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 I could go back in time and tell myself one thing as a stylist who took six years to hit seven figures, it would be this: stop trying to sell confidence, because you can’t. And the longer you keep trying, the longer you’re going to stay stuck, overworking, undercharging, and eventually resenting your business and wondering why your marketing isn’t landing and you never know where your next client is coming from, even though you swear up and down that you’re doing everything right.

Because something that has become abundantly clear after working with hundreds of stylists in my career, before I started the styling consultancy and in the years since, is that most stylists don’t actually know why their work works. They don’t understand the deeper mechanism behind identity change, behind transformation.

So what I see is that as an industry, we fall back on vague, somewhat empty promises. Not because we don’t mean well, but because we’re actually not sure why what we do works.

There’s a lot of things out there that’s like, "This process will give you confidence," but confidence is not a deliverable. It’s not. Confidence is not a deliverable.

It is a psychological state, and you cannot manufacture a psychological state for another adult human being through clothing alone. I’m not sure that there is any other way you can legally manufacture a psychological state for another person, but for now we’re just going to stay in the realm of clothes.

So when you promise confidence in your marketing, you unknowingly set yourself up for failure. Because what happens, and I did this specifically around body image, is that you attract clients who want to outsource their emotional world to you.

You attract people who are not ready to participate in the back-and-forth work. I use the word work very lightly because usually it’s just packing up some returns or meeting you at the mall at a certain time that is required to participate in identity change.

Then you end up doing the emotional labor for them and trying to make them feel better about themselves instead of the professional styling work that you were hired to do. This is why so many stylists come to me burnt out, but not booked out.

Because the emotional labor becomes the job when you make confidence the byproduct of your work with your clients instead of your process. The problem is that the industry has trained you to do exactly that because there’s been very little step-by-step detailed instructions on how to run a styling business. Do they exist? Sure. Do I see most people after they go through them? Also yes.

People are shocked that I give them step-by-step processes. I give them scripts, not because I want them to have them forever, but because when you’re learning a new skill, you can’t learn it by winging it.

You need to practice the steps so you can master it. On top of it, most stylists are never taught how to do real marketing. They have no idea where they should be getting the information that they put into social media posts. That is wild to me because that’s the first thing that we go over.

You cannot call your work transformational, which I know is now something we’re all throwing around, if you don’t have a process that creates transformation. Transformational is not a vibe.

It’s not, my clients get a lot of compliments. It isn’t a word that you sprinkle into your marketing because it sounds elevated. It’s not something you put into your courses if you didn’t come up with it. It is a claim about the structure, the depth, and the repeatability of your work.

If there is no defined process, if there are no stages, no checkpoints, or psychological insights built into your styling process, if everything relies on you personally hustling and overdoing it and over-communicating and not having any boundaries so that you can just finish a job with the client because you haven’t put in the structures, that’s not transformational.

If you don’t have a new client form, that is not transformational. If you don’t have a way of leading someone through a style discovery process before you get into their closet, that is not transformational.

If you’re not able to articulate to a client at any given point how far they’ve come, what you’ve seen, what the specific skills are that they need in order to make style easier for them, on top of, yes, shopping for the clothes and editing the closet and putting together looks, that’s claiming credit for something that hasn’t been earned. This is why it matters. This is why I care.

Clients who are looking for identity-level change can feel and know the difference. I’m saying that as someone who does transformational work with a former stylist and now does it through a repeatable process in my work with stylists through my methodology and my frameworks.

So I know that you need to lead people through steps, and they need to be thought out so that you can’t get the result from one step if you haven’t worked through the previous step. This is exactly what I tell people when they start my programs.

This is meant to build on each other because I am not just giving you a set of tasks and things to do, just like you’re not giving people just the clothes if you’re transformational. I’m showing you how to think.

I’m showing you how to step into the identity of a six-figure business owner. It’s going to be a little awkward at first. You’ve never done it. You know what I mean? Of course, right?

And so as somebody that is helping people through transformations, I think I had 17 people last month I was working with, one of the things that’s important is that I’m charging enough that I am fully present for that conversation with everybody, that I am not exhausted.

So at the very base of this conversation, your prices are related to your ability to create a transformation, not just because it makes you look fancy, which is how I’ve seen some of the conversation that we’ve had on this podcast taken out of context, but because it’s the thing that’s going to actually keep you as the stylist, as the guide, and the experience in a good place.

When you don’t have all the pieces of what makes something transformational, from the pricing to the process to the way that you talk to your clients, the marketing, you dilute your authority when you use language like transformational or giving people confidence or saying that you have a methodology, but then telling me all you’re doing is editing, shopping, styling like everyone else.

The thing about this is that it makes your business harder than it needs to be. Because one minute you’re claiming that you’re going to get somebody confidence and change their life, but you don’t have a process.

So your clients, even if they sign on with you excitedly, they may not stick around because unconsciously, when your marketing says these things but you don’t have the process to back it up, they hold you responsible for not managing their mindset, their emotions, and their breakthroughs because you promised something that your process doesn’t deliver.

If you try to do that because you are, in fact, managing their mindset, their emotions, and trying to make them have breakthroughs that are not natural to the process, that is how you go from being a stylist to becoming a full-time emotional laborer, for lack of a better term.

Let me be clear about something. Transformational styling is not a promise that you make to people. It is the result of a well-designed, well-communicated process grounded in actual human behavior and identity development. That’s why it took me six months to write the podcast that started out this entire podcast that I developed.

If you don’t have a process yet as a stylist, that’s totally fine. Build the process first, then name it accurately, then decide what your promise is. But don’t call things transformational, and don’t say that they inspire confidence, or that just because somebody somewhere wrote a cute quote and put it on Instagram that stylists are life changers, don’t let that fool you into thinking that just because you have a good eye, you’re running a solid styling business.

Fair enough that people don’t realize that this is happening because very few people are telling stylists what actually sells high-value styling: a repeatable process with a real psychological backbone that helps lead people through it.

What I see at the start of every single round of Income Accelerator is that stylists are trying to sell services that they don’t even fully understand. They can’t articulate why their process is the way it is, how it works to get their clients results, where in the process most people have the majority of their shifts or their aha moments, which is different for every stylist because the way you present the edit versus the shop versus a style will be deeply tied to your values, into what you care about. So it will naturally lend itself to different results at different points. And that’s fine. That’s great. That’s what makes you all unique.

But if you don’t know that, you can’t talk about it confidently. When you can’t talk about your offers with your own conviction, your audience, your followers, whatever you want to call them, they won’t feel any conviction in what you do either.

So what ends up filling the gap when stylists don’t know how to talk about what they do is them leaning on influencer-style content, showing up and doing things over and over again that don’t work.

A fear of slowing down because people then fear, “Well, what if people forget about me? If I don’t keep showing up, then I’m losing my chances of them hiring me.” No. Every time you show up with a lack of clarity in what you’re saying, you lose people, and you might as well not show up. It is low-skill contact that has become some of the norm in the industry.

There should be more thought leadership. There should be more people explaining why. That it’s not a coincidence, for example, that we have the rise of quiet luxury at this time. It’s not just a trend. It’s not just, “Oh, this is an interesting thing that’s happening, whatever.” There’s a social reason for it.

If you don’t know that as a stylist, that’s not really going to be a transformational experience because you have to be able to say to a client, "Hey, are you sure you want quiet luxury? Or is there perhaps another feeling under that we’re trying to get to that we should explore instead of just hopping on a bandwagon that is a result of the fact that we live in an economy where people don’t have access to basic middle-class things?" That’s what you’re just replicating over and over again, that reality.

When you can’t educate people in your content, when you don’t know anything more than, "This is a shirt that I think is cute, so here’s the link to it," when you pair low-skill content with very high-stakes emotional promises like confidence, you set your business and your own confidence up to eventually collapse.

Because let me say this super clearly: the clients who hire stylists are at a high enough level in their own self-development, if they are the right fit, that they know that they cannot pay for confidence. They are paying you for a process that ushers them into the next level of their identity, an identity that they already have in their mind and you are helping bring to life.

For someone who understands what the process of change requires to be successful in becoming the next version of themselves, you can’t promise them confidence because they already have it or they’re pretty close to it. But what you can do is lead them through a structured identity-shifting process.

If you learn the steps, you can help them understand why they keep buying what they’re buying, why you’re buying something else, why that will help them understand the way that their next-level identity is shifting, why they’ve been stuck, how their beliefs are shaping their choices when they get dressed, and how their choices when they get dressed are shaping the outcomes that are unfolding in front of them.

But most stylists don’t have the tools to have that conversation. So they jump right into the closet edit, the shopping, the outfit-making tasks, which is still part of this. And because they market tasks, potential clients assume they’re hiring them for tasks, and tasks do not command $3k, $5k, $10k, $20k styling packages. When you market your tasks, you don’t attract competent clients.

Tasks and sharing about tasks in the styling process do not establish your authority, but a process does. A process is what makes your work professional. It’s what makes you feel professional. A process is what distinguishes you from influencers, closet organizers, personal shoppers at Macy’s.

A process is what allows you to actually scale one day without drowning in emotional labor and resenting your business. What you sell is a process. When you do that, three things happen immediately. You attract clients who already like themselves. That is the secret to this that we don’t talk about enough.

If you’re here to try to make people confident, and when you realize you’re doing that, like many of us do, and you’re not like, “Oh crap, I’m going to change that immediately,” you have a codependent relationship with your business because you’re trying to outsource your self-esteem to it.

But if you realize, like I did one day, “Oh my gosh, the reason why I’m getting all these people with crazy body image issues that are just completely off the wall is because I’m talking about body image in a way that makes it sound like I can fix them,” then I was like, "Well, we’re going to be turning that around tomorrow."

Because I didn’t mean it. But all of a sudden, because I was looking at my marketing and auditing it and working with coaches, I took the feedback and it completely changed my life. It puts me in control, not just in that business, but in this business of who I attract.

Because when you attract people that have enough confidence already, they’re up for taking responsibility for their own growth. They’re going to respect your expertise and your boundaries because it’s a part of their identity that they hire experts.

The second thing that happens is that you stop absorbing your client’s emotional world on the daily. Of course, you’re going to have days where your client hurts your feelings or you doubt yourself. That’s totally normal.

But you’re no longer day to day feeling responsible for their self-esteem. If they don’t like a shirt with the puff sleeve, it’s not going to ruin your whole day. You’re going to say, "Okay, it’s just a shirt," and keep it moving.

You are responsible for the structure that helps them see themselves more accurately and for a structure that keeps their feelings theirs and your feelings yours. Because that’s part of what structures in business can help with, especially if you’re a very empathetic, sensitive person, like most of the stylists are that I work with.

The third thing that happens when you break the pattern is you stop overworking as much. You stop sprinting to deliver a feeling to someone, a psychological experience to someone that was never yours to give them in the first place.

Instead, you see yourself as a guide, and you’re helping guide someone through a series of steps that reliably leads to clarity and identity alignment if they are the right fit, which means your marketing has to call in the right people. That is part of your responsibility.

This is why I say inside Income Accelerator, every single season that I run it, your job is not to help people feel better about themselves. Your job is to help people that already feel pretty good about themselves understand themselves better.

Confidence comes later if they don’t already have it, when their identity and how they’re looking and how they’re seeing themselves in the mirror and their behavior in the world match.

If a client doesn’t have the basic emotional readiness for the work, like self-acceptance, honesty, self-awareness, your job is not to drag them across the finish line. Your job is to filter them out.

This alone will save you years of heartache in business because you cannot scale a business where your value is determined by how confident your clients feel on any given day. You just don’t have the job title for that.

But what you can do reliably, and what I have helped many stylists do, who were also ready for transformation, by the way, because the process is fascinating in that it mirrors the stylist’s development, is scale a business around a very clear, very thoughtful, very professional, very boundaried process that creates predictable transformations for the people that are ready.

Stylists struggle not because there is not a demand in society. There always will be a demand for styling. Stylists struggle because they’re selling the wrong things in the wrong ways to the wrong people and then blaming things that are not the problem.

You cannot be the source of anyone else’s confidence. You cannot. You can set up the right conditions. You can guide them through the steps, but you cannot make somebody feel confident. It is an inside job.

That is also true of your partner, of your child, of your parent. There is no one that can make you feel confident, and there is no one that you can make feel confident. It is an inside job.

But you can be the source of their clarity, and you can unhook from wanting to pull people over the finish line. I have had to do that again and again because when you care about people and when you care about the thing you’re doing, I know how hard it is to want to over-function for them, but it ultimately robs them of what’s possible.

It is the structure, and your confidence in the structure, and your ability to honestly lean back a little so that people can take responsibility for themselves where appropriate, that actually creates change.

When you have that structure and when you have that internal clarity on what your process does and how it moves people from one step to the other and where the transformation typically occurs at each point, that’s what you sell. That’s what you lead with in your marketing. That’s what you talk about on Instagram Stories.

Because the minute you stop selling confidence and start selling a very grounded, professional process that people can see themselves in, because most people have never felt confident, so you selling it to them sounds like an absolute pipe dream, everything changes in your business.

Your clients get better, your marketing gets sharper, your prices make sense, and you stop overworking for clients who should never have been in your world in the first place. Because confidence is a byproduct of effort.

The stylists who understand that are the stylists who actually transform lives. 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.