry: as someone that talks to the founders of styling software and adjacent industry support for the styling industry, there is just way more competition than there was five years ago, before the pandemic.

There are more stylists who are investing in websites and SEO right out the gate in their business because they're coming from six-figure jobs. They're business savvy, to be honest with you, and they want to get to the top in their city. And they will spend more money to get there.

So they're outranking a lot of people that were there for a while because they're playing the game. They're also registering their services on AI engines, and they're doing all of this stuff.

So all of these developments mean that if you are relying on search alone, it is going to become increasingly unreliable if you want to do that without marketing on social media. That's just the facts.

You don't have to be on all the platforms, but you do have to be on the platform, at least one. If you aren't aware of the way that the industry and the online space is changing, you will spend time and money on solutions that are not going to make any sense to get you where you want to go.

That has a big impact psychologically on us, which is why I wanted to do this episode. Because I see stylists in this position all the time. All the time. They hire marketing agencies. They hire social media agencies. They hire SEO companies. But they have no idea how to talk about their offers.

These experts that they're hiring don't understand that the thing that matters isn't clicks to your website. It isn't people liking your content. It isn't going viral.

It's sales calls. So if you're not getting sales calls, I don't care how many people are going to your website. I don't care how many people are liking your post because that does not make you money. That is the business we are in. This is not a hobby.

So the reality is relying on SEO alone right now means you are leaving your business at the mercy of external people and constantly changing algorithms. Like referrals, it's still handing control of your business growth over to chance. In all honesty, you as a stylist—and former me as well—is not doing the work that needs to be done to grow your business like a real business owner who is committed to the relationships they have with their clients so that they can do what they need to do in their marketing to seed the relationship for transformation in the right way.

Your marketing is part of the transformation. Otherwise, you're just giving people a transaction.

So let us be really, really honest about where this comes from, because I'm pretty honest about this in my past. Most stylists clinging to word of mouth referrals or SEO, they're doing that because they're uncomfortable or they're scared of marketing. I really needed someone to tell this to me straight, so I will do it for you because this is what turned a lot around in my business.

Yes, it was strategy. Yes, it was other things. But more than anything, it was me getting real about the fact that I had to choose: was I going to be a big girl business owner or was I going to be a little girl with the hobby? Because by avoiding marketing, you are not only leaving money on the table, but you're depriving potential clients of transformational experience that they don't even know is possible for them. So they settle.

I specifically address this gap inside Income Accelerator by guiding my clients to create intentional marketing that vividly illustrates the unique transformations that only that stylist can offer by talking about their clients in a specific way so that it attracts the right kind of client to them when they're online. This is the thing that helps clients instantly recognize your value for them.

It works. It's not magic. It still takes time for people to notice because not everybody sees every piece of content. But when your marketing paints a vivid picture of what truly is achievable through your work with people, they notice.

So without clear messaging to help with those word-of-mouth referrals or that SEO, your clients or potential clients have no way of understanding the value of the transformation you offer. So they will lowball you on price. They will try to negotiate. They will come in at a lower offer than really they need because you haven't shown them the value.

So you will continue to settle for transactional experiences because your marketing isn't preparing them and showing them what's truly possible, which means they won't get the most out of it and their work together, and you'll have a lower repeat client rate, which quite frankly, makes you work harder.

So avoiding marketing traps you in a hamster wheel that puts you on an offensive, which is absolutely antithetical to creating true and lasting change for your clients. You are always uncertain about who's going to book. You're not sure how a new client's going to behave because you haven't primed them with expectations. You probably don't have systems either that outline what is actually going to be happening at every step.

So you get scope creep, which is another reason why these stylists are exhausted. You will never know if they're going to respect you as an expert and your process. So you're always on the alert. Whereas now, I just expect that if you're working with me, you're going to respect my process.

Guess what? If you're not, then I will release a client. I will refund their money and I will release them. I have done that because I know that they deserve to get a transformation.

So if my process, which has worked for tons of other people and hasn't been a problem, doesn't work for you, then either we're not a good fit, or this doesn't matter enough to you, period.

So this is the gap that I deal with with stylists a lot inside Income Accelerator. They are so stuck being afraid of marketing, even though they have 10, 20 years of experience, in some cases, people think this is like a new person problem.

This ain't a new person problem. Honestly, I'm seeing that the new stylists coming out are way more savvy on marketing. Way, way more savvy. They're leaving six-figure jobs with money to deal with some of the business stuff that stylists that have been in the game for a long time never do.

So when I work with these stylists, they have all the experience, they have everything they need. They just need to get over themselves. I don't say that with no compassion. I know a lot about the fear of visibility, trust me.

But if you care about the people you work with, you will find a way, and you will find the platform, and you will find the messaging that feels like you. Because this is how we lead businesses, not hobbies.

You can create marketing that clearly communicates your transformational value, attracts clients who genuinely understand and appreciate you as a stylist and as an expert. They're not just looking for a quick dopamine hit or a fun experience to tell their friends about that they work with a stylist. The right people are using this as a tool to get to their next level.

When you don't know that, it will impact how you feel about yourself and your business. Because I was that person.

It would literally cause arguments with my husband. He'd be like, "You need to market. You can't just pay for this." I knew in my heart that was right. But I didn't know how to tell him how afraid I was to market.

Then what's wild about it is all the things I was afraid about, not only did they not happen, but now I love marketing so much. I don't spend my life on my phone, and I'm getting sales calls.

Like when you live like this, you actually have space and time, and you're not on the defensive, and you can actually create work that matters, and you can make a difference. You're so proud of yourself.

The expense of relying only on—I'm not saying don't use them—but only on SEO and referrals is how proud of yourself you are going to be when you make this legitimate. I'm telling you, it will change your whole life. It will change your relationships. It will change what you stand for. It will change everything.

So if what I'm describing sounds like you, it is time to regain control by mastering your marketing and not outsourcing what you need to take control of. When you clearly communicate the specific transformation that you offer, you're going to attract the right people that are excited to be there.

So here's how you're going to start. These are the three things, if this is you, I want you to start thinking about: You're going to get crystal clear on your ideal client and the specific transformation that they seek.

Two, you're going to align your messaging across your website, social media, and any client touchpoints to reinforce that you are for that person and how your process specifically helps them.

Three, you are going to proactively share client success stories that represent clients you want more of, because they are going to clearly demonstrate your results in your marketing for the right people.

This is the structured approach that ensures that leads—whether they're referred by SEO, word of mouth, social media, however they get there—fully understand your value and arrive already sold on you as the expert for them when they get on a sales call.

So if you're ready to step off the word of mouth or SEO hamster wheel and finally take control of the growth of your styling business, it is really time to invest in business strategy that's going to show you how to do that step by step so that you can confidently execute and take control of your business instead of letting it control you.

You owe it to yourself and you owe it to your styling clients to clearly communicate the transformation only you can offer.

Go to the link in the show notes, apply for Income Accelerator. We are more than half full. There are just a few spaces left. I want to teach you how to master intentional marketing so that you attract the right clients.

Most importantly, you are so proud of yourself because no one can take that skill away from you. 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.