PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Nicole Otchy: I want to tell you about something that happened when I was in LA a few weeks ago that I haven't really been able to stop thinking about. So I hosted a meetup with the founders of Nouve, the styling platform who've been on the show before. And it was just an informal meetup. I really had the goal of doing more live events this year. And most of the stylists in the room, at this event, were my established clients, stylists who I had been working with for many years. And, you know, we were all just sitting around talking the way you do, when you are, you know, deep in an industry and you're sitting there with your peers and, you know, you finally have other people to get it in the room. You know, client returns, client pushbacks, the situations that come up when you've been doing this for a long time and you've seen things go sideways, sometimes comically so. And, you know, you figured out how to handle them. And, you know, sometimes those situations can rattle your confidence, but everyone was kind of sharing their, quote, war stories.

And there were a few women there as well who I had never met, they were wonderful. And they had left corporate careers to sort of go full time in styling. They were super smart, very ambitious, very bright, exactly the kind of women that I work with, in my programs. And as I was sitting there, listening to my clients talk and trade stories, I thought about what it would feel like to be the new stylist listening to this. What was interesting is like these were just normal Tuesday conversations to the stylists, who were in the room. But to anyone who was hoping to start to get their first clients outside of friends and family, it probably didn't sound enticing. In fact, it probably sounded like a little bit of a warning of all the things that could go wrong. That wasn't the intention. But when you haven't really been immersed in something, hearing about the realities of it can feel like a lot, because you simply haven't seen them yet. And that's what this episode is about.

This is The Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast. I'm Nicole Otchy and this is a show for personal stylists building world-class businesses and setting the standards in the industry. We're talking all things profitable growth, thought leadership and real client conversations. Because the best stylists don't just edit closets, they shape culture.

So that moment I just described, let me tell you why it has been sitting with me, when I sort of leaned back and realized that the way this conversation was unfolding, probably hit different people in different ways and why I think it matters for you right now, if you are listening and you are in the early stages of starting a styling business, or are considering it. The truth is that stylists who were there talking about these experiences and all of the different things that have come up with clients, they were not in any way talking about this from like a place of being rattled. This is just the reality of it. And when I was thinking about how they were talking about it, it was really that they were able to talk about it in this way, because they had a language for it. They had policies. They had been through it and they had figured out what to do. They had built the structures. Since those things happened, that meant they were never caught off guard the same way twice.

And that was partially what the conversation was about, about like, how do you handle these things when they come up? But when you don't have any structures in your business and you don't have a lot of experience, that will hit very differently. Not because those problems are insurmountable, but because you just haven't built any of the containers, or the guardrails to make them feel manageable. And so it could just sound like a lot of things you didn't see coming, when you have been romanticizing a career that you want so much. Because I thought a lot about, as I was listening, what I thought styling was going to be like. And I truly used to think it was just like going to be the same as like, you know, shopping with my friends and like going to great Bloomingdale's lunches after. And I gotta tell you it really wasn't that at all and that's just life, right, we always romanticize what we don't have that's not a problem, but it is true And so the facts are that clients don't like things sometimes. You have to do a ton of returns. Sometimes that's a disaster. Someone was going to text you at 11 p.m. to tell you that, you know, all the clothes that they bought, they're now second guessing. That's not even like advanced stylist stuff. That's just what it can be like any given day of the week, when you run your own business as a stylist.

And the question is whether those moments that are really the norm that also come with incredible highs that, you know, people don't always talk about as much, make you doubt your whole decision to start a business in the first place. Or whether they just throw you off guard for a minute, before you know exactly what to do. And the difference between those two experiences is the foundation underneath you, when you start a business. I want to say this, because I think that why most stylists or aspiring stylists wait to really take their business seriously and go all in, is for reasons that I think we have totally backwards. The story most of the people I work with tell themselves is often that they need more knowledge, before they start building the business, they need more experience, they need more confidence, more of something that they don't quite have yet. But knowledge and evidence are not the same thing.

You can have advanced knowledge and still be a beginner in the execution of that knowledge. And this is a critical thing, the gap between what you know about style, what you know about your own strengths, because you've worked with your friends and family, because this seems to be an innate talent that you have and what you've actually built the reps to do in real life with strangers. That gap is a really important thing for you to close. And it's not imposter syndrome. That's just where most stylists are when they start. And the only way out of that feeling is through it, is through getting in the right reps. I don't care how much knowledge you have. I don't care how long you've been in retail. If you haven't seen your clients in their home, if you haven't figured out how to onboard a client, if you haven't figured out how to make sure that you are keeping a client engaged through every part of the styling process, whether that be virtual or in person. If you don't know how to handle negative feedback, all of these things are going to happen to you, whether or not you have 20 years in the fashion industry. Because while those things may be helpful, they are nowhere near as helpful as understanding how to deal with the client facing side of a business, when that client is paying your bills, basically. And the problem is that when you get reps without structure, that doesn't teach you what you need to learn to be a business owner and a stylist.

Lots of people have the ability to be a stylist. Very few come with the knowledge of how to run a business, a high ticket, high touch business, in a way that's going to get them to six figures quickly. And that's just because they've never done it. I was on a call recently with a bunch of stylists and one of them was sharing how she had done sessions with people in her area and felt like she hadn't really gotten real experiences from them, because they weren't invested, they disappeared, when it was time to do the shopping and they just didn't follow her recommendations. And she felt like she was chasing them, which no one wants to feel. But the issue wasn't the clients she was trying to get practice on. It was the way that she structured the container that she offered for these free trials. And when you don't have a defined process, a clear scope, a consultation structure that sets expectations before the work begins, whether it's free or not, clients practice, clients whatever, will fill the vacuum however they want. So the session will happen, but the learning that you will need to be a professional stylist, doesn't land, because there's nothing to learn from. It is completely unstructured. And so you can't really figure out what went wrong, if you've never defined what was supposed to be the right outcome, in the first place.

And that's what starting your business with a structure does. It doesn't just make you look more professional. It makes the reps you do before you actually have everything up and running, or charging thousands of dollars actually count. It gives you something to learn from, to refine and to build on. And without that structure, you can do hundreds of sessions, you can style all kinds of people and still feel like you are starting from scratch, every time, because you are. And all of that starting from scratch doesn't make you feel more ready to be a professional stylist. From working with stylists for over almost a decade and a half, I know that experience without structure does not build confidence. It doesn't build a convincing case for you feeling ready yet. Because every time something goes sideways, normal things, you don't have a sense, or an understanding of why or what to do differently. So you will just absorb it as evidence that you need to do more next time, that this might not be right for you. You will make it mean something it doesn't mean, because you don't have the right frame.

And the stylists who are my established clients who were in that event in LA, who were not rattled by all this hard stuff, who are laughing off these ridiculous situations. They weren't tougher than anybody else there, or than any other person that wants to be a stylist. I've been with them through many of those situations. They were deeply upset by them, but they knew how to handle them, because they had somebody to help them see their way through. And it became part of what made them stronger and better, more confident in their business. They weren't, you know, more experienced in some innate way, they just had a business foundation. They had a consultation structure, a contract that actually protected them, a scope of practices that made the right clients feel like they were experts, before they felt like it. The policies that meant that none of it was a surprise, when something went sideways, more than once, because they learned their lesson and put in the things they needed to to prevent them from happening again. And so that's what it looks like when you build your styling business right from the start. It's not a guarantee that nothing is ever going to go wrong. It's a guarantee that when it does, you will know what to do. And I want to make the cost of waiting very, very concrete, because I think it's easy to hear that phrase and nod and move on without really like feeling what it means.

So I got on a sales call a few months ago with a stylist, who had been full-time for five months, at that point. She's very talented and she was already making $5,000 a month, which for five months into launching her business, having quit right out the bat her other job, was honestly incredibly impressive and not typical. She had clients, she had repeat clients, she had

packages, she had a very impressive online presence and visibility and the ability to be on camera, in a way, that most stylists I have worked with at that stage do not have. I already knew who she was before we got on a sales call and she was absolutely exhausted. She described herself as basically making it up as she went. She said that she had held it together so far, but five months in, she really needed to figure out what she was going to do with the foundation of this business, or she was going to really be having a hard time. This was really affecting her. She was feeling anxious. She was stressed out all the time. She felt like she wasn't able to do things in her life that she wanted to do. So when I looked at her pricing, it was very clear immediately that she was doing the kind of work people charge $3,000 for and charging like $500 for it. Like her best-selling services, the ones she was booking the most often, was $950 for hours of work she wasn't charging for. For results, the clients were like blown away by.

And she wasn't undercharging, because she didn't like know her worth in some like vague motivational sense. She was undercharging, because she didn't have the time, because she hit the ground running to build structures that would let her like hold a higher number for her services with confidence. And so she didn't have the time, because she was so burnt out to actually think through what would make this worth it for the client and for me. And she didn't have a framework that made the prices that she was charging feel obvious, a way of looking at it and saying, is there value here for both of us? And so she kept taking on more and more, because at the prices she was charging, she had to to pay her rent. So she joins my group program and started doing the work. I think it was only three weeks in. She had finished her pricing and everything and she got on the call and she says, before we even started, I have something to share with the group. She said that she went to her website, almost doubled her prices. So her $550 service was now $950, her $950 service was now $1,750. And she had had this fear all of these months, so now we're like seven months into her business, that if she charged that number that we had talked about, I mean, that was way beyond her thoughts. Just anything higher than what she was charging, people would just stop booking with her. So within days of making those changes on her website, she had five or six new consultation calls on her calendar, she said. And she ended up quoting those new prices immediately on those sales calls. And people booked. People booked. And what she said that I can't, like, it's just sort of like reverberating in my head, was that she felt like she was actually starting to get a little bit of space, a little bit of peace around her, for the first time, since she started her business.

That is the point. When you love something, when you care about it and yet you are working so hard, it feels like it's suffocating you, that doesn't lead to this dream life that you think you're going to have. She finally had space, after months of drowning. And here's the deal, she didn't work harder. She just stopped winging it and decided to build a proper business foundation, so that the business didn't burn her out anymore. And it wasn't just upping her prices, it was doing the work so that she was sold on those prices first. And that's the work that you cannot do alone. You need someone to support you in that mindset work. And I want to say at this juncture something out loud that I think holds a lot of aspiring stylists and new stage stylists at a certain point, where they feel stuck for longer than they need to. And it's the fear that building a real structure, that raising your prices to actually be competitive, that holding a real boundary is going to push people away. That if you show up like a professional before you feel like one, people will actually see through it.

But here's what I want you to consider. The clients who are a good fit for a personal stylist, who are going to actually take it seriously at the level of work you probably want to do, are not going to leave, because you have a proper intake process. They're not going to bulk, because you sent a contract. They're not going to disappear, because you raised your prices. The right clients, the ones who are ready for a real and honest transformation and not just a one-time closet edit, or styling as like a cute little experience, those clients expect your process to reflect the quality of your work. And some of them are quietly waiting for you to figure that out, if I'm being honest with you. The clients who push back on structure and on normal business practices that any other professional would have, are the ones you are going to struggle with anyway. Stop settling for breadcrumbs. Like, seriously.

And here's the other thing I want to say to you, waiting until you have more clients before you build the structure that gets you clients is a loop that keeps stylists in the friends and family stage for years. And it keeps even established stylists. And I'm just happy to be here sort of charging system that totally burns them out, but at least makes them feel like they're like somewhat in proximity to being at the table. You don't actually need any clients to build the foundation of a business. You need the foundation to get clients who actually show up, follow through and come back to you.

So let me tell you exactly how I help stylists build what those established stylists at that LA event had, from day one, in your business, instead of having to go back and rebuild. So if you have been the trusted stylist in your group chat for years and you're ready to make your business a real business, this is for you. So Foundations is a six month program. It's got seven models that you can do at your own pace, but you could finish all of them within three months and have the business up and going. You'll learn how to book your first real paying clients before you feel ready, how to price your services in a way that reflects the work you actually want to do and the clients you want to get. And how to run a session from start to finish so that every client experience feels consistent and professional instead of improvised. You're going to learn how to go from free favors to paying strangers so that you can actually build up a book of real clients and how to put the backend systems in place, so the business runs like a real business, from day one. That makes an enormous difference in how you feel about what you do, even as you're getting more experience.

Every module is about 30 minutes and the rest of the time you're implementing. You're not consuming. Everything you are doing is not just mindset work. We save that for the Q&A calls. It's you actually building a real business. What kind of a bank account you need, how your clients should pay you, all of the little things. When do you need a website? Is there an intermediate way? Do you need booking software? Everything that you can think of, we are going to cover. And the first round of Foundations, this new program, includes two live Q&A calls every month. Future cohorts will only have one. So this is the most supported cohort that I'm ever going to run. And when you join me through the wait list, you're also going to lock in the founding price of $1,997, which is $1,000 off what the program will be in future rounds. So as soon as this program ends, it will go up to $2,997. And you're going to also get two bonus live workshops in May and July, before the program officially kicks off, if you join from the waitlist.

The first one in May is going to be about how to get real clients outside of your friends and family. And then in July, we're going to talk about how to start talking to your ideal clients in your content. But you can only get that special price and those bonus workshops through the waitlist. The waitlist can be found in the link in my show notes and the call opens April 27th for the waitlist. The program starts August 17th.

And here is what I want to leave you with. The stylists who were in that room in LA with me, the ones who had the language and the policies and the structure, who were not rattled anymore by all of that hard stuff that happened with their clients, they all started somewhere. Every single one of them had a moment, where they decided to stop waiting for readiness to magically arrive and decided to start building the readiness immediately, with an actual plan and someone to help them along the way. And that moment is available to you right now. Link in the show notes to the waitlist and I will see you inside.

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 a 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.