PODCAST SHOWNOTES

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

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

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

Welcome to the Six Figure Series. This is the first in a four-part episode designed specifically for personal stylists who have already hit six figures and are wondering why it doesn't feel like they thought it would. Over the course of these four episodes, we're going to break down exactly why you're stuck and what it takes to build the styling business you actually want for the next chapter of your career.

If you've built a personal styling business that has crossed six figures, congratulations. That is a massive, huge deal. You're in very rare company. Less than 12% of all personal stylists will ever hit this point based on the data that we have today, which is admittedly not comprehensive. But to put it in perspective, only between 12% and 18% of all women-owned small businesses across every industry hit six figures in revenue annually.

So $100,000 or more annually in revenue. That's not profit, that's just revenue. I want you to celebrate this. But if you're at this level, and I can speak from personal experience, you probably don't even realize it, or you realize it, and you haven't taken one moment to celebrate it. I did not know I had six figures until I finally hired an accountant and she went in and did my bookkeeping, which there was a reason I needed to hire an accountant, and I was in shock.

I was in absolute shock because all I was doing was chasing six figures. Yet there it was in front of me and I had no idea. It didn't make me feel better, much to my own surprise, that I had hit this goal that I had become obsessed with, but I felt exactly like I felt at $50,000. So I want you to ask yourself, does it feel like you thought it would? Are you as exhausted or more exhausted than you were when you were at $60K?

Do you have any clear sense of how you would get to your next income goal and less important than the income goal, how you want your career and your business to feel as you move forward? Again, if you're anything like me back in the day, the answer is no. No, I don't know. No, I don't feel better than I did at $60,000. No, I don't know what the future is. No, I haven't thought about how I wanted to feel.

But I am in a business now that's into multiple six figures. I think about this every day. I think about this every day for my clients. So I want to be a stand for you over the next four episodes to actually think about the quality of your life, not just the quantity of money. One of the reasons why I'm so obsessed with stylists that are already established is because lots of people will want to make you a stylist, but very few people want to support you in being one.

Because it's less sexy, it's harder, it's more complicated because there are a lot of human beings in the mix. I think that there are a lot of views of the industry that are incredibly outdated and that there just are not a lot of examples of women at six figures in any industry, but specifically in this one. So I want to call you forward because I know you're listening. I know you feel like there are very few people talking to you.

I know you feel like you are misunderstood in some rooms that with other business owners who are at six figures, multiple six figures, maybe close to a million, you can get their thoughts and their advice, but sometimes it doesn't exactly translate. I know that you feel like there just aren't a lot of people talking to you, especially if you've taken on the responsibility of a team. We're going to get into that.

I work with lots of stylists, probably the very few in the industry, honestly, that are at multiple six figures. They have teams, they have scaled, and they often feel the exact same way at $250,000, $300,000 that they felt at $100,000, at $40,000. There's a reason for that. We're going to talk about that in the coming weeks. If you are not at six figures, here's what I want you to know.

We spend a lot of time romanticizing this goal. But if you don't figure out that mid-income issues you have, if you don't figure out how to get your systems cleaned up, how to get your pricing cleaned up, how to get your messaging cleaned up at $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, you have way bigger problems later on. And that's why I opened the styling consultancy talking to established stylists because the biggest pain point in the industry is right there and it's why we never get past it as an industry but also as women in business.

And it's not that I want you to romanticize $100,000 or $200,000 and think that all your problems go away because that's not true. But that's the point where you're not usually taking home that much money, obviously. If you had problems underneath the $100,000 mark in terms of systems, in terms of client retention and attraction, they will get so much worse. That's where I see people wondering if it's time to walk away.

Because if you're anything like me, you built a six-figure business for those of you that are there using hustle, maybe your network, maybe scrappy systems, maybe you have some notes over here on your phone and a Google Doc over here and you had some forms over here, you were doing client intake, and then Jotform, then you decided to try out something else, you don't even remember all the subscriptions that you have to keep this thing going. You're just focusing on signing another client and another client.

You keep saying, "I will get to that other stuff one day." But now you're trying to build a $300,000 or half a million dollar business. You're using the same playbook and it doesn't work. The cost of that is usually to your physical and your mental health. Below this mark, you will have some hits to your confidence. Above this mark, you will have serious consequences to your relationship and to your own physical health, in my own experience.

So we're going to talk about some places that my clients at six figures get stuck and what they've needed to change to get to their next income goal. But most importantly, what they've needed to do to step into the next version of themselves so that they can hold the level of income and impact that they are headed for. A very common thing that happens, I think, to all of us is that we hit a certain milestone and we are happy and then we got to get back to work because we're doing all the things.

You think to yourself, "Great, I did it. I guess I'll just keep doing more of the same in order to grow." Even if we'd never stopped to ask ourselves if we're enjoying the process as we've got to our goal. But the truth is that usually just means way more exhaustion, way more overwhelm, and way more of this experience of, yes, maybe you have repeat clients, maybe you do have people that reach out to you without you needing to proactively hustle in your marketing, though most of the people I work with at multiple six figures are marketing every day, but you don't feel excited about a lot of the clients that you're working with.

You're just grateful for having the income. You'll do it. But you're not lit up. What you don't even realize is that doing more of the same, yes, it got you here. But you can get away with having messy systems. Maybe your marketing isn't totally on point, but it does the job. Maybe you're used to saying, "When everything slows down, I will stop hustling and I'll get my act together."

You are basically the stylist, the marketer, the administrator, the bookkeeper all rolled into one. That's going to happen until you hit six figures. But I have clients that are at multiple six figures that are doing that for years. All of that wearing all the hats, trying to figure it out is part of the process and survivable getting to $100,000. You can do that. But it is not survivable. It is definitely not scalable at $300,000 or half a million or I have a client going for a million.

There's just no possible way that that could happen. So what often happens is you're going so fast, and you're so in it every day, that it's hard to see what you need to get where you want to go next. Whether it's taking on fewer clients and earning more, whether it's hiring a team, which I help my clients do all the time, whether it's training that team, which is another thing that I do, whether it's delving into thought leadership and really stepping it up in your messaging, whether it's starting a product line or teaching a new program, you need a new roadmap.

That's exactly what we're going to discuss in this series. So the first shift we're going to talk about is an identity upgrade. This is hard to do when you're in it every day. But right now, you are probably still seeing yourself as a stylist who happens to run a business. But at this stage, you are actually the CEO of a company. You have a lot of influence, more than you might realize.

Many, many, many of my clients are too tired to even stop and see what they built for themselves, or they're afraid that if they slow down, everything that they built will fall apart. The difference between where you are now and the way your mentality is at six figures or multiple six figures and where we need you to go is this: Most people that are in hustle mode at six figures or multiple six figures are still thinking like this: How can I get more clients? What do I have to do today? Who do I have to get back to? What is on my schedule that other people have basically put there in the sense of client work?

When you're a stylist who's a creative CEO, the kinds of questions you ask are: What kind of business am I building? Who do I need on my team? What is the long-term positioning that's going to keep my pipeline full without me hustling 24/7? Because I shouldn't need to hustle anymore for the level of expertise that I have.

This is where a lot of stylists stay stuck and they never transition their mindset. I have to regularly coach my clients at half a million dollars to be a creative CEO. I have to be coached to be a creative CEO. I have to hire people to help me stay in that. Because when you have grown up with scarcity and when you have been in an industry that has not been properly recognized and properly codified so that there are actually standards, which there are not, you have a lot of doubt. You have a lot of imposter syndrome and you are used to, on a nervous system level, going really hard all the time to survive.

That is your norm. So your brain is not going to naturally go to "How do I get more help? How do I hire people?" That's why I did the episode on shame and on making sure that we're thinking about "Where am I in shame? Where am I in pride? How am I shutting down if I don't even realize it by acting like I need to do it all myself?" Because at some point, you doing it all yourself is going to have a serious impact on the reputation you've created, because you cannot do this alone.

That's not how these businesses were meant to be created. But no one ever told us that because no one really thought it out to the end. The industry isn't that old. It's something that I'm really becoming very clear on as I grow this business and make a name for myself in the industry in this role. Maybe you keep telling yourself things like you've been lucky or you just want a small business. But the truth is you are actually already running something much bigger, but your mind and your identity haven't caught up.

You are pretending like if you carry a team of part-time people helping you, you're going to be poor or like there's no way to make this work because too many people will rely on you. But with all that's happening is you just haven't built your capacity for that. You don't really get how the business won't actually allow it. So maybe you make your plans a little bit smaller, or maybe you keep putting it off. That's where I got stuck.

It really took me investing in a $30,000 mastermind to get out of this place and to be around people making so much more money than me to open my eyes and to really figure out that I had to stop acting like my entire identity hinged on booking $2,000 or $3,000 packages here and there when I was absolutely capable and often was selling $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 retainers. I would book them and then immediately become obsessed with the $2,500 offer because it was really uncomfortable. I hadn't grown my capacity.

Now that's like nothing to me. I regularly have $20,000, $25,000 weeks and I don't bat an eyelash. I'm not saying that to brag. I'm saying that because I couldn't have even imagined that. And I used to think that having even this small team that I have now would have been this crazy burden to me, and it's not. It's the greatest joy of my life that I have these other women supporting me.

It is honestly one of the coolest things ever to be able to create your own economy and earn enough money to have other women earn money and to support them and to grow their businesses. It is something I had no access to because I was so afraid of how I would let everybody down. That's what I mean about growing your identity. You have to upgrade it. It doesn't necessarily mean hiring people, but it might mean charging more or speaking more or doing less one-to-one clients.

I don't know what that looks like for you. But if you keep defaulting to stylist-for-hire decisions, you are pushing away your next-level self and your next-level goals more than you even know. You don't have to see the whole staircase in order to commit to your next level. You just have to take one step at a time because the opportunities will show up. They will.

You can't even imagine how you're going to get there, where you want to go. Your job isn't to know how to get there. Your job is to show up and be available for the opportunities that come because you are ready. This is the difference between somebody who's acting like a creative CEO and someone that keeps defaulting back to, "Let me just get another client, let me just get another client," and they're staying in survival mode.

All right, let's talk about systems, the least sexy thing in the world. You can patch things together when you're at $100,000 or less. Maybe you've got some Google Docs here, you've got a little HoneyBook half done over here, and you've got all your client notes in your phone. Maybe like me, you have 90 notebooks. I still have that. You can't break that out of me, I don't think.

But once you're working with high-ticket, bigger, more influential clients, whatever that looks like for you, especially if you decide, "I need some help," even if it's just a VA or somebody to help you with your marketing, you're going to need some systems that run without you micromanaging every detail. This is why I want stylists to get a sense of just basic systems that I've created for stylists well, well, well before their $100,000 because it just gets so complicated later.

If you don't understand your business, it's really hard to create systems. So this means standard operating procedures, benchmarks for how many clients you need a quarter in order to hit your income goals, and clear expectations for any contractors or assistants or even junior stylists that you hire. Because if you want to hire and keep good people, you absolutely can do that not paying them a full-time salary. Some people don't want to work full-time.

I didn't understand that. I used to think I'd have to pay health insurance and all this stuff. I used to freak myself out before I even got started. I had no idea what I was even talking about. But you can't just tell someone, "I need you to help me with my systems. I need you to help me with admin." You need to know the what and the why for their role in your business. They or they and you together can figure out the how.

For example, if you don't know how to convert people in your marketing, if you're on social media and most of your clients right now are coming from word of mouth or through referrals, that's great. I've talked about that in other episodes. But if you don't know how to convert people in your marketing, you're just going to hire people, say, with messaging or social media manager, they are not going to be able to know that either because they're not seeing people in their underwear for a living. They're not closing sales calls. They don't know.

So if you don't know what your audience needs to hear to get on a sales call, neither does somebody else. They're not even going to think a sales call is the metric nine times out of ten. They're going to think it's likes or shares, and we both know it's not. And if you don't know and haven't thought through every step of your client process and why things are where they are and when you need to have touch points with your clients, the people you hire, even if they are very experienced administrators, are not going to be able to take anything off your plate because they are not going to have that knowledge.

Without these light structures, even if it's just a Google Doc that you're pouring your brain into, you either avoid hiring altogether like I did, or you burn yourself out. Then you think, "Is this career even going to work out? Am I meant for this?"

Or, and I see this a ton, people do not take this advice, or they don't know how to take this advice because no one's ever told them it, and they think, "Okay, I've made this much money. You know, my partner, some rando over there, my dad thinks I should hire someone," so they do. And they cannot give someone else a clear sense of their business because they've been in it and just reacting to it, not being the CEO of their company. They waste a ton of money. They think, "Well, I'm not doing that again."

Both of those situations, burning yourself out doing it yourself or hiring someone and it not going well, stall your growth, and they stall your confidence.

Another upgrade that you really cannot wait any longer to make at this level is your marketing. At six figures or multiple six figures, your audience already sees you differently, but you might not share their vision of you because you are so head down in the process every day.

I'm sure your prices are higher than when you started. If you're getting a lot of people to just say yes right off the bat on your sales calls, your prices are probably too low. You probably have gotten a fair amount of visibility, maybe even some press. Whether you realize it or not, again, in your marketing, if you're not able to consistently command the rate that you actually want, not the rate that you know that you can get, you haven't fully stepped into a leadership position in your marketing.

What happens is that even if you have a big following, even if you have an intermittent experience of being able to show up on social media and get some attention or write a newsletter, and people are like, "Yeah, I want to work with you," if you don't know the general sense of where you're going and how you want to be perceived at the next level, you'll keep having the experience of friction. You're going to get more sales objections or you're going to get people that say yes, but don't really seem excited or interested in the process the same way that maybe when you were signing clients at thousands less dollars, they were so lit up and excited.

They wanted to know if you had homework for them, right? You're going to attract clients who just aren't quite the right fit. You're going to sometimes feel like you're working harder to get the same results that you were getting at $60,000 or $40,000. That is demoralizing. This is where you need to redo your positioning. This is where positioning and looking at who you are now is critical.

There are multiple points in the journey you need to look at it. You're obviously going to look at it when you first start your business, then around $40,000, $50,000, $60,000, and then at the $100,000 to $150,000 mark. Then about every $200,000 later is when you really want to start looking, "Am I talking to the right people still?" Because your pricing is going to start going up and the way that you work is going to change. Probably the amount of one-on-ones you're going to take versus other opportunities because they're going to start coming to you is going to change as well.

So that means that if your one-to-one has to dial down because you're getting a lot more speaking, then you need to reposition your one-to-one because now you're also a speaking expert. But most people just keep adding things in and then acting like nothing has changed in their one-to-one world, even though the world and the people that are hiring them for, say, speaking gigs see them as another level expert. Because no one's bringing you in to train people if they think you're just a whatever stylist.

So there needs to be some recalibration in the thing you're most comfortable with, which is most likely one-to-one. This is where building that belief, that identity stuff we talked about at the start of this, in who you are and how far you've come, what you stand for as a businesswoman, seriously, what you stand for and why working with you is the obvious choice for a select group of people, needs to become your obsession.

At this stage of your career, if you want to create a new chapter for yourself, for real, for real, you are not just marketing anymore. You are ready to step into thought leadership and you have to start thinking about what makes you unique and leaning into that.

I have an entire episode about that. I'll link it in the show notes. It is by far one of my most popular episodes, and it is probably the thing I have helped the most stylists see and what has changed their career is their own unique voice and turning that into an asset in their business because that is what gives you opportunities that do not burn you out.

If you want to move into higher ticket retainers or you want repeat clients who see you as an advisor to them instead of just a stylist who goes shopping for them, your marketing has to reflect that elevated identity and you have to be bought into that first. Before we wrap this episode up, I want to talk a little bit about the cost because it's really easy to glamorize making this amount of money.

But the biggest thing I see at this stage with stylists is, again, that shame or that pride starts to kick in that I talked about in an earlier episode. So they just keep thinking, "I'm going to wait." They think, "I'm going to fix my systems once I have the money to hire a bigger team," or "I'm going to step into thought leadership once I feel more confident about my pricing," or "I'm going to raise my prices once I'm fully booked again." "I didn't do a good job this fall. So let me wait till the spring or whatever." That is completely backwards.

The longer you wait, especially to upgrade your identity, your systems, your marketing, the more stuck you're going to feel. You'll be working twice as hard for the same results, even though you are seen as a bigger expert. While opportunities are going to clients like I have that are getting paid $10,000 for speaking gigs, they're getting corporate contracts to consult for fashion tech startups, getting dream retainer clients who gladly pay them $30,000 to work with them for six months or a year, they're going to go to the stylists who have positioned themselves as leaders in the industry.

Even if you have more experience, you have to value yourself first, just like you tell your clients to value themselves when they invest in your services. Because you don't get confident and then upgrade your experience. You upgrade, and then the confidence comes. That's literally how this works.

If you're not at six figures yet, I'm going to say it again. You upgrade your identity and your systems and your marketing, and then the confidence comes. It doesn't come when the money is in the bank because I'm already talking to people at multiple six figures, and they're still thinking there's going to be a someday when this will all click. That's not how it works. It's identity first, action second, confidence third.

So if you're at six figures and you're starting to feel these cracks, maybe your systems are chaos and you feel some shame about it. I know that was a huge issue for me and it's still one I have to watch all the time as I get help as my business grows, maybe your marketing feels stale or you know that you're attracting clients, not marketing, but you don't love the experience you're having with those clients, and maybe you know that you are to some degree still acting like an old version of yourself because it's safe, this is your sign. I am talking to you. I know you. I am you.

You don't need another course. You don't need to hire another random person off of Upwork or whatever it is if you don't have your stuff together, because people cannot do the work that is only yours to do, which is understand the what and the why so that they can do the how. You need to step into your creative CEO identity, period.

If that's something you want help with, I have one more spot left into my Creative CEO program. There's a link in the show notes for more information. Let's hop on a call. In the next few episodes, I'm going to break down what the shift looks like, how your identities change, how your beliefs need to change, how you need to start thinking about the world in general in order to take all of the amazing experiences, some of which you may not even remember that you have had in your career and get you to the next level.

It's not going to be an overnight thing. You don't go from where you are now to a team of seven people that you support full-time. So just remember, this is a one-step-at-a-time process, just like it was to get you where you are, but you have a lot more information about where you're going than you did when you started. That is the real win at being where you are.

Most people never get here. So give yourself credit and then get back to 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.