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.

If you're an established personal stylist and you're doing everything alone in your business, and it somehow feels like you are earning less than you were when you started out, or that even if you're earning about the same, you aren't growing the way you would hope to be for all of the effort that you're putting out, I want you to know that this is an incredibly common experience because I talk to hundreds of stylists a year. I would say more than 60% of them are doing everything on their own. They're showing up and they're trying to have a good attitude and stick with it, but they don't have anyone to compare notes with.

So today I want to talk about this internal experience of your business that is super common on your way to six figures. The reason why I say on your way is that a lot of stylists take what I'm going to talk about today and make it mean there's no way it's going to happen when actually it's a key indicator that it will happen. But it is a turning point that you have to basically choose in your business.

Instead, I see a lot of stylists, and I think I did this too, plateau for longer than they need to because they are making this phase of their business where they are experienced and they're established but they're not growing mean that there is something wrong with them. Meanwhile, it's just a phase that shows up for pretty much everyone. It's a matter of how long it sticks around that is up to the way you look at it.

So my hope today is that this is a mindset reframe for some of you out there. So this spot right before you break through to a more profitable business that feels easier, you feel more in control, and you feel like an expert is really uncomfortable because it forces you into a choice. And many, many stylists, and I think many business owners, don't realize that they're in this position where they really are at a crossroads.

Because they're looking at the wrong things and they're making things mean something that they don't, they never actually make the choice. So you have the option of continuing to operate like a stylist who happens to have a business, someone who wanted to be a stylist and so they got a few friends and family together and then they moved a little bit outside of that and then they throw up a website.

But really, the business is just a means to an end. It's like, "I want to be a stylist, I don't know what else to do. Okay, I guess this is a business," right? Or you step into being a business owner who happens to be a stylist. Most stylists never realize that this shift has to happen in order for their next level to break through.

So instead of seeing this moment where you feel stagnant, where you're showing up and your messaging isn't working, where you're constantly afraid of saying no to a suspect client because you don't know where your next one's coming from, instead of seeing it as a moment in your development, most stylists take it personally. They assume that they should know this already.

Or they look around at Instagram usually and convince themselves that they are behind or there's something wrong with them or it's the economy or it's not working for everyone. Everyone comes at this in a different way, but I see over and over again that it's a whole mental spiral. It really could be avoided if people talked about stages of business.

Because when people are marketing to you online, they're not often telling you about these normal parts of growth and development. And most importantly, we act like everybody who has the strategy should just be able to move past it at the same rate, as if we're not all individuals that come to any online program or any coaching, or anything like that with life experiences.

Maybe you struggled in school and so an online course is tricky for you. Or you have a lot of stories about visibility, or you always thought of yourself as being introverted, so the idea that you even have a business that you're the face of is just really hard for your identity to even grapple with.

If any of those stories and a million other possible ones show up when you're trying to grow your business—and they will, because there's no better self-development path than owning a business—and you just think, "What's the big deal? Well, I only wanted to do this business because I wanted to help people feel confident," you're going to lose the plot about what this opportunity and what this difficulty and what this stagnation is actually offering you. Because you never really thought of it as a serious business, if you're honest. So it never occurred to you that there would be serious challenges.

But no one who makes a lot of money in business, regardless of what you see on the internet in ads, never experiences discomfort, never has challenges, never fails. People who have massive launches that make hundreds of thousands of dollars every time they launch something didn't tell you about the six courses that they've launched back in the day that nobody bought.

You have to be bad at things to get good at them. What often happens in this phase that creates a lot of noise for stylists and really takes their eye off of what matters is they begin to compare themselves to other people's highlight reels. Or they look at somebody who has a lot of followers or who appears to be in dressing rooms all the time or is on social media and they immediately go into a spiral about what that means about them, not even knowing if what they're seeing is reality, quite honestly.

What's usually happening when I see a stylist who's stuck in a lot of comparison, who is saying to me, "I'm probably going to have to go get a job," there's a lot of demoralization at this phase. It's that because you are making it all about your failure—which I get, you're probably someone who is very responsible, very sensitive, and you want to take personal responsibility—but the truth is that you cannot take personal responsibility for things if you don't understand them.

What is going on in these circumstances, if you had paying clients in the past, a lot of stylists I'm talking to that are in this world are already charging like $2,000, $2,500, they're charging a decent amount, they already have packages, right? But they're marketing on social media, they're doing all the things, they're giving the talks, they're giving presentations, they're giving their time away for free, they're trying to partner with other service providers, and they're just not getting sales, all of what's happening is that you have evolved. You've gotten past the period of learning how to be a stylist, when you're really excited and you'll take on anyone.

So there's this feeling when people encounter you in that stage of your business that you don't even realize retrospectively, which is everybody just wants to be part of the energy. But then you get good at it. Once you get good at it, you outgrow some of that beginner energy.

You don't realize that maybe the business you built up till now is just not designed for the level you are operating at. You're not looking at it holistically because you are so focused on what you're doing wrong. Why is it working for other people?

And if you're honest, you're not even really focusing on the people you want to help anymore because it's all about you and how you feel like a failure. Blah, blah, blah, right? It feels terrible.

Today we're going to take away some of that drama and that self-judgment so that you can understand what actually is happening at this stage. You can stop burning all of the time that you are spending comparing yourself and trying different tactics to try to pull out a leak in a boat that is going down that are just not going to fix anything.

The way that this pattern of events usually kicks off is this: you get busy. You're a little bit out of that newbie stage, a couple of years in. I'm seeing this a lot with people because there was such an enormous spike in stylists created during the pandemic, which we've talked about on here before.

Now that things are normalizing and they've been at this for a while, they've had paying clients, they've usually started to charge higher rates. Maybe they've even had ideal clients, but you know, they've also had some that really weren't, which is actually a great learning experience.

All of a sudden, what you were so excited about and launched is real. And then all of a sudden, you look down because you get a new client, you're super excited, and the delivery of the day-to-day starts to take over. Your marketing starts to slip.

You're forgetting to even do behind-the-scenes when you're with a client. You keep telling yourself that you'll pick back up with the admin tasks, getting back on track with billing people on time, with finally getting your social media right, with finally writing that newsletter. But just the delivery of the services and just trying to manage the clients that you're getting, even if it's not as many as you want, is having you in a place by the end of the day where you are fried.

And then if you have kids or you have other responsibilities, and even if you don't, even if you just have to go and cook yourself some dinner at the end of the day, you feel mentally unable to show up and be visible in the way you want that would grow your business. When you do do it, when you do create marketing, you probably aren't really sure what you're even going to be talking about.

So maybe you do something that a lot of my clients talk about, which is they wait for inspiration. They wait to be excited to market. They remember feeling excited to market in the past, so they're just waiting for that feeling to come back.

As a result, your visibility drops. Content and remembering how to talk to the camera or how to write posts or how to write a newsletter starts to get pushed down the list. Then you notice that people aren't engaging when you show up.

Because it's quiet, all of a sudden you notice there's a slowdown. Now, people handle this different ways. Some people recede and become more passive because they are like, "Well, nothing I'm doing is working."

But if they're honest, they were not at full throttle for a little while there because they were busy working with clients and they couldn't figure out how to do both well, market and client delivery. Then some people begin constantly posting discovery call links and saying, hire me, hire me, hire me. But it's still coming from this, and I mean this in the kindest way because I've been here, but you're so focused on yourself and what's not working that you don't even realize this at the time, but when you look back, you'll see you don't even realize that you're not talking to people. You're talking at them and you're talking in a way to just get them to book. There's not a connection happening with your audience.

Then at some point you deliver the final deliverable to those clients and it gets really slow. Then you're just sitting around. This is where that comparison scrolling and all that starts to come in.

What I see here is that there is a scramble. There is either a scramble to post more, but not a lot of thought about or connection to the content they're posting. There's no emotional connection, it's not starting from client experiences, it's not starting from the client's pain points. It's just, "Hey, I have services, hey, I'm available, hey, book me now."

Or they start scrambling for a new offer, or they go down a rabbit hole about their prices, even though they just sold these offers at the prices they were before. They start becoming obsessed with why their past sales calls that they completely forgot about didn't do anything. Maybe they decide, "I'm going to hire a social media manager," or whatever.

They don't ever, almost ever in these cases, I notice, look to reconnect with the client they already have, often because there is no path to reconnect with established clients. There's no possibility for income on the table in that route. So now they're even more disconnected from their experience of themselves as a stylist.

And then you have impostor syndrome. Depending on how you tend to deal with circumstances like that, maybe you start comparing yourself more to other stylists or maybe you start isolating yourself more and more and not going online at all, basically, some way or the other, you either go towards trying to fix this problem or trying to avoid it and making up stories.

I hear a lot of people right now saying, "Well, no one's hiring stylists, the economy is bad." I mean, again, I feel like I say this a lot, but it can never be overstated: if you're talking to people that can't afford a stylist because they can't make their rent or their mortgage or buy food, you weren't talking to the right people to begin with.

So what I'm saying is instead of turning towards the people we want to help, we turn away from them and start comparing ourselves to people in our industry or to things going on in the world. We don't go back to the very thing that got us here in the first place. It's not that you're not meant for this. It's not that you're just a failure.

You don't have the right structure to take the experience you have at this point and make it profitable. What was driving you before was new kid energy. It's very contagious, but you're over that.

You are going to need something deeper, and your prices are going to require, if you want to stay in business, a better strategy than "I will figure it out as I go." I want to talk about why this phase that's really normal, and that even very seasoned entrepreneurs go through, where they're not inspired, they're not connected, they haven't been able to plug back into their messaging in a way that feels natural, why this feels so incredibly personal to us.

I think part of it is because styling is intimate work and most stylists come to styling with a personal drive towards it. You either are in it because you had a really hard experience of style and you really changed your life to change yourself through how you dressed, or you were always really good at style and that was something that you were able to pass along to other people, and it became something that you prided yourself on. It's part of your personality and your gifts that people appreciated about you. So not being able to get it to work feels very, very hard for your identity, and understandably so.

On top of it, styling is intimate because you're in people's closets. They're sharing things with you and you're dealing with their insecurities, their stories, their body image issues. It feels like, as many have said, "I feel like I'm a therapist." By the way, you are not, but it does have that feeling to it sometimes.

So when your business stalls, it's almost impossible not to absorb that as a personal judgment about your talent, your value, what you did wrong. Especially I see this with stylists that have no path for established clients to come back to them. Yet they beat themselves up and think, "Well, I must have done a bad job if they didn't come back," instead of thinking, maybe that client that you wish would come back is waiting for you to reach out and say that there's a way to work with you.

When you are in that place where you're not even able to take stock of your own actions and how you are furthering these cycles, that's how you know that something else has to intervene and help you audit. Because what's actually happening is that the person you were when you got started is not who you are now. So you have to figure out what's going to get you excited at this point.

You have to figure out, in part through all the experience you've had and all of the services and the ways you've delivered them, and if you've done it virtually or in person or whatever, you have to look at all of that and round it up. Then basically edit it down, curate it into what will become the next version of your business.

A lot of stylists start to listen to this podcast, which is really amazing to me and why I wanted to do this episode, and tell me, "Oh my gosh, I've been a stylist for four years, eight years, ten years, or I'm new to styling. I'm realizing that the way I was going about it isn't the way that I want. It's not deep enough. It's not 'transformational.'"

All that means is that you have an awareness now that you didn't have before, that you don't have all the skills to live out in your lived experience. Just like people can know what styles they like on other people, but they don't have the innate ability or the styling skills or the eye or the aesthetic language to make that a reality in their life.

So it becomes a very painful place to sit when you have an awareness and you have enough experience behind you to know that that's where you want to be. But yet you are still over here and not sure how to cross that bridge. It's very painful, and it's important for you to know this because that's the exact point in which your styling clients are reaching out to you.

So there are a lot of similarities between where you are right now as a business owner and where you're going to be in terms of how you behave towards your business if you have a transformation or if you don't. If you actually move to the next level or you stay stuck. Same thing with people that work with you as a stylist.

They're either going to sit around continuing to pin things and shop at the last minute and buy 55 black dresses or whatever, some other plain outfit, or they're going to have to get the help to get into action. If they get into action or not is going to determine if they ever hit their next level in terms of their style.

Something that I see a lot that almost is like pouring gasoline on the fire for stylists who are at this point where they're at $40,000, $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 but they can't seem to break through, is once in a while, at this point, a stylist will attract a client who mirrors their own stuck point. What is usually happening here is that when we are people pleasing in our content, when we are avoiding being seen—even if we're showing up, there's still a way to avoid being seen—that stylist will often end up with clients who are also hiding from themselves.

It's not because you attract what you are. It's because your standards for yourself and your business are quite low at this point because you are desperate for validation. Maybe you even know this client is kind of bad. But if you hesitate and you don't stand with, or ever get the skills to be able to qualify your clients, it will feel like you keep ending up with clients who aren't fully in, who aren't fully committed.

You'll also see this if you keep discounting people and discounting your rates. That's the only time you attract people, right? Because you're trying to teach yourself basically a lesson. The lesson isn't that people will only hire you when they get a discount. The lesson is you only feel safe to show up when you're watering down and discounting yourself.

So of course, you're going to then get people that are watering themselves down and discounting themselves. I often hear a lot from stylists at this phase, "Well, what if my clients want this or what if my clients want that or how do I deal with every little thing?" Even though they don't actually want to deal with those things.

It's like they feel like they have to accommodate everything all the time. So they're exhausted because they can't even imagine how they would get control over this situation. When I talk about systems and processes, some people find that terrifying, even though it's really not that deep or hard. Other people are like, "Okay, maybe that will save me."

The answer is: I can give you all the systems and processes in the world. But if you don't have an internal boundary about what you're available for or how you'll show up, because you're so worried about seeing if the outside world is going to validate you or if this is going to work or how someone, anyone can just hire you so you feel like you're legit, versus doing that work for yourself, there's not a process or a system in the world that you're not going to override. I see it all the time with clients.

These situations are exhausting, but what they're not is evidence that you're going to be stuck at this point forever and that everybody knows something you don't. They are pointing directly at the parts of your business and maybe your identity that need to be rebuilt. They are reflecting back to you a lack of business structure and a lack of clarity on who you actually are now that you have all these experiences behind you.

You're still acting like you're grateful to be here, even though you've arrived. That is difficult because you're treating your business like a reflection of your worth, not like a business.

This plateau that so many stylists sit in before they hit six figures or, in some cases, decide to walk away from their business is the result of trying to deliver and knowing that it's possible to deliver a higher-level identity-based styling experience, but they're doing it inside of a business model, and perhaps most importantly, a self-concept that was just built around, how do I get paid for a shopping trip? How do I get paid for closet edits?

And so what happens when I start to work with stylists at this place inside my programs, specifically Income Accelerator, there is a moment where they understand that this is actually not about the tactics. It's not about the marketing they were so excited to get from me. They got it, but it's still about them deciding if they're going to be a leader, if they're going to stop treating this like a little side business even though they have the hours in the day.

Their kids are in school or in childcare. They've done all the things to have it be legitimate. They have the time, they have the space, they’ve charged for packages before, but there's still a part of them with one foot out.

You cannot get where you want to go and you cannot be a stand for the kind of clients you want as an expert if you are outsourcing all of your power to getting anybody to say yes to you on a sales call. All of the offers that got you here may come with you, they may not come with you, but that's the least of the work.

What is the biggest part about your pricing and your offers is that it reflects back to you what you actually think of yourself. That means there’s a lot of identity work that goes into rebuilding a business at this point. You're going to need a method, you're going to need a way to articulate to past clients that they can still work with you, or that your prices are going up, or you’re going to need to slow down, which makes a lot of people uncomfortable, in order to master the right kind of marketing.

Because clearly, even if you're marketing all the time, if you're not getting clients, it's not working. So you need to build a new set of skills. What happens is some people are uncomfortable with that and they move forward anyway with the discomfort of learning the new skill and doing it in public.

Some people are just like, "No, that's not for me." That’s why this period of business is the hardest. It's because, and it's not a stylist thing, it's an all-business thing, it's because it becomes the point where you realize, I either have to take this seriously and I have to make some of the investments, for example, that I am telling other people to make in themselves. I have to walk the talk. As in all things, whether it's learning to walk or learning to talk or being in a relationship for the first time or deciding to commit to somebody or deciding to buy a house, there are hard parts.

But for some reason, a lot of people that enter this field think that this should be a walk in the park once they have the experience. It's actually once you have the experience that some of the hard choices happen. Now, you've probably handled worse and harder things in your life than what I am talking about here.

But your relationship to discomfort and your ability to validate yourself, to self-soothe, all of the things you see your own clients struggling with, are going to come up for you. That's why this stage is so uncomfortable, because it means the version of your business that you built through hustle and excitement about being a stylist has reached its limit.

Now external things are not going to be able to drive you anymore. This is when you have to start reaching inside and coming up with the reason you're doing this in the first place. It's not going to be, "I just want to help other people feel good about themselves," because some people are never going to feel good about themselves.

So now you have to define it on your own terms. Is it because you want to show other people what's possible? Is it because you want to show your kids that you can be a mom and a business owner? Is it because you want other people to see women who are your race, your religion, have your values, showing up and talking about style and also standing for something?

I don't know. I don't know what that is for you. But this is not the point in your business where you either fold or you find that little tactic and all of a sudden everything skyrockets for you.

This is the moment where you decide if you're going to move from, "I happen to be a stylist with a business," to, "I have a business and I am a stylist," because those are very different ways of relating to your identity, to your clients, and honestly, how you move through the world.

Underneath that identity choice is how you get the energy and the momentum and the excitement to do the things you need to do to build the next level of your business. To build the systems that are going to support you in guiding people through a transformation without being exhausted. To learn how to speak in your marketing in a way that actually connects with people.

To show up on social media in your own expertise enough that you're not constantly comparing yourself to every other stylist. I mean, we all have bad days, but that shouldn't be your norm or your go-to activity.

Because nothing about this is a personal flaw. It is a stage of development, and I'm not sure why we don't talk about that enough. I want you to be listening in the upcoming episodes about how you move through this plateau without beating yourself up more, without burning yourself out with tactics that you already have a lot of evidence aren't working, and without having to truly rebuild your business from scratch.

It is actually about curating your next level the same way that you curate a client's closet. These shifts become very, very simple once you understand, number one, what's actually happening, which is what we talked about today, and number two, that this is a choice that lies in your hands.

Sure, your journey may not look like somebody else's that you admire out there. I mean, hello, it took me seven years to hit six figures, and now I have made more people six figures in their business faster than I was able to on my own. That's just the truth.

I never thought this would be my journey either. I never thought that someone who took that long to get to where I wanted to be would now be someone who helps people do it faster. Thank God I didn't, because that would have been a lot of pressure.

So some of this is about you not knowing the full story of your purpose in this business. What you have to get is that every point of self-development that you have is a point in favor of you being truly transformational. A lot of hardship got me to the place of being able to teach people how to be transformational stylists.

It mostly required me being able to sit in discomfort so that I can help other people sit in their discomfort but still lead them forward in hope and excitement. That's the same skill set that you're going to have to learn.

That is why I say it doesn't matter how many stylists are out there. It doesn't matter how big the industry gets. You are your own competition always, because your development and how aggressively you go after it, and how open you are to growing and learning and not needing to be perfect all the time, is directly related to how you are able to get results for other people.

Because you cannot be a stand for other people's development and other people going through the necessary discomfort of growth, which is what transformational styling is, if you can't tolerate it yourself. That's why I say this is the line in the sand that catapults people to six figures, because it's the moment when you realize it is about identity work.

If you're ready to finally step out of the cycle that you've been stuck in for far too long, keep listening, because the next eight episodes are going to help you with that. 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.