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.

For the past two months, I have been having a version of this conversation over and over, both with my stylist in Income Accelerator, my one-to-one clients, my established clients, and my Creative CEO clients and their teams. When I'm having a specific conversation, often what that means is that it is a sign of a bigger trend. That means that it's time to talk about it here.

It's not a particularly easy one, but it is one that this industry needs to hear. Stylists are telling me this very similar storyline that I'm working with. I'm showing up, I'm posting, I'm doing all the things, and it's not working.

I don't know why I was using the framework before and all of a sudden it's not working. There is a belief right now that the Instagram algorithm is terrible or that people just aren't hiring stylists because of the economy and so no one's engaging. That must be why.

That must be why all of my effort isn't working. But inevitably, because I want to get to the bottom of things, I open up a browser and I go to that person's account and I type it in and I start going through their content, the last three to 10 posts. It is immediately clear to me why they are not seeing any response, getting any sales, their views are down.

It's just crystal clear. They are not speaking to their audience. They are letting AI speak to their audience for them. That is a massive problem. Personal styling is a high-touch, high-trust industry.

You cannot expect people to let you influence how they show up in the world if you are hiding and not going first. When I hear stylists saying that they're doing everything right, they're posting, they're emailing, they're showing up, and nothing's moving, what I know immediately is that they have somehow watered down their message. Now, before ChatGPT and AI was as popular as it is right now, I saw this in other ways that were often a little bit more tricky to pinpoint.

So I don't think that AI is doing something new. I think that it's just a very easily recognizable version of a conversation I have had to have. Certainly never to the degree I'm having it now for years. When you hand over your perspective, your personality, and basically everything that you stand for to a robot and expect that human beings are going to pay you hundreds or thousands of dollars, and you look at someone who's trying to help you and say, "I'm doing everything," there's this moment where you have to learn to take accountability.

You cannot sell a transformation through captions that sound like they were written by ChatGPT. I truly don't know that there has ever been an easier time to open a business, especially a styling business, but if you don't understand that there is going to be some hard work and some thinking beyond “this is what I wore, let me post links to it in my Instagram stories,” that there's going to be more required of you than that, then this is going to be a much harder conversation. If you're someone that was using AI because you thought it was going to save time and you got caught up in it, no problem.

We can see our way back. But what I'm seeing, interestingly, is a lot more people showing up "consistently" than they were before because they have AI. So people that were never posting through the grid are now, as if we don't all know, that it is absolute trash.

The irony here is that AI was supposed to save us a lot of time, but what it's really done is it's disconnected a lot of us from the reason that we started doing this work. It's really starting to show. People can feel when something was written with thought or emotion behind it, and we can tell when a human being was there.

As a matter of fact, I would rather you post something full of typos than post another AI caption. The reality is that AI isn't bad. I personally use it all the time. I have made this mistake before and used it in content because I felt like Superwoman when I could get four hours of work done in an hour and a half using ChatGPT.

But I quickly learned that I lost my audience and I was working double time to try to understand what happened. I think a lot of people in the community that I'm in are just starting to use AI for the first time and don't realize that technically, and this is not a knock to you, you're a late adopter. So what you think is exciting and original, we all know isn't.

This is one of the issues in an industry that is very slow to modernize, to, for lack of a better word, get with the program about what is happening in the business space and the technology space, and in just basic online business trends. It's a concerning thing because it's very easy right now for there to be a host of somewhat reliably seeming or genuine seeming reasons why content isn't working. There's a recession or the people aren't buying and that price of milk and eggs is high.

That can all be true. And the most millionaires are always made during recessions. There are always going to be people that are buying when times are tough. The bigger point here that is part of the reason why this is a very difficult conversation to have often is it shows me very quickly that people that got into this industry a lot during the pandemic because there was a lot of crap being sold to stylists and there still is, or people that want to be stylists, that you can sit on your couch and make a hundred thousand dollars a year, and you just can't, and I'm sorry but that's not how this works.

And there is this idea that you should be able to do the bare minimum and make all this money because this is how far we've come. But at the end of the day, we're still dealing with other human beings. How would you feel if other people were phoning it in for you?

I think that what we're really missing sight of is that, yes, we are at a time when people are hurting and there is an enormous stratification in the economic landscape. That's a conversation for a different day. But as someone who's been in the industry for over 20 years, I can tell you right now, as someone who was not in the economic bracket of most of the people that I served, styling, personal styling, one-on-one personal styling, virtual, in-person, but specifically in-person, has never been for people that could not pay their mortgage or their rent.

You fundamentally misunderstand that while everybody may deserve to be confident, there is a certain amount of basic regulation and a certain type of lifestyle you have to have before you can even have the fortune or the ability to start considering what your clothes are signaling to the world. There is an enormous amount of privilege in this that we are not talking about.

I think this is one of the big problems in the industry is that we're skirting around the reality that this is a status signaling business and fashion always has been. Even if people don't have a lot of money, there is still status signaling happening in clothes. If you're uncomfortable with that, then there's a basic level of, honestly, this is going to sound harsh, but I mean it because I want us all to get where we need to go, a certain amount of emotional maturity we need to have as an industry.

The truth is, nobody's looking to hire a stylist to help them signal the things that they need to in the rooms that they want to, that is barely getting by. Would they like to? I'm sure. But they're not going to pay you over buying food to put on the table.

So if you're here thinking that that's an excuse, then I have a wake-up call for you. You need to do the work to understand what business you actually got into. You need to watch where you're getting the content you're getting, because that's what's crippling your business.

You don't need to be a millionaire to work with people that are well off. I spent the entirety of my career being well below the financial situation of the people I worked with and they were wonderful human beings and they did tons of good in the world and that's just the reality of the situation. If that's not something you're comfortable with, then my question to you is how do you ever expect to get where you need to go financially if you have such a problem with people being well off?

But the point of this conversation isn't that. It's just that if you cannot do the things you need to do to write basic sentences and speak basic words in a video to talk to the people that need to connect with your message, this is probably not going to be the path for you. If you just fell into the AI trap like most of us do because it seemed like you're going to get more done, got it.

Here's what I want you to know about it. You can use AI to help you refine your thoughts, to organize your ideas, and to copy-edit content you already wrote. But you cannot use it to think for you, meaning you have to put into ChatGPT or whatever AI model you're using the thought, the raw thought.

You have to come up with it. You have to use your observations. You have to use your client experience. You have to use your common sense. From there, it can help you make it more of an in-depth observation. It can help you create a hook.

It can help you do those things. But you have to watch for AI talk. I am seeing way too many people taking my frameworks, putting them into ChatGPT, and then coming out with something that's like “your style isn't broken, you're just missing the blueprint.” We all know that ChatGPT wrote that.

So no one's going to think that they can trust you with their appearance and discernment to help them figure out how to navigate who they are and how they look in the world. The truth is, the majority of Americans use AI platforms, specifically ChatGPT, so they know it too. The bigger issue is the reason why people's views are down isn't just because they're putting trash content out, but because these platforms like Instagram and Threads and Facebook can detect AI-generated content.

There are actually little characters that are invisible inside of the captions that signal it.

So the reason why your content is down and when no one's viewing it is because it's actually being marked by the invisible markers inside of AI-generated captions and telling the programs this was written by AI. So it's pushing it down the feed in terms of its priority when it pushes it out to your audience.

So you can blame the algorithm. Sure, the algorithm is doing it. But the algorithm is just showing us that this is what people don't want to see. It doesn't work. So then it deprioritizes it. It's not even saying inherently that AI is bad. It's saying it doesn't work. So we don't show it.

So there you go. There's the answer to why everyone's engagement is trash. This is not hard. There are people that work in AI that talking about this all over the internet. This is basic. So this is another reason why I feel like there's a big misunderstanding that if you own an online business, if you're an entrepreneur, and if you're a creative, you still have a responsibility to educate yourself about what is going on in the world.

Because this is the stuff that you get yourself into and then you make these excuses. The problem with the excuses is it paints a picture of your capabilities that isn't true and it isn't real. That's why I have to have this conversation. So we are currently living in a world where so much of what we see and read is automated or AI-generated.

That is why people are craving real human connection more than ever. So one of the things that's happening in the industry is that there's a rise of in-person styling, which I've talked about. I knew this was coming because when a client hires a stylist, what they are buying is somebody else's eyes and expertise to look at the context of their life that they're trying to show up in a certain way and help them think through that.

That ends with the clothes. People want to be seen for who they are and they also want you to see them for who they want to be. There is something about that that I do think translates better in person. AI cannot do that. It cannot pick up on body language. It cannot pick up on nuance. It cannot pick up in the emotion in someone's voice.

It can't help somebody close the gap between who they are now and who they are becoming because there are too many factors that only the human ear and eye and just your sense of being around another human being can pick up on. That is at the heart of personal styling. I'm not saying you can't do virtual styling, but most people that I'm seeing that are struggling that came out of the pandemic's training are people that never got enough one-on-one experience and are skirting that reality.

So I've had to tell a lot of people, "Hey, listen, I don't care how you get the experience. I need you to get back out with human beings. I don't care if they pay you or not." A lot of stylists feel like it's a step backwards until they get back into being in people's closets in real time and realize, "Oh, wait a sec, I missed a lot."

Then they're able to catapult forward. I'm not saying that you need to do the shopping in person, I understand that stores are hard. I get it. But you can make some part of it in person if you can. If you are doing it virtually, you probably need to elongate your services. That's not what this conversation is about.

But I do want to be clear. I am actually fixing a lot of these problems by putting people back in front of other human beings. The truth is, like all trends, when something rises in the public consciousness to a point that it's available to the masses, you see a course correction the other way.

So when personal styling became more available online and through apps and through other things, you immediately saw the most savvy and the consumers that are most likely to keep you in business for a long time go right back to in-person. Why? Because they fundamentally understand the difference between the two experiences because they have the money and the means and the need, quite frankly, the need.

Because people will pay for things they don't have money for, trust me. Most people that buy Chanel bags cannot afford them. So you need to understand that it's not about how people are doing financially. Sure, hopefully they are not being irresponsible, but that's not your business. It's about how people perceive the need in their life for this.

That's where stylists go wrong. That's why you have to be in the rooms and in the conversations with people that may not hire you, but at least you're in the mindset that I'm talking about, because you will not know what to tell AI. You will not know how to organize your thoughts. You will not know what stories to start with. That's the truth.

If you want to be good, you have to have human experience. It is a human business. It will never be able to be completely taken over by AI if you get that there's a lot of nuance here and you become confident in it. It's very hard to become confident in the nuance of this business if you are sitting on a couch talking to Instagram, linking your outfits, and never dealing with real people.

The fix to all of this is not to post more content or to research more or to ask your friends what to do. It is to care more about people. It is to care more. It's not to train your GPT to think better for you. It's not that. It is literally to just care, to remember what got you to this business in the first place.

What do you do instead? First of all, you admit that you try to take the easy route as all of us have at some point with AI. You go for a walk and you try to reconnect with your perspective, with your experience, what got you here. Sometimes it might be the thing that got you interested in styling personally.

It can't be, "I've liked style since I was five." No one cares. I mean, like if there was something that happened to you in your life where you started to use style or you didn't think of yourself as stylish and then you did or you helped somebody and you had these moments, go back to those clients, talk to them, look over your new client intake forms.

If you don't have them, this is a big problem in the industry. It's another thing people were not trained on. The reason you need them is to remember these things. There are only so many things you can keep in your head at one time. There's going to be more that I'm going to talk about about why you need these things because it's part of a client's transformational process.

But that's for another day. But you need to start with real humans. If you're giving your content to a VA or a social media manager, they also cannot be putting the final product out on social media that has just come from AI. So if you're using AI, start with your own thought, put it through, have it organize the post, take out the dashes, take out the emojis.

They're making everyone know immediately that they cannot trust you. If I go back two years and I don't see a dash in your content, I don't want to see it today because we all know AI wrote that. Nobody even knew how to use an em-dash correctly. So it's very, very, very shocking that people think that we don't all know that most people didn't write the content if they're using it.

So go back, look at what it wrote, and then humanize it. Write it the way you talk. Speak it out loud. This will also save you a ton of time because you don't have to write it from scratch. If you're anything like me, you can look at a blank piece of paper for a long time.

So it's better for you to edit it and then speak it out loud. I would rather you have a run-on sentence than a bunch of dashes. Please do not do that. People do not need perfect captions. They need to know that you care. That is what we're going towards. That is what everyone's talking about.

The good news is that literally the bar is on the ground right now. If you have even in a somewhat interesting, somewhat formed original thought, you're going to stand out. So it's easier to stand out, actually, if you just don't take the final version and put it on the internet.

Also, good luck with your views if you keep doing that, because all the platform knows, and I'm sure email will start sending more things to spam as those platforms get savvier too. I just want to remind you that radical responsibility is how you move forward in business. It's also how you attract people that are responsible for themselves and are ready for the styling process.

So your business is reflecting back to you what you are showing up for and what you are available for. When you are stuck and unable to think a thought or not able to do the vulnerable work of connecting with people through your content, you're getting reflected back to you the results that come from that. It's hard to hear, but it is true.

So I just wanted to have this little chat with you and remind you that sure, it can help you save time, but I would rather you be doing two to three solid, really good posts. Right now, I even suspect that soon anything written will not be trusted. It will have to be video. That's why you're seeing video rise at the level it is.

So that's what you're going to have to lean into and get comfortable with. Then I would rather you post every single day because it will make no difference if it's not good content that stands out. Like I said, it's not that hard to stand out right now. So a reminder that yes, I know there feels like there's a pump out content, pump out content, but people remember things that resonate with them.

They don't remember quantity. In fact, most people don't see all your content anyways. I would rather you be training yourself to think more deeply, to start your posts with the people that you actually want to help in mind, and then go from there.

Then once you get used to that, you have a rhythm for yourself. Then if you want to increase the volume and the output, that is totally fine. But no one's final product should be coming cut and paste from ChatGPT because you're just not going to see results. So it doesn't matter that you're "showing up" if you're not actually showing up and you're not actually in the content. Okay, I will talk to you next week.

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.