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 have ever thought that building a course or maybe a passive product would finally get you out of that slot machine cycle in your styling business, where it’s like a good month, a dead month, a scramble month, a good month, a dead month, this episode is for you. Because I completely understand why your brain goes there. Most of the stylists I work with, I’m sure this is true for you too, are not sitting around and thinking, “I would really love to just create a cute little digital product or a course because I have extra time on my hands and it would be fun.” You’re usually thinking, “I cannot keep running my business like I am. This isn’t sustainable, and this isn’t what I wanted for myself. Why does this feel so hard?”

And somewhere between a dead month and that moment where you’re about to throw your laptop across the room, you start scrolling online and you’re hearing, in the online space, people say something very attractive over and over again. Scale. Passive income. Create it once, sell it forever. Do this at nap time. Do this while your kids are sleeping. Do it without leaving your house. Make money while you sleep. Make money while you’re on vacation.

If you are tired enough, stressed enough, or just done enough with your business, it is very easy to believe that what you are hearing is going to be the solution to what you are experiencing on a day-to-day basis.

So today, I’m going to break this down very simply. A course is not the foundation of a stable business. A course, or any passive product that you want to come in and replace significant amounts of income—most people know that a $20 product isn’t going to change their whole life, but something that is substantial, hundreds or thousands of dollars—is going to come in and multiply whatever is already true in your business.

So if your marketing is inconsistent, a course multiplies that inconsistency. If your messaging is unclear, a course is going to multiply that confusion. If your sales process is really shaky and you’re not sure what gets people on sales calls, a course is going to multiply that awkwardness and that lack of clarity. If your business model, or lack thereof, is held together by sprinting and panicking and improvising, a course is going to bring that to the surface as well.

This is why so many of the stylists I work with who are established and already have a career behind them build a course and end up more exhausted, more broke, more discouraged.

Another thing I see in this group is that people will try to do a membership, which then puts them on more of a content and output hamster wheel than they were before. So if you already don’t have energy for your marketing, but you’re going to create a membership that’s going to require you to create assets for people all the time, now you’re stealing your energy from your marketing just to make a small amount of money.

So you can sub in membership, passive product, course, whatever it is. Anything you are grabbing for that you have to sell to people that is not your one-to-one, is not the thing you’ve been perfecting over the years, is going to fit the bill of what I’m talking about today.

What also happens at this point, and the reason why I wanted to talk about it in this launch for Income Accelerator, was because courses, passive income, those types of things, and having it feel like you “failed” at them, after and on top of feeling like you can’t get your one-to-one to work, creates a psychological space within the stylists I work with where they begin to convince themselves that nothing is going to work. So that is an emotion that’s in the mix.

My hope is that you can listen to this episode and hear that actually, when you look at what you were trying to do—which is very commendable—trying to not give up, trying to stick with it, trying to make this thing you care about work, and trying to make it sustainable for you and your family, nine times out of ten, you forgot that you were missing all of the pieces to be able to make the right choice about what would do the thing you were intending to do.

Instead of staying in a shame spiral and telling yourself, almost to the point of what I see often, “You can never make another investment, you can never get help, you can never do anything again,” because you’re being punished for the thing that didn’t work, I want to give you a view of how actually, maybe it’s just a delay on the investment you made in trying to create a course, both in time and in money. Instead, in order to get the most out of that, you need some other things first.

Because the established stylists I work with who have been in this situation, or could be in this situation because they’re at this breaking point, have a ton of experience. They are talented. They know how to get results for their clients. In some seasons, they’re actually overbooked, right? It’s not like they never have clients.

But what happens is they get into this cycle, and they’re sometimes not even aware of it, where they’re booked, and then real life hits, and then they get to a dead month, and then they either lose a client or assume that a client was going to come back for another season that isn’t. So that income is gone.

Or they get slammed with one-to-one clients, and then they stop marketing because they literally cannot do one more thing, usually because the systems in their business, are not taking some of that load off their plate.

Then they’re back to everything being quiet and not knowing where their next lead is going to come from. So it’s basically the cycle of head down, delivery mode, total disconnection from the next few months and income flow in their business.

Then their calendar opens up again, they offboard the client, and there’s immediate panic. Then they’re scrambling, and then there’s posting like it’s an emergency. Then it’s, “Well, maybe I need a discount,” or “Maybe I need to sexy this up a little,” or create a smaller offer because people aren’t buying.

Then they start saying yes to clients that they would normally screen out or, in a better place, would not be willing to compromise on the things that these people are asking of them, because bills don’t care about your standards, right? Like, I know that I’ve lived that.

This is the cycle I see where a course starts to feel like a life raft.

When you live inside that cycle long enough, you stop thinking strategically, of course, because you’re hijacked with anxiety and sustainability, like you just have no access to what the best long-term thing is going to be for your nervous system, the business you want, the kind of clients you want.

So you start thinking desperately. I have been there many times. That’s when a course or something passive, allegedly, starts to feel like the salvation that your business needs.

But I want to say this to you, no matter where you are in this conversation. What you want is not a course or a passive product or a membership. What you want is consistency in your business. What you want is predictable money. What you want is predictable appointments with clients that you love on your schedule at a pace that feels like you can enjoy your life and make a good income.

You want a predictable connection between the marketing you’re putting out and having right-fit leads coming in. You want to know that your marketing efforts, the time you’re sitting down and making yourself vulnerable and getting on camera and doing all those things, isn’t a waste of your time.

You want some margin in your business, financially and otherwise, so you can hire help and not feel like you are the only one responsible for remembering the 37,000 things going on in your business to keep it together.

That is where most stylists are when they feel like a course or a passive product is their next move. Of course, you are thinking to yourself that that is the responsible and next right step because everyone on the internet is telling you to scale. But here’s the thing. Scaling a business is a description of the result. So that means that you did something in your business that got you more revenue, more clients, more impact, or more capacity. By capacity, I mean time or money.

It doesn’t inherently mean a one-to-many model or a passive model is the only path to get those things. Often, what we don’t realize is the sacrifice to get that course going, that membership going, that passive thing going, is too expensive for what is already on our plate.

So I would say this later on in the episode, but I have no problem with courses, clearly. I have them. I had them as a stylist. But I do know how absolutely hard it is to get them going and getting them successful.

If you also don’t have the right kind of expectations for them, it will crush you because it can be expensive, it can be time-consuming, and it can take away from the thing that you already have a lot of capability at, which is your one-to-one business.

So I’m going to say this quiet part out loud because it has to be said more often to this community. Being great at personal styling and being great at building a scalable business are two different skill sets entirely.

You were taught, or you taught yourself, how to dress someone. You were taught, or you taught yourself, how to shop for a wardrobe, how to create outfits for people. But I’ve been in this industry for almost 20 years. I have taught in programs. I have worked with some of the best teachers and stylists in the world.

I can tell you from asking them for a year and a half before I opened this business, “What was lacking? What was missing in this program? What was missing in that program? What level did you feel like it was supposed to be teaching a stylist at?” that you probably were not taught how to create demand and predictability in your business.

You probably weren’t taught how to build a business model that creates repeat work intentionally. You probably weren’t taught how to sell. You probably weren’t taught how to position your offer so people understand what they are buying and why it costs what it costs.

So you end up with a business that’s held together by your talent, your effort, and your capacity, which is dwindling by the day because you are so stressed out about not having repeatable and predictable outcomes in your business.

So courses become the attractive thing because the marketing promises certainty. Create it once, sell it forever. But what no one tells you is that adding a course or another product to a one-to-one business that isn’t doing well is actually a very advanced move.

It’s not because you’re not smart enough to make a course. Trust me, there are tons of dumb people that have made courses. It’s more because it requires business skills and data from your business to tell you what is already working.

If you were starting out fresh and you wanted to go to a course, I suppose that is an option. But for most of you, the thing that you really enjoy and love is that interaction with your clients, that back and forth. So you need to figure out a way to systematize that.

But if your one-to-one business is unpredictable, you don’t know where clients get results, you’re constantly having to people-please and overwork and be in a codependent relationship with your business to get results, then trying to translate that into a course to get some space, you don’t have what you need.

So it’s not that you are not great at styling and so you can’t have a course. It’s that a course doesn’t magically fix the lack of business skills or the lack of business data that you need to sell it well for what you need to do at this point in your career, which is make real money. This is not a hobby.

So it exposes a lot of the things that people feel or realize aren’t working in their business. Sometimes stylists take that to mean that there’s something wrong with them. And it is not.

That’s why I say being a good stylist and being good at business are not the same skills.

Most of the time, what happens is because a lot of stylists intuit that their styling skills are natural and innate to them, they take it personally that the business side isn’t coming that way. But that is true of all creatives. That’s true of painters and sculptors. My dad was an architect. I saw this with him. I’ve lived in the world of creative people trying to make a living. So I know why you take it personally.

But they’re not the same. So you have to be very rational about the fact that being great at one thing doesn’t mean that the packaging and commodifying and selling of that thing, or not being able to do that, means there’s some other problem with you, because there’s not.

I want to say this again. I am not anti-course. I am anti-stylist being sold emotional promises that ignore reality. Because what happens when you build a course and it doesn’t sell, you don’t just feel disappointed, you feel betrayed by the fact that this was your last shot, you told yourself, and it didn’t work. Or you feel betrayed by the person who sold you the dream.

But if you’re honest, they didn’t qualify your business model. They didn’t say, “Hey, if you’ve done all these things, then a course is going to give you even more capacity.” They just sold you the endpoint, the transformation, without ever doing the work of helping you decide, “Is this the right place for this at this point?”

We all want the transformation, but the trick is, is the way you’re going to get the transformation going to work for the life and the reality of the business you have?

And so many stylists in this position say to me on sales calls that they think they need to go get a job, like this is their last hurrah. Because they believe that there is a fundamental flaw that is making it the case that their styling business won’t work.

They’ve now tried everything because they tried the one-to-one, they tried the marketing, they tried the newsletter, and now they tried a course and it didn’t work.

But you did not try everything if you didn’t start your business with a business plan. You tried a tactic that was out of the right order to make it work.

Here is what a course requires, as someone who has created four in my career. A course is not just an end product. It is marketing, messaging, content, and sales that is often separate from what you’re already doing now.

It is a launch plan that has to hit very specific points, which I’m fascinated by how many people sell people a course but never tell them how to market it. Like, wild.

A customer journey that helps you not just sell that course once, but sell up or down to your one-to-one or into another program so that you can continue the life cycle.

Support that you have to give people that do that program. So often customer support, support like Q&A calls, more time on your calendar.

Updates to that course when you see that people aren’t doing well at certain sections, which is why most people that try to sell a passive course without any live support the first few times are never able to make significant money from it, because they don’t understand they need that back and forth with the market.

And iterations in how you market that course. So every time I market Income Accelerator or any other program, which are all live courses, I’m always involved in them, you see a different wave of problems, a different wave of issues.

So it’s not like you can sell one of these things and keep your finger off the pulse of your community and your world, which is what people try to tell you when they sell you these things.

In fact, more than one-to-one, having a membership or anything where a course that you’re selling, or anything like that, if you don’t want it to be an utter, utter time suck and complete failure, which then can impact your name over time, you are going to need to be even more involved with people.

I know nobody tells you, right? And so that means when you add a course or passive product, you’re actually adding complexity and work in the short term for a long-term payoff.

I can say that as someone who’s currently in that, like, “Holy crap, I have three programs launching in the next three months, and they’re all being rewritten because I’ve created a whole new framework.” I’m hiring team members.

The only way I have the ability to do that and do my one-to-one is the fact that I’ve iterated so many times and my marketing is so dialed in.

That’s also how I make it better because my marketing isn’t separate from my delivery. It’s all one thing, right? I’m not promising you something in my marketing that I’m not also going to do with you when you get to my program.

You’re going to look me in the eye. You’re going to be able to ask me questions. You’re going to be able to do those things. When you do that, I make the program better, right? And then I push it back out, and it’s a constant cycle. Nothing that I do in my business, as someone that makes over $100,000 from courses, is passive. Nothing.

So if you are already burned out, already inconsistent, already in a reactive cycle, the timing in your business to add a course is absolutely wrong. Because a course will feel like a second business that will blow up your first business.

Because you won’t have time for your clients, for your one-to-one, for the people that actually you probably just need to tweak a few things to make more from them.

Here’s what I want you to know about a course. These are the six things that you should be considering before you move to a course or passive product.

If you currently have a one-to-one styling business, and you have fewer than four answers that are a yes, a course is not your next move. If you have more than four or five answers that are a yes, then you probably are actually in a good position for a course.

So, one, do you have unshakably clear positioning? Do people immediately understand who you are, who you help, and what outcome you create, specifically for what group of people?

Number two, do you know what to say in your marketing to attract and warm and nurture the right people as one-to-one leads in your business?

Number three, do you know what converts people from observers in your marketing onto a sales call? Do you know what to say that you can go, “Okay, when I say that, more people book.” Important to note here that I don’t mean you’re discounting things or you’re bundling things or you’re making it like a deal. Your words, no discounts, just your words, have to be doing the thing that gets people on sales calls.

Number four, do you have a reliable process to qualify your leads on sales calls and then invite them into your one-to-one services? Because that tells me that you know how to ensure, by qualifying people, who the right fit is for your one-to-one. The better you get at that, the more you can create massive amounts of income in your one-to-one. So if you have the ability to go through a sales process with someone, know that they are right with 95% accuracy for your service, you’re in a good position.

Number five, do you know where the greatest changes happen in your one-to-one styling process for most clients? Because if you don’t, it’s going to be hard to replicate that magic in a course or passive product.

And number six, do you have a business model that is stable to generate repeat clients in order to pay you while you also work on a course or a passive product? Because you’re going to need income coming in while you spend time on this other thing.

So if you don’t have yeses to four or more of these, then now is not a great time to add a course.

So you have this decision. If you want a course because you’re panicking, exhausted, inconsistent, or you want something that’s going to rescue you from instability in your business, you have a choice. Do you want to keep living with this inconsistency, or do you want to deal with it at the foundational level?

Because you can’t build leverage on top of something that is already not working and from a place that isn’t making you feel like more of an expert. You have to fix the foundation of your business first.

If you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, “Okay, I see myself in this. I don’t want to keep doing this good month, dead month thing. I don’t want to keep feeling like my business is a slot machine and I never know what I’m going to get when I put my marketing out,” then this is exactly what we do inside my Accelerator program.

It’s where we build, rebuild for most of you, the foundation of your business to reflect who you are now. Not the things that didn’t work, the things that did work, to focus you on what makes you amazing at what you do, to make sure that you are only bringing services with you that light you up. Because I want to create the best and most dynamic stylists in the industry. I don’t want everybody looking the same.

That tends to light up the right people for this program. They’re like, “Yes, that’s what I want. I don’t necessarily want a course. I mean, maybe I want a course later on, but right now, I want to fall back in love with my business.”

You want positioning that makes you the obvious choice. Messaging that you can just have an idea in your shower and know, like, “Yes, if I say that, that’s going to make a difference,” because you know your people and you know how to message them so well.

You want lead generation that is sustainable, meaning you know that the prices that you are selling your offers for are both appropriate to the people that you’re selling them to and allow you more space on your calendar and are things the market actually wants. Because a lot of stylists think they have to completely pick between those things, like what people will buy versus what’s actually going to make you profitable. That’s not true.

You want a business that’s going to help you create repeat clients so you’re not working so hard for every new client. You have to keep replacing them because they aren’t a right fit for long-term styling. Everybody is not a right fit. So 30% to 40% of your clients have to be the right fit so you are not needing to kill yourself in your marketing.

That is what you need at this point. You need to believe in yourself. You need someone that’s going to be there to pull out of you the best. Because I have seen it all. I know what it feels like to be in this place. That’s why I can do an entire episode with this much detail of what you’re thinking and experiencing.

Which is how I know that the thing that’s going to make you feel in control and the way you really want to feel is doing the foundational work, and then you can go back to that course or that program and launch it in a completely different place. So it wasn’t a waste. Nothing we do in our business is a waste. It’s just often not the right time because people don’t know how to qualify stylists for the right phase of business.

So you are not behind. You are right on time. You have everything you need, which is the tenacity to keep going and to keep trying things to get this business where you want it.

Now we just have to redo some of that foundation with who you are now, get you excited, get out there, get the right clients, get those lives you’re going to change into your orbit, and then we’ll talk about a course. Deal? Okay.

If this is something you’re interested in, head to the show notes. The application is in there for Income Accelerator. I will be in touch with your next steps. In the meantime, 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.