PODCAST SHOWNOTES

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

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

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

Today, I want to shift how you see the styling industry, not just the business side, not just how we make money, but the deeper patterns that shape how most stylists think and operate. Because if you want to grow in the coming years, you are going to need to have a somewhat sharper view on what is actually happening in this industry. You need to understand why so many stylists feel stuck, even though they see other stylists who they think are just as talented as them, who are booked out, who are doing everything that their business coaches or the programs that they're in tell them to do.

I really want to rewire how you think about your work, being a member of this industry, and what it looks like to be building a business from the inside, not as somebody over here. If you are a stylist and you have a website and you are on social media, you are part of a community. You are part of a publicly perceived group of people that are viewed in a certain way. How people interact with stylists impact how people perceive the industry.

Once you hear this, you are not going to be able to unhear it or unsee the gaps that we are experiencing in the industry. It is the reason why so many stylists never get to six figures. The amount of women in business overall that get to six figures is dramatically higher than stylists alone. It just isn't very common. It's not because stylists can't meet the demand or that there's no need for it or that people won't pay the prices that a six-figure salary requires. It's because there is a lack of understanding about how the industry is perceived, how the industry is behaving.

Basically, we have a little bit of a self-perception problem. Many people in the industry are teaching things that happened or that worked decades ago. If that is the lens that you are trying to succeed at and you don't realize it, it's going to make a lot of sense why so many stylists do not trust experts to lead them anymore. Because there's a lot of skepticism by stylists who are currently established to trust somebody else in the industry because they have been burned and told that they would learn real tactics, that they would know exactly what steps to take. Instead, they were given a lot of mindset coaching.

That's what I hear day in and day out on sales calls. So I want to talk about something that came up again and again in my group calls on the last two rounds of Income Accelerator. Stylists were trying to market services, in some cases, were told to market services that they did not know how to sell. They did not know enough about these services that they were supposed to be selling to do that with any level of success.

I'm not saying that to be harsh, we all have to learn. But I think it stands to reason that if you can't talk about the offer that you are providing as a stylist with any level of confidence to yourself, let alone other people, it's probably not something you should be marketing. A lot of stylists are trying to sell personal styling services, specifically transformational styling, with the marketing style of an influencer.

They're not even posting tips and tricks anymore. I want to say that that's outdated, but I don't even see that many people doing that. I actually see people phoning it in a lot more. They're posting really light content, pictures of their outfits: Here are three ways to style a shirt that I love. Here's how I style my outfits.

They're not even true education. It's not “how to find and assess if clothing is high quality.” Is that the sexiest thing? No, but at least its style is showing that they are an expert, that they understand that somebody might want to know that information if they're going to trust you to be given thousands and thousands of dollars to buy them a high-quality wardrobe because that's what they're looking at.

I'm not even seeing that. I'm seeing most people posting outfits being okay with just getting link money because they don't know how to charge for their business, maybe posting behind-the-scenes content now and again or posting insights that they get from clients and then putting up a really quick discovery call link and wondering why they're hearing crickets. It's because they are influencing. They are not acting like experts. They're not acting like stylists and it's not their fault.

I don't think that someone's telling people to act like influencers. I just think they're not giving them any other way to act. So if you are someone that came to the styling industry in the last five years and you saw that, that you wanted to be a stylist and you found people online that were stylists because there was more than there ever has been before, and you also see a lot of people doing style content that looks like influencers, then you're just trying to replicate what you got because you don't have any actual strategy.

This mismatch is causing the first really major problem in the industry. Most stylists talk about very surface-level services or they're giving away tips that are trend-based. They're not matching with the audience that actually hires personal stylists wants. There are only so many times someone is going to hear about how you edit a closet and why it is important before they just stop tuning out.

It's not what gets people to buy. When you talk about tasks instead of the transformation, the results you get, it becomes like you are marketing a list of chores you can do for people. That's why so few stylists are able to confidently command the kind of prices that the stylists I work with do. It's because it's not even a conversation that you would be talking through all of the different things you do in a closet edit.

Nobody is here for that. As a matter of fact, only stylists love closet edits. People that want to hire a stylist and want results with their wardrobe want outfits. At least talk about the outfits. When you have yourself as an expert online, whether you feel like you are not, you are listed as one because you have a business account, you have a website, and you are just showing me what you're wearing or you're just showing me a couple of ways to mix and match things or what you pull out of your closet without telling me anything about why I should care as someone that could hire you, you're really not marketing a business.

And you're really not putting yourself in a position, especially if you're putting up links all of the time because that's how you get money. You're training people how to treat you. That's just the truth. It's unfair because it's not rocket science to learn how to market your business, but if you are going to market your business, you have to start with your offers.

That's how you know you're a business. When you focus on tasks, you build your marketing around a lot of insecurity and proving energy: “I can edit your closet. I can shop for you,” not “I'm going to lead you through a transformation.” That energy is wildly different.

If you think that the answer is to show up more, then again, and that's what I see with a lot of stylists when I tell them to slow down, they get anxious because to them it is a volume game because that's what they see modeled for them in influencer behavior. Because yes, it is a volume game when you are selling links. It is not a volume game when you are selling a one-to-one service.

I can tell you that as someone who has built two six-figure businesses in one-to-one services. Your clients may become attracted to your account because of your style, but they don't hire you because of your style. So when you use that as your only way of generating income, whether it be links or the only type of content that you're able to do because you don't have any other skills, again, unintentionally, you're teaching people how to treat you and it's not like a business owner.

There is a belief in the styling industry that is really draining the energy and the confidence of many of the stylists that I work with because by the time they get to me, they are pretty seasoned. So they've had some experience, they've been around the block, and that is that they are telling people, “I am going to change your life.” This process gives you confidence. This process is transformational.

But the problem is they often also come with a set of stories if they've been marketing in this way that shows a lot of them and their clients, ideal clients, being on separate pages. That's because you cannot give anyone confidence. Confidence is not a styling deliverable. Confidence is a psychological state.

Confidence by definition is a feeling or a consciousness of your own power. It is a faith or a belief that you will act in an effective way when whatever circumstances come up appear. It is a state, an internal state of certainty. None of that can be transferred from you to them.

In fact, one of the things that I see is that people that are attracted to transformational styling, myself included, often want to fix and help and change people. They get into this business unintentionally and completely unaware that that is where they have gotten a lot of their value. So what happens is every little tiny piece of client feedback becomes soul sucking to them because they have been praised for the majority of their life in different circumstances for being the helper, the fixer, the changer, the doer.

But when it comes to confidence and what we're actually trying to sell as stylists, it's not a good fit.

One of the most profound things that stylists hear in my programs, they tell me all the time and I did not expect it to be this, is that your job as a stylist is to find the people who are already happy with themselves. It is not your job to try to find the people who are miserable and want you to prove to them that they're good enough. Because A, there's no amount of money in the world that makes you qualified to do that.

I've worked with stylists who were formally therapists, so I feel pretty confident saying that, and because it is never going to be the case that you can build up somebody's confidence or help people feel confident in themselves if they are not aware of what gives them that feeling in the first place. Go back to the enclosed cognition episode that I did a few weeks ago.

So a stylist's job to be truly transformational isn't to market confidence. It's to show up confidently. It's to actually be able to understand why you offer the services you offer. What kinds of clients are actually a good fit for your offers? And it's not anyone and everyone who is struggling. There are certain struggles that are not yours to take on. You cannot guarantee how somebody else is going to act in clothes ahead of time.

You cannot create beliefs in people's minds that are 40, 50, 60 years old and have decades of experience and beliefs behind them that you can't rewrite in six months, a year, or most stylists aren't even working with people that long. So how is that your promise to people that you're going to help them find confidence?

What you can do though, and this is where I wish every single program that taught stylists, just like how architects and interior designers are taught, is you can't give people confidence, but what you can give them is a process and a structure. Stylists think that what makes them good stylists is their eye, but it's not.

Because you can have the best eye in the world, but if as a personal stylist, this is where this industry is different than other parts of styling, if their beliefs don't connect with that look that you got them to signal to them, "Oh yes, that is what makes me feel stylish and confident and powerful," or whatever, then their actions are not going to follow. It doesn't matter what kind of skills you have.

That's why if you want to actually succeed, you need the structures that walk people through a process of transformation. Transformation requires certain things as a foundation so that you can build upon them and so that people can say, "Oh, that's how far I've come." Now I get it. Now I know how to put together looks.

Now I understand why I was getting stuck before, but most stylists never even have the conversation with the client to show them how far they've come. So that pathway helps them understand and you understand who they are and how they make choices as a result of how they view themselves.

When you give people a structure and a professional container and you act like a professional, not someone who just happens to be good at styling so you decided to open a business one day, you create the conditions where their confidence, their skill level can grow, can actually take root because they are participating in the process through means that you guide them with. Yes, you give them the clothes, but they have to communicate with you about them.

You are not trying to manufacture a feeling for them. You are manufacturing and helping them live out an experience of themselves that should lead to them feeling more confident at the end. Or if they're not ready to feel confident because a lot of other things have to be there, like a basic sense of self-acceptance, then they will have more self-awareness that they can use on their way in their own personal journey to being confident.

Doesn't mean you weren't an important part of it just because they didn't love every outfit you picked. It means that they weren't ready yet or you did not have the skill set and the systems to lead people through a process. Yes, transformation seems very magical and mythical and like it's something that's just synergy, it's either there or it's not, but that's actually not true.

It's like learning. There are steps you take to learn. You don't just wake up one day and know how to read. First, you gotta learn how to write letters, uppercase, lowercase. You gotta learn how to do phonics and sounding out words. Then you start to read little words. Then you read bigger words. Then you read sentences. That's how you get transformed from being someone who's not a reader to a reader.

It's very similar with style, but I don't know why stylists think that it's all on their shoulders to just poof, look at someone, browse a Pinterest board that that person has made zero sense of, and then you start shopping for them and you're going to transform every bad thought they've ever had about themselves, their body, their relationships in a few weeks. Come on. No wonder no one is making the kind of money they want. You can't sell that believably to anyone.

Here's why this really matters for your business. When you promise confidence, you attract clients who want to emotionally outsource the work. They're not looking to transform into their next-level self. They are responsible for the vision that they bring to the styling container of their next-level self. You will attract clients who want you to fix something that can't be fixed by new clothes.

A lot of stylists also want that from their business, which is why some of them don't succeed. When that person that you're working with does not feel confident, they will blame your service, not their own lack of clarity or emotional maturity, which is why you have to understand your service. You have to understand what each step of the process does for someone.

When you lead with the process, not promising people confidence, you're going to attract clients who want to participate in their own growth journey because they're looking for and listening for not how good your style is, not how many cute links you can put up, not three ways to wear a sweater, they're looking for some evidence that you are legitimate and have a process to lead them through so that they can participate in their own growth.

You're going to start attracting clients who understand your role, clients who respect your time and your expertise. This is the turning point for most stylists. You can't scale a business when your value as a stylist is defined by whether a client feels confident on any given day. That is a level of emotional labor that is not appropriate for a business relationship. It's definitely not a business model.

This is why so many stylists feel burned out but they're not fully booked. They made themselves responsible for a result that another human being can't guarantee. So what's happening is we have these two wild ends of the spectrum happening in this industry. We have people over here saying they're stylists and just linking clothes and saying that you should be thoughtful about your clothes, but also over-promoting overconsumption and zero thought about how you curate a wardrobe and an image.

Then we have people that are promising basically self-esteem makeovers. None of them make anyone feel more of a professional. Like when you hire an architect, they don't promise that you're going to have great friends because you're going to all of a sudden be able to invite people over and everyone's going to want to know you. That's crazy town.

They take you through a process and they also say, "Hey, there are some limitations here. There's only this much square feet. You can't buy any couch you want for your living room, it's just not going to work." They act like experts. They don't try to tap dance and move walls or do whatever to get a couch in there. They give you alternate options and then they let you pick. They don't try to move you to a new house.

That's what you gotta get. When you're trying to promise people confidence and when you over-deliver, it's because you don't know your worth as a stylist, and that usually isn't because you're not worthy. It's because you haven't done the work to understand why you even have the services and the process you have, or maybe you don't have them at all.

Maybe you have no onboarding and off-boarding and ways of having conversations with clients and follow-up emails that actually get people to answer you. Maybe you just don't have that, and that's fine. But don't promise things that you can't deliver because it also creates an enormous amount of stress on you and it's where everything breaks down.

When you make yourself responsible for a result that nobody can guarantee from one human being to another, you put yourself in a position to always be wondering why you're not good enough. But when you shift out of that role and into a professional with a process, everything starts to change for you because your energy and your focus and the way that you show up isn't tied to your self-worth, which means you stop attracting clients that are looking for you to prove their self-worth to them.

The last part of why I think the industry is struggling right now is because most business coaches do not understand the industry, and I can say that as someone who hired a lot of them when I was a stylist. A lot of stylists who are not able to make it right now are thinking that the way to scale is to teach other stylists.

So as someone who gave up my career and does this now, I can tell you right now, I had 14 years of experience. I had a podcast that tons of stylists listened to and learned from. It took me a long time to make the decision to leave because there was a part of me that felt like if I stayed, everyone would wonder if I was telling them the full truth.

Because it's really hard to keep up with marketing trends and explaining to people how they get on ChatGPT versus if they should buy SEO help. Helping people understand and navigate business in the last five to six years is an entirely other job when you see how fast technology is moving. It was just really hard to keep up with both and have a thriving styling business, which I had in three cities. There's only so much you can do.

So when I left it behind, I did so with the decision that I would be committed to making this industry as business savvy, as cutting edge as I could. Because otherwise, we continue into this trap of bad self-esteem and we continue to perpetuate the same problems that the industry has always had.

This idea that you can treat it like a little hobby, but you can also and should also expect that people are going to hand over their trust, their attention, and a lot of money to you. You can't have it both ways. It's the same thing with this business.

A lot of stylists think, "Oh, let me go be a business coach for a stylist because I've figured out a little bit of this and lots of people want to be stylists." Because there aren't people talking to stylists at many different levels, which is why I came in at the level that I did, there's not a good idea or a sense of, when I give you this strategy, is it for now or is it forever? Is it because this is the growth you need right this minute or is this the principle that should guide you forever?

Which is why I've decided to do programs for different stages of business because it's not appropriate that you should be doing all the same things forever. Yet that's what's being taught. So when you are someone who picks up a lot of content hacks or generic marketing formulas or a lot of people say to me, "Well, when I was in XYZ program, I learned that I had to build trust and entertain people in order to sell to them."

That's just not true. I say, "Okay, well, why?" Or "Would that even look like?" And no one can tell me. So what happens is that a lot of people learn visibility tactics. Again, that's where it comes back to a lot of people behaving like influencers. When a service provider or coach tries to tell stylists what to do in terms of their pricing but they don't know how to lead them through, "Okay, remove this at this price level, add this. This is how much personal one-on-one time you should have for these types of price points," when they don't know that, they send stylists out into the world with higher price packages that will get them to six figures, sure.

But without all of the tools for the journey—none of the marketing, none of the networking, none of the in-person, none of the online service provider relationship building that you need to do. They don't tell them how to get on podcasts. They don't tell them that they need their own bank account.

So I've got all these stylists out here taking Venmo from people as if that's a legitimate business move. It's not. Open a bank account, use Stripe like a grown-up. That's what I mean. You can raise your prices. You can be told to wear certain clothes or act in a certain way. But if you at the end of the day don't understand why and how you lead people through the styling experience, all of that doesn't mean anything.

I'm seeing a lot of stylists right now who left six-figure jobs during the pandemic and experienced themselves as very capable. They've always gotten what they wanted. But for some reason, they can't make this business work. "How hard could it be?" they're thinking. It's just clothes, it's just styling. I agree with you. I thought that for a decade.

But the problem is that when you follow generalist coaching or coaching that's outdated for the industry, you end up doing more work and earning less money because nobody's telling you what the standard should be for your level of business and for your level of experience. You end up with confused offers. You end up with content that does not resonate with anyone or speak to anyone because you stripped all the personality right out of it.

You'll start to make up stories. Like, nobody's paying for this. It doesn't work. You will end up in a cycle where you're working harder and you're not growing. You'll wonder, "Why was I told that I could have this six-figure business, but I don't have any of the tactics and strategies to get there? What did I just pay all this money for?" And you can also give people the tactics and strategies and you can list them, list by one by one, and they won't do them. So both is true, right?

But my work exists and the programs I create exist because this industry needs something different. We need to speak to the reality that it's not that AI is coming for your jobs. It is that we have democratized. If you are just doing passive one-off shopping or you're treating all of your services like a list of chores that someone can hire you for—editing, shopping, putting together some outfits—instead of another human being hiring another human being in order to help them metaphorically read the rooms they are in, if you're not able to show that you have the capabilities to help people actually advance in professional settings with how they dress, in their dating life with how they dress, if you're not showing those credentials and those capabilities, often through your own life experiences—what I teach stylists to do—then yeah, AI will take your job.

If you're just draping people in colors but you're not able to explain to them the symbolism of it or how it affects other people's energy or how it interacts with their personal brand or how it interacts with the way they are perceived in this space versus this space, if you don't have that knowledge, it's going to be hard. But that knowledge is not rocket science and you can get it.

So the work that I do in this industry exists because we need something different, because the industry has changed. You cannot do the things that made me and other people six figures years ago anymore. People aren't the same and everyone on TikTok is a style influencer. If you're on Instagram, you don't even know the half of it.

So if you're not even aware that other social media platforms are outperforming in these areas what most stylists who are professionals are doing every day, it's going to make a lot of sense that you feel stuck but that you don't understand what you're missing. Anyone that doesn't fill in that gap—that doesn't understand how to talk that way—AI will just do for free. AI will do better.

So body shape analysis, color analysis, all the things that have come under the normal image consulting or even just personal shopper or closet organizer role—all of that will be taken over. That doesn't mean that there's not a place for styling. In fact, what it means, and this is the shift that I want everybody to get, it means that there's actually more of a seat at the table for high-priced personal styling, but it won't work if we don't start viewing ourselves that way.

You cannot view yourself as just someone with good taste anymore. "Sorry, can you make a bunch of money with links?" You sure can. But pretty soon—and honestly with most people that are doing that, it's not even pretty soon, I see it every day—people will just stop hiring you. They will not think, "Oh, she has great links. Let me eventually hire her."

If you don't show up reasonably consistently with content that actually says something and makes people feel something or is actually an original thought, it's going to be hard. It's not that the options for stylists have decreased, as somebody asked me on a call recently. It's that the standards have increased.

What's not followed is the education, the support, and honestly the self-concept that we need as an industry to command the rates and command the perception that is required. There are plenty of stylists making six figures—I work with plenty of them—that are still in survival mode because there is a lack of legitimacy in their own brain.

So the goal here is for everybody to get that we are professionalizing because of AI, because of the fact that actually nobody really that is going to hire a stylist thinks that only celebrities have them. If someone is there, they're nowhere near the point where they're going to hire you. So you're talking to the wrong people.

Part of being a professional is getting that there is a status and class acknowledgment and savviness that stylists have to have. Because one of the biggest markers of people hiring stylists—which I don't know why more people don't know this—is a change in socioeconomic status or wanting one.

So if you don't know how to read the rooms and interpret the kind of places that people want to go into, you're really not much better to them than AI. Because that's something that AI isn't going to be able to do. So the more you talk about your own experiences and you relate it to people and you weave it into your experience, the more you're going to be able to capture trust in the face of all of these other technological achievements that are happening and that are impacting the industry.

But the flip side is there's also a way in which technology makes your job easier as a stylist in the coming years. You also can't shun technology because it actually could be the thing that's your edge. Because if you have the humanity and it has the ability to be more efficient with how it shops for your clients, then that sounds like the perfect mixture of human and robot to me. But if you try to use the robot for your content, well, we have a different story.

Please take away from this conversation that if you are not sold on your expertise and the importance of this—you don't even have to have all the right skills yet—but if you are not sold, it's a wrap. Ninety percent of this is how stylists show up, how they act, the standards that they hold. Everything else will follow if you consistently behave in a way that, again, shows people how to treat you.

That is what we're going to be talking about more in the coming episodes. But I want to just have this little pep talk because cute little styling businesses are not going to make it anymore. But that means there are actually bigger seats at longer tables from people that are really ready to legitimize this work. So if that's you, let's go.

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.