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.

In 2019, I worked with a styling client, a woman in her mid-30s named Ellen. She had just been promoted to a director at a high-net-worth management firm in Boston, and she was the only woman at her level. Six months after we worked together, I got an email from her. She had been offered a VP role at another firm, a bigger salary and much higher visibility than her old role.

In the email, she told me she almost turned the role down because she didn’t think she was ready. Then she remembered something that I had said to her during our very last styling session about dressing for the identity she was building. These were prompts that I had been coaching her with throughout our time working together and in the dressing room, but it really started to click in that session where I mentioned that I had noticed a pattern of her being worried that she was not doing enough to, “prove herself” in her current role.

My suggestion to her was to look past her current role when getting dressed every morning in her closet, and choose clothes not for her current role or even her next promotion, but for the promotion that she wanted in a few years, potentially a few levels up. And then I wanted the outfits she put on and the work we had done together to give her evidence that she could step into her next level of leadership on a really big scale.

She repeated this back to me in the email. It was a really interesting moment for me because when we were working together, I actually wasn’t sure that the process was landing for her. By this point in my styling business, I had restructured everything to be what I now consider to be more transformational. I had built a group program that also had an alumni program that was very, very, very well attended in my business. I had this methodology that I was reliably getting results with clients.

I just felt like when we were working together, she was very measured. She was very cautious. She was the kind of personality that kept her cards really close to her chest. There were these moments where I was very tempted to adjust my methodology because I was worried that it was too introspective for her personality or her view of life or basically how conservative she seemed emotionally.

But I didn’t because I knew better at this point. Quite frankly, I was working in three cities and did not have the emotional bandwidth to recreate my process for every client. But I trusted the process I had built, and we parted ways, and I thought she seemed very happy. She said she would work with me again, but you never know.

When she came back to me and told me she wanted to work together again and what she had remembered based on our conversation, and said, I almost didn’t take a new role that I was presented for, this big step up, I almost didn’t do it, but I remembered our conversation, it really showed me that despite how I thought things were landing, I was wrong. And that the process carried me through that misperception of her and what was actually happening on the inside.

That I trusted the process in order to get her the transformation. I didn’t trust my mood or my observation or anything like that. And that’s what created a true transformation for her. That’s what created a different way of looking at the world such that when she was approached for this VP role, she thought to herself, “Wait a sec. Wait a sec. Yes, it feels like a lot. But I remembered that I was getting dressed for this. I was auditioning for this.”

And that happened in our work together. And it didn’t happen overnight. She didn’t tell me this immediately in her offboarding. She told me this six months later in an email.

That type of transformation is the type of transformation that most styling businesses are not built to deliver. I want to be very specific about what I mean by “transformation” in the styling world because I have watched this term get diluted and misused a lot recently, even quoted back to me wrong, quite honestly. I even had somebody repackage it for one of their courses and really butcher it.

So I know that it’s sticking. I know that people resonate with it. But I also can tell it may not be exactly what a lot of people think. So let me be clear.

Styling transformation is not a client feeling seen during your session. It’s not you earning more from styling packages because you call them transformational. It is not even your client leaving your work together feeling more confident or getting more compliments on their new look. It is not raving testimonials. It is not an immediate “I’m obsessed with you” energy from the client.

It can be. It can be. In most cases, I hope it’s a little warmer than this client that I talked about before, because I really did wonder, like, “Did this even land?” But transformation is actually behavior change that lasts long after your time together ends.

And they may, and most likely will, come back to you. I’m not saying that it’s like a one-and-done experience. I’m saying that people are dynamic, and in an ideal world, styling clients, and honestly, people that have the money and the actual mental space to truly engage in transformational work, are people that are looking to be in motion and continue to change for the better over time. They know this is not a one-time deal.

It’s how a person makes decisions differently when faced with the same situations that they’ve encountered before. It’s someone standing in their closet six months from now and choosing something differently, not just the way they put the clothes together, but how they think about the way they’re putting the clothes together. Not just what they put on their body, but how they’re going to show up in the world as a result of what they put on their body. Because some foundational element to how they see themselves has shifted.

A client cannot tell you that they’ve had a transformation immediately after working with you. This is what I heard someone say in a training about transformational styling, and I knew, okay, we need to do some deeper work here. They need time to live with their wardrobe, to experience themselves in it, and to test it against real-world situations.

They may love that wardrobe and be obsessed with that wardrobe the minute you put it on them, but it is not a sign of a transformation.

This means that when you’re working in a truly transformational styling container, you’re creating identity-level change. Identity-level change requires a specific type of business structure to support it. All of my programs over the past two and a half, almost three years, have been rooted in this business structure.

But what I see right now, everywhere in the industry as it grows, is a problem that needs to be explicitly talked about. Because when you are promising transformational results in not just a transactional business model, that’s something I’ve talked about before, but in a business model that literally has no connection to the way you get that result, there is a lot of, I think, unintentional but very clear miseducation and misleading results being claimed in marketing.

Because most styling businesses operate from what I’m going to call a reactive business model. Quite frankly, this often means no business model, but for the sake of it, we’re going to call it reactive.

I’m not saying this to criticize anyone. I definitely operated this way for the first seven years of my career. I got started as a stylist in a business model, what I will call now a business model program for stylists. It wasn’t even like a styling education. It wasn’t teaching me about color or body shape or anything like that. It was just about how to build the business.

It was great. It taught me a lot of what I teach now. But it wasn’t set up to be a long-term strategy.

Once you see what I mean by reactive in terms of the way that your business is being run, you can’t unsee what I’m about to show. So here’s what reactive looks like in practice.

Everybody you schedule is based on availability. You’re squeezing them in. You’re basically saying yes no matter what. If a client or potential client reaches out, you’re going to find the time, you’re going to meet them, you’re going to be willing to negotiate your package, if you have one, even if it’s not what they want.

There is no defined container and no set timeline, even if you have a package. The process unfolds based on what that particular client needs in the moment, even if you don’t mean that, or on that day, not what is the pre-planned outline of a transformational service.

For a lot of stylists, this means every client gets some version of customization, even if they don’t realize it, because it’s just a knee-jerk reaction that they’re calling good customer service. You might have packages listed on your website, but in reality, you’re adjusting them constantly.

You’re adding a session here, you’re extending a timeline there, you’re throwing an extra check-in when a client goes silent or is needy or seems to need more hand-holding. You have a general flow. So maybe you always do a closet edit, a shop, and then a styling session. But you’re essentially improvising what happens inside those sessions. The questions you ask, how deep you go, what you focus on, all depends on how you are reading your client’s energy, their responses, and what spontaneously comes up during the styling package.

And while I do think that you can’t be weird and not respond to what the client’s putting down, there should be a sense of what the end goal of each of those sessions is from a transformational viewpoint. It’s not just, like, you’re going to have 15 fully styled office looks, like yes, that, and what are they going to realize about themselves at the end?

And this has somehow become a point of pride in the industry. Like, I customize everything for each client. I meet them where they are. I work with every budget. Every person is different, so my process is different.

Here’s what actually happens when that is the reality behind your business. You can’t refine a process when you’re changing it constantly and too many variables are shifting. You don’t even know what to test or what to look at that’s working because you don’t even remember what you did with your last three clients.

You have no way of knowing if a breakthrough came from a specific question you asked, a thought exercise that you introduced, the timing of when you brought up certain concepts, or just the fact that you happened to be particularly sharp that day or that client and you were vibing. And so the result is that your outcomes depend entirely on your energy in that moment, whether you are well rested, whether you just came from a past client who’s draining you, whether you feel inspired, whether you’ve had PMS, whether you’re going through the motions that day, and if the client is in a good mood.

Nothing can be tested or refined. You start from scratch with every new client, even though you have a lot of experience. Even when you have worked with dozens or hundreds of clients, you are still constantly trying to not just attune to them, which I think is great and what you should be doing, but literally reinvent the outcome of each of the sessions that you have because you’re trying to personalize it.

Now, are there degrees of this? Sure. You can’t promise everybody a certain number of outfits or outcomes if they don’t have a budget big enough or clothes in their closet. Of course, those things are an issue. But when you’re doing transformational styling, that’s actually not the focus.

So let me give you an example of this in reality. Last quarter, I worked with two different stylists. Both established, both had incredible client feedback, worked in different parts of the country. Lots of testimonials, lots of Google reviews, tons of glowing LinkedIn endorsements. Honestly, stylists would be dying for some of the testimonials I saw. People genuinely loved them that had worked with them.

But they both were really exhausted and questioning, in different ways at different points of their career, whether people actually make a sustainable living in this field. I understand why. When I looked at their businesses, these two stood out because they were very pronounced cases of this.

We joke about it all the time, but they were good examples of how every single client was a completely custom experience. When I asked them both about their three best clients, they both said things like, "Well, I did something a little different with this one." And, well, that one’s a different case. I guess I can’t really say what it was about the process with that one, even though I love their personality, because she didn’t really want to follow my process.

And the reason why these two particular stylists stood out to me as I was writing this episode was because they both had that explanation when I went through my process with them. Like, well, this one’s a little different, well, that one, and it was just, like, a good vibe. They couldn’t really tell me where the shifts were.

They also both had packages listed on their site, but they rarely stuck to them. Like, they would break them apart. One was really big on discounting, but both of them thought that they were just making their clients happy. If they made their clients happy by breaking down their process and doing it custom, even though that’s not what they really intended, that they would keep coming back.

But their repeat client rates, when we dug into them, did not show that. That is true for the majority of the stylists I work with. They think it’s good, but when we look at the numbers, it’s not so great.

Everyone’s not going to come back forever. I do not want to give you a misleading thought that it’s like 90% of your clients. That would be insane. But 30% to 40% is not really that big of a deal, especially if you’re attracting the right type of clients for this type of service. Because if you’re attracting the right people, then one of the qualifiers would be high need, not just, I want to look cute today.

So they would spend a lot of hours prepping for sessions and overdoing it, researching client industries, diving into hobbies their clients had that they didn’t. Some of that’s fine if they’re going to a conference. But this was really intense. One stylist I worked with was researching golf because some of her clients played and was visiting golf courses.

The effort was admirable, but it signaled something deeper. They were trying very, very hard to prove their value. Honestly, I was impressed. If we just took a third of that and put it into their marketing, life-changing. And so that’s what I told them.

Examples of this were their sessions were supposed to be 90 minutes or an hour and 30 minutes, when they were regularly four hours or as long as it took. Nobody actually wants that. Clients might be polite about it, but they want to know when this is starting and ending. And there is a point at which you lose people’s focus, even if they’re being polite.

And one of them said to me, I mean, it’s just tiring because I love that clients trust me, but they end up pouring their heart out and it becomes like a therapy session. And I hear a lot of stylists saying this with pride. This one was actually exhausted, but I hear a lot of stylists saying this with pride.

But let me be clear. That is not what we do. That is a distraction from transformation. Because when you spend three hours with someone wallowing in their closet about their past, every bad memory associated with the clothing, every moment of shame, everything their mom said about them, every moment that they hated their body, or every good thing from the past because they don’t fit into those clothes anymore, you are not coaching them forward.

Therapy is past-led. And as far as I know, none of the stylists I’ve worked with are actual therapists. There are some. I have not worked with them. And coaching is future-led. And on top of it, most of the stylists I work with have no coaching experience.

And so styling that creates identity change is absolutely 100% future-led. And that is an important criteria for calling in the right people.

And so after we restructured their businesses in different ways, but all with clear processes, boundaries, all of that, they went from working 55 hours or more. One I would say was way more than that because she was taking so many clients in a day just to make what she wanted instead of conserving her energy and charging more.

They raised their prices. They were able to actually slow down. But they had to catch themselves, right? Because it is the structure of the business and it is the boundaries in the business, but you are responsible for keeping the structure and the boundaries.

So if your identity has not caught up to being someone who’s okay with keeping your boundaries, it doesn’t matter how much strategy work you do. Okay, just to be clear, you need to do your own identity work.

So most importantly, when we did this and I worked with them, they stopped resenting their clients. I’m sure they still have moments, but overall, I could see a shift. They were so much more proud of the type of clients that they got.

I’ve had a lot of stylists that I’ve worked with tell me that, yes, you know, they’re still working on some of the parts of their marketing or, like, you know, it’s not like I give you this and it’s perfect overnight. But they’re so proud of the type of clients that they are getting. They are so proud that they can speak in their marketing and know exactly what it was that they said and how it called in the right type of person. And it’s like, oh my gosh, this really works.

And you’ve heard my clients talk about that on here, because the reality is, when you give everything, not only do you resent the people you’re giving it to, but you are holding up the transformation, because that is their work. That is their work. You should never be working harder for your clients’ results than they are committed to those results. Let me say it again. You should never be working harder for your clients’ results than they are committed to those results.

Yes, styling is a high-touch service. But done-for-you means the shopping, putting the outfits together. It does not mean outsourcing all the thinking and meaning-making to you, because that is not your job. And it’s literally not something you can do. You’ve not had their life experiences. You cannot reflect for them appropriately to make the appropriate meaning.

So let’s connect this directly to money, because I don’t want this to be abstract. One of the biggest criticisms I hear of stylists doing other programs or what they’ve learned in the industry is that everything felt like it was, like, a rah-rah, mindset thing. Just like, believe it and it will come true. Like, that makes me crazy because it keeps women poor. It keeps everybody poor, but women tend to get that "business advice" a lot more. And so we’re not doing that around here.

I do think mindset helps, but sometimes you need the strategy first, because abstraction is not what pays bills. So this reactive business model caps your income in three very specific ways. Again, I say reactive business model. No one’s like, “Oh, I have a reactive business model.” You realize it retrospectively. You don’t realize it in the moment. So I’m not saying that you wake up every day thinking, “I have a reactive business model,” but you probably do if any of these things resonate.

First, no referrals can be counted on, not just by your established clients, but by other industry experts that you have networked with or been around. Yes, some clients will love working with you and refer people to you because that’s the kind of people they are. If you’ve ever noticed, it comes with a personality type. But because you have no consistent process, you can’t predict what’s going to get the results that you really want, which means you can’t help other people identify the right referral sources for you, both people that are your past clients and other service providers.

You just can’t talk about what you do in a way that makes people think about you immediately. People think this is a niche or, like, a tagline, but it’s not. It’s the way you talk about your process over time. I know this because I’ve seen my own clients refer me based on how I do this in my business now.

So if a client just had a fine experience, like they liked their outfits, they got a lot of compliments, that’s not enough for a long-term referral pipeline. They won’t think about you to refer when someone mentions a major life transition that requires identity-level change, because you didn’t give them a frame of reference to think of you that way. You just delivered some outfits, and, like, they seemed happy, and so you didn’t ask any more questions, and so here we are.

That’s why you can never count on referrals in the majority of the businesses I look at the stylists, not even to touch the biggest point that I think is the obvious one, which is that they have no system in place to get the referral. And I do have systems that I give stylists, but if you’re not doing the level of depth in the work that makes it clear when somebody else should even think to talk about you, besides when they get a compliment on their outfit, which they may not refer you because they want the credit, honestly, you’re not going to be in a position to get those referrals even with the systems.

Second, you cannot raise your prices confidently over time. So when someone asks on a sales call, what exactly am I paying for? Like, what are you going to do to help me with this problem? It’s usually not in that way, but they’ll say something like, so tell me more about how you work with someone like me, after they tell you what they’re looking for.

And you say, well, I give you a two-hour closet edit, a three-hour shop, a styling session, a lookbook. You’re describing activities, not outcomes.

If you do that on sales calls, or you just repeat all of your services to a potential client, that is a red flag. You are nowhere near closing as much money as you could be if that’s how you’re describing the way you work with people.

If you can’t describe the actual parts of your process that create results, then you’re basically unintentionally asking people to just believe you. And that’s not a strong enough offer to command the rates that most stylists need to survive. So when you can’t refer back to what produces the change beyond your taste, the fact that other people have liked working with you, the fact that you worked with other plus-size women or other tall women, you keep your prices lower than you know they could be, or you feel over-the-top anxious when raising them, even a small amount, like a few hundred dollars.

Because unconsciously, you’re never quite sure if what you’re offering delivers the value that you hope it does, because you’re not actually sure what to reference in your process besides the deliverables. You don’t know how to reference the transformation because you don’t have systems, questions, or a methodology to get that outcome. You have good taste. You’re able to read people. You’re probably highly sensitive. You’re probably an empath. But there is nothing in place that you can point to.

And that has an enormous impact on your confidence and on your ability to raise your prices with any level of certainty. I’m not saying that you’re not going to feel a little bit anxious when you raise your prices. Sure. But I see this as a chronic issue with stylists. When we break down why it’s happening, they think it’s a mindset issue. But after we work together, they’re like, “Oh, I get why I didn’t know what I was charging. I literally didn’t know what I was doing on a day-to-day basis.”

They thought they were good stylists, and they might even be a good stylist, but they had no idea how to articulate where the value was and what they were doing. They just knew how to list off some tasks.

The third reason why the majority of stylist income is capped is because they don’t have a model that allows them to not hit a ceiling very, very quickly. When every client requires you to show up at 100% capacity, keep everything you need to remember in your head, and completely remake your process based on subtle energy readings or whether or not the client is telling you they are enjoying this, or if they’re giving you subtle cues that maybe they had a bad day, that’s not a sustainable way to work.

Add to the fact that you’re probably doing your own admin, your own marketing, and the model is just not scalable. I know because I’ve had these models before. You can’t make good money this way. I’m not saying that you can’t do one-to-one for a long time. You can. Scalable does not mean group program, to be clear. But if you're always exhausted and a little bit resentful because you are playing mind reader and doubting yourself constantly, of course this is not going to be a sustainable option, and you’re going to hit an income ceiling because you’ve already hit an energy ceiling.

When you think about taking one more client on or raising your prices during busy season, if there is a voice that says, like, “I don’t know how I’m going to make that work,” or “Is it going to be worth it?” your instincts are probably right. But most stylists think they have, like, the wrong social media audience or they need more visibility. But what’s actually happening is that the current model, or lack thereof, will not support them scaling in any way. And all I mean is earning more and not doing more.

And honestly, in most cases, I’ve told stylists to do less because their systems need to pull some of the weight. So with all of that in mind, I want to introduce you to what I have been working on for over a year behind the scenes: the Identity-Led Styling Method.

Let me explain why I came up with this, because most stylists work backwards from what currently exists: the client’s wardrobe, their body, and their lifestyle, or work from external rules about what’s flattering or professional or on trend, depending on the training that they have. Identity-led styling works from who the client is becoming.

So that finance client, Ellen, that I told you about at the top of the show, she wasn’t dressing for the director role when we worked together. She was dressing for that VP role that she was becoming, even though it hadn’t arrived yet. And when that opportunity showed up six months later, she’d already been practicing that identity in her closet every single day because I was having those conversations with her in our process. I was prepping her for that.

That’s why this method includes identity work before ever touching clothing. Because when people are anchored in who they’re becoming, not just what they like on Pinterest, though that is an important model of this, don’t get me wrong, so that every styling decision references a future identity, not just their current taste or their past patterns or trying to break them, you enter a different level of an experience.

What most stylists are missing is that you cannot create that kind of transformation in a reactive business model. The two things, the business model and the styling methodology, philosophy if you will, are inseparable. So if your business doesn’t have a structure, like defined containers, clear processes, repeatable frameworks, you may create change sometimes. You may get lucky with the right client who’s done the level of work that they were able to self-select in and realize, like, “Oh, I’m able to hold this level of depth of the work.” But it will not be reliable.

And reliable is what allows you to grow and to feel like an expert, which is what has been plaguing me for years with stylists, is that there’s just not a sense of, like, ownership over what they’re really doing. It’s like, “Yeah, a little styling business. Like, you know, it’s a hobby. I hope it works.” But like, no, no, no, no, no.

That is really why I think the industry has some self-esteem problems and why I see stylists who technically make a lot of money, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, still working in, like, a weird hourly model or constantly just giving discounts or changing their prices or being willing to just, like, shape-shift into what everybody wants of them. It’s very hard to feel like you’re an expert if you’re doing that.

This is why a business model is not just, like, a boring back-end thing that you deal with so that you can get to the fun creative work that you got here for. This is what I really want you to hear. A business model isn’t this thing that you deal with later. It is actually the structure that holds the creative work. Your business model is how the transformation happens. It is the vehicle to the transformation, not your taste.

That is one of the biggest misconceptions. Your taste has nothing to do with your ability to be a stylist. Someday, when you are burnt out, if you are not already, you will feel very relieved when I say that. Because eventually you will come into a situation where it doesn’t matter how good your taste is. Your worldview is so different than someone else’s that you are going to be so grateful, or angry at yourself, honestly, that your business model doesn’t help you fix that.

Because when you are out here talking about your taste all the time or linking to your outfits or your looks, you’re going to have a hard time being a true expert. Trust me, I see it every day. There’s nothing wrong with those things inherently. And I teach lots of people how to monetize that. But without a clearer understanding of how the transformation is delivered, your taste is irrelevant. You are just hoping for the best.

And truly, I mean that with all due respect, because I work with some stylists that are absolutely killer. But without the vehicle to express that, they are exhausted, and they cannot do their best and most creative work.

So in upcoming episodes, I’m going to dive deeper into this methodology. We’ll talk about why insights alone don’t change client behavior and the gap between when a client has an awareness and when they can actually sustain the action after they finish working with you. We’ll explore why you can have styling packages, but still get very weak to no transformation, and why customizing your styling offers creates a breakdown and actually absolutely impedes transformational results.

So if you’re working with paying clients and you know after listening to this that your business model is the thing holding you back, not necessarily your taste or your styling skills, you’re going to want to follow the upcoming series very closely.

I am also relaunching my Income Accelerator program as the Identity-Led Styling Accelerator. And this is for stylists who already have client experiences and already have packages who want to refine their services to be transformational and sustainable using the Identity-Led Styling Method.

So if you’re new to styling and you don’t have packages yet, or you do have packages but you’ve not really worked with enough clients to know who your ideal client is, hold tight. I’ve created the Identity-Led Styling Foundations program specifically for you. That’s coming up. You’ll hear more about that.

But for now, let me leave you with this. Transformational styling is not magic. It is not manipulation. It is not a vibe that you give off that other people need to trust you about. It is a repeatable process that gets reliable results. And that process, in turn, calls in more of the right clients, people who actually want the depth you’re capable of delivering.

Because there’s no lack of talent in this industry. There is no lack of commitment to helping people see themselves differently. But there is a structural problem. And that is what I have set out to fix, what I am so excited to share with all of you. Because I can’t give somebody talent. I can’t give somebody commitment. But I can give them a structure that helps them express both more reliably and with a lot more confidence in their own expertise so that they can actually show up as the experts that they are. I will 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.