PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Nicole Otchy: Every stylist that I talk to who has a slow period in the summer, tells me one of two things. Either I don't know what happened, I did everything right, or it's always slow in summer, so I stopped marketing, because it wasn't worth it. My clients are busy in the summer and they're just not reaching out for styling. But the sales problems were in April that led to that slow summer that they have then often made a rule instead of an exception. And so what most people don't see is that the problems you have today, as I've talked about before, happened 60, 90 days before you experience them in your business. But that's because most of us, myself included, are too close to the work that we do. We are too connected to what is happening with our clients, with the day-to-day, to zoom out and look at what is actually happening in the business. Or we kind of have a sense, but we get overwhelmed and we just think, I got to bring the next sale, I got to bring the next sale.

But summer is actually a key window where stylists should be looking at what is running and what is not working in their business. But a lot of chats over the past few years have shown me that the industry narrative that is just slow in summer means that a lot of people really miss out on actually creating the momentum that would make fall be their best yet. And that's often when stylists are also just like the most excited to work. So it's a big bummer to not have that. But we're not doing that anymore, because today I'm sharing the exact audit process to use to turn things around in summer, whether you take time off. Or you just want to go into fall with a clear strategy for your income, because maybe you want to make even more, maybe you suspect you're not on track, whatever it looks like, summer is a really good time, especially early summer, to do some strategic planning. And I'm going to walk you through that process right now.

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

If you've been with me for the last two episodes, you know summer is the setup season. So if you're not crushing it right now, it is a really good time to look at what you can do to capitalize on what the marketing industry and our own internal mentality around back-to-school clothes looks like in our society. But staying visible through summer isn't really enough on its own. Because even if you stay visible, you will go back to your busy season, especially if you took some time off, with the same problems in your business you had before. So I'm going to walk you through an audit that I run on my own business. I've run some of my clients through this, when they're having a hard time. These are the four areas that I want you to look at, because they are all connected to sales and bringing in better leads. They may not seem like it, but I'm going to walk you through my rationale for all of them, because when I said most people don't even know where to look, this is where to look that most people don't know.

The first area I want you to look at is how you are talking about your offer suite in your marketing. This is where I start with every single stylist I talk to. So this is literally what people pay me a lot of money for. And that is the fastest way to make marketing easier for most of the stylists that I work with, is to only market one offer. And as soon as I say this and I see the panic, I know exactly why people aren't making the money they want. So sit with your reaction to me saying that. I'm sure maybe for some of you, your first reaction was like, which offer? I'm going to tell you. But how you feel about the offer I'm going to talk about, is the key, not just to you making more money, when you get better at marketing it, but to understanding where you are stuck internally in your business. I want you to only market your highest ticket package. Unless your highest ticket package is a retainer that requires an amount of money that is like, you know, $50,000 or $60,000 a year, right? Like for clothes and the service and everything, right? If you have a high ticket offer, that is not like an ongoing, you really have to like the person, it's hours and hours of work, you're like in their business, just a normal season or whatever is fine. So if you're the person with the retainer at the top, I want you to go to the mid-tier offer. That is not a locked-in contract for an extended amount of time past a quarter. Otherwise, whatever your highest ticket offer is, is what we are going with.

And here's why. Every time you sit down to write content, you are quietly trying to market multiple services at once. And what you don't realize about that is that if you are in fact doing this, which I find most people just get overwhelmed and do like what I like to call people pleasing content, which is like style tips, which is fine, once in a while. But when people know they need to make sales, they pull the wrong lever and they create, again, people losing content, things that the algorithm likes, but our goal is to get people off of the algorithm, right? We're like a dating app as business owners. I don't want you to stay here. I want you to slip into my DMs, or reach out to me by email and work with me. Right? And so when you create that kind of content, you're probably not bringing it back to your offer. Like it's really hard to bring styling tip posts back to your offer, because you're basically training people to do it themselves. And most of your right clients aren't going to want to do that, so you're missing them entirely. And then it's hard to, you know, when you do a roundup of, you know, pics or whatever, which is what a lot of stylists do as their main content, they get some income, sure, from the links. But, they never actually learn how to make money that they are in control of. Because, you know, eventually with AI, this sort of marketing is going to be less appealing for brands to pay stylists for. So, what are you going to do when that happens and you don't know how to talk about your offers? That's why learning to talk about your highest ticket offer and only talking about that, completely changes your business. And it is the model that I teach to everyone.

Now, the thing you need to understand is that every time you create an offer, which most people just copy them off of other people's websites, if we're being honest, I'm sure I did too. We don't really think about the client lifecycle, which means we're not really seeing how that offer is connected to our marketing. And so what happens is stylists tend to go for the package they feel most comfortable talking about, which is often relative to the mindset work they've done on their self-concept and being paid. So they will tend to go for the lowest ticket one, or maybe the mid ticket one, even if they are really excited about their high tier offer. But they don't realize that those are all different phases of the buyer journey, because they don't know buyer psychology. So the person looking for a quick restyle of what they already have and says they don't really need much help, because they know what they like, is gonna cost you the same amount of time to market to as a high-end client that's going to stay with you season after season, you know and spend a lot of clothes with you, because they actually need you. And they need the high level of service that you ultimately want to provide, but are nervous to market.

And so you're trying to, if you are in fact marketing multiple tiers of your offer, I'm not saying there's a problem having it, but if you're trying to talk about them all at once, you're either going to, like I said, get shut down and not do anything, or defer to people-pleasing content that isn't going to help get sales. Or you're going to split your audience's attention and confuse them about what to actually buy from you and what to hire you for. Because the problems and the psychology of each of those different groups are different and many stylists don't even stop long enough to think about that. So even if you feel like you're doing a really good job talking about your offers and quote selling, the more you split people's attention, because they don't see everything you put out and you have to name the offer now anywhere between 10 and 22 times, the data shows and I can attest to this, that's why it's gotten harder to sell. You are basically, if you're spreading it out over multiple offers, it's really, really hard to A), nail the messaging, nail the psychology, nail where they are in the client-buyer, but also talk about it in a way that's actually interesting, so it takes a lot more time.

And so when you market a higher-end package, more done with you or done for you, multiple-part package, you have more to talk about, you attract a higher-end buyer who's likely to stay with you longer, takes the same amount of time to market something lower and they're ready, they're warm, because this is a real problem. This is where not understanding how sales psychology and your messaging and the offers play into each other, because people that want a high ticket offer and are like, I am not doing this themselves. They are not messing around with the links that you're putting in your thing. So you can have, you know, I mean, I know I have definitely had $15,000 days as a stylist, more than that in this business, because of my offers. I don't know a lot of people that have $15,000 days in their marketing from links. That should be like the topping on the Sundae, not the main event.

And so I want you to audit your content with this in mind. When you go back and look at your previous posts, newsletters, marketing, wherever you were, whatever you were saying, over the past 60 to 90 days, how often did you talk about explicitly your high-end or mid-tier offer, if you're in the case of someone who has a retainer for their high-end?

How often did you make it clear the outcome of the package and exactly who it was for by talking about what it looked like to experience their pain points in their daily life? And before you panic and think, what about my other offers? I'm not selling my high ticket one that much. You're not selling it, because you're not getting good at selling it. Selling is a skill, which is why it's so wild to me that people think that they should just start a business. It's like, it should just take off. Because it's a whole separate skill. And if you don't lead with the offer you want to sell in your marketing, you won't sell it. And I can tell you this, because I launch offers four times a year and I don't sell much in between them. That's just how human nature is. You have to keep hearing the thing over and over. So, I want you to go back and look at that. And then I want you to see, like, have I legitimately been talking about my offers? Because if you have been, especially your high ticket offer, if you have been, then I want you to look at the messaging within that offer and play with it a little. But most people find they're actually not pointing to any offer. So, that's why you have no sales. Are there people that are super warm that maybe connect with you on certain things that will reach out? Yes, but it will never get you to consistent revenue. I know what that life is like. I lived on referrals. I waited for the internet to reward me with Google searches and it worked, but it's very hard to feel good about your business, to not be demoralized, when you don't know how to sell.

And so the stylists I work with who hit consistent six figures, pick one fully, in my case, I like to say transformational, but just one high ticket package and get serious about it in their marketing. I think transformational packages are much easier to sell, because the audience kind of writes itself, but that's a larger conversation. Once you get good at talking about that, you don't have to eliminate all the other offers from your website or from your world. You just learn how to qualify people into the other offers, because they make sense. Because you wrote, in cases of people that I work with like an accelerator, we write it so that it's easy to upsell and downsell, but you speak to the highest. And then when people are attracted to that, which they naturally will be, because there's the most amount of solutions you can find for someone, in a high-ticket offer, which means it's going to hit on so many different parts of their life and there's more opportunities for you to really connect with them, to make that investment. Then, if you get them on a sales call and you know how to qualify people, because you know what your offers stand for, you can downsell them. But it's way worse for you to try to scatter your marketing across multiple offers, which is why when I see styles with seven upfront offers, I'm like, best of luck. Like, there's just no way. If you're overwhelmed talking about your offers, why would the person who's overwhelmed with their wardrobe know what to pick? Because you've just listed a whole bunch of services. You got to guide people. And so, if you get overwhelmed and you never explicitly market an offer, you get the results that are up to chance.

When you do it like this and you see and get serious about what am I actually doing in my marketing, and then you commit to this one thing, if this is the only thing you did, it would change you, because you'll see all the places where you're nervous, where you're anxious, where you're limiting beliefs come up and then you have to work through it. There's no other solution around here. You either don't know your offer well enough, because you're not connected enough to it, in which case someone shouldn't be paying you thousands of dollars for it. You need to be able to talk about it in a way that you feel led up by, or else it gets off the menu, basically. So this is going to be the bootcamp for that. You will change, if you do this for 90 days as a person. There's just no question. Most people won't do it. If you're the person that will do it, you're going to be just fine.

Area two, you're hiding your credibility and burying your personal brand and you need to put it back into your content. So you're going to audit your content for something that I think is connected to number one. The looking at your offers and how you're marketing them is like we talked about people pleasing content and that another version of it is kind of a different realm of it, where stylists who have these really impressive backgrounds, they were in finance, they have marketing careers, they were in design, they were in law, they were in education, whole careers, before they became stylists, leave it out of their marketing. They're giving me all the tips, they're giving me all their recommendations, but I'm not really able to connect with them as a person. And I think so many stylists are so afraid of seeming not legitimate, because this is a pretty female-dominated industry. It's pretty common that people say things like, you're a little styling business. And so as a result, we internalize that and pull back. And there's a lot of thoughts around what does and doesn't count. And it's usually all wrong. Because say you, you know, a lot of women will say like, well, I did that, but then I took some time off to have my kids, so I don't put that in my marketing. What are you talking about? You still have those skill sets, right? You didn't like forget how to market.

Well, usually people that are in marketing tell me they forgot. They don't know how to market themselves, but they know how to market other things. If you're in finance, you're probably really good with staying organized, probably really good at helping your clients stay on budget and think about cost per wear. You're probably a really good stylist for people that run more analytical. This is the kind of information that's probably keeping you feeling really burnt out in your business, because you're not including yourself in it and people can't relate to you, because you're just someone telling them about links, so then you look like everybody else or giving them style advice, but it's not connecting with you. And so they don't know why they should choose you over someone else. Because your clients care a lot. As someone that hires a lot of people, I can tell you, I'm always looking for what are the points of overlap? Have we hired the same people? Do we like the same things? Do we have, in some cases, do we have the same style? I'm not saying that's right, but I do do that with people like social media managers, or people that are doing design, right, for me. Because it's just easier when we have the same aesthetic language. That's saying your clients would be looking at that and maybe you need to speak to that in your content. But your clients care enormously. Are you a mom too? Do you know what it's like to try to go back to work after having a kid, even if you've been out of that room for a long time?

People want to know that you're not going to judge them and when you leave out your past background, because you're a perfectionist and and you're over here like apologizing for, you know, not being a quote professional enough stylist, which like I don't even know what you're talking about, this is like the wild west of a career, then you're not a doctor, you're not saving lives, you're putting people in clothes, if it doesn't work out, they can return them. Your clients care more about who you are and where you came from. So I need you to stop acting like there's a career police checking in on how many years count, or how far out of corporate you have to be, because there just isn't. You get to bring all of who you are into your marketing and your business in whatever way feels right to you. I'm not saying put your business on the internet at all. There are going to be themes of overlap that people need to know to feel a connection to you. And if you're a stylist with a background that gives you credibility, but you are coming from a place of insecurity, because you haven't done the work you need to do to understand your business, not just to have a business, you are robbing your ideal clients of that. And you're really making a very expensive mistake in your marketing.

So while you're going back to look at how often you talked about your highest ticket offer from the first thing I talked about in the audit, look at how many times you let people see any element of your life. It could be that you like to cook. It could be like, you know, reading. I can't tell you how many people reach out to me when I share what I'm reading. I also do that, because it's part of the culture I want to create. But more so than that, it's because I like talking about books with people. That's what makes social media social. Share it with them. It doesn't have to be like, if you're a french fry connoisseur, I want to see it. Like, I had a client that was really into snacking. She had a really great series on snacking. Like, it's okay. People worry about, you know, this credibility piece, but they forget the human credibility piece. And so I want you to think about how you can add that in, even if it's just an Instagram story, or in your newsletter here and there, because it's probably costing you sales that people don't know you.

Section three, are you running the 90 day diagnostic on your own marketing? So this is like the most valuable thing you can do. And you can, if you have a business account on Instagram, you can go into Instagram, download your last 90 days, or you can just go look at your last couple posts. And I just want you to look at really, really simply, as I've talked about in the other things, but like, what are people saving? What are people having conversations with you about? Not what's getting the most reach, not what are people following you from. Because Instagram, like I talked about earlier, is going to reward people for their content, for staying on the app, which is why it's a tricky place to be. Many of you have noticed that. But every day I get a little bit more engagement from people that will buy, once my offers are open, because I'm building the relationships with them in between. I'm not saying you need to use a launch model. For many of you, that doesn't make sense, because you're not booked out enough. But it's not a bad way to think about it, because it can really help you stack your clients at the beginning of a season.

But in order to do that, you need to not just go and see what got the most likes, because that is more of a result of the algorithm telling you what kept people on there, not what is showing up on your sales calls, not what people keep in. Because as I've talked about on Instagram before, the content that will get you sales, is not the content that will get you likes. It often won't get you reach either, because it's your warmest folks, which is again why that sales psychology matters. So go back and look at what topics have come up with your clients. And if you're not sure what topics have made people in your marketing hire you, that's a major systems problem, that's making your whole life harder. So go back to your last three or four clients and just send them a quick email and say, I'm just curious, I'm talking to some old clients. I'm wondering if there was anything that you saw that particular in my marketing that made you reach out. That this is where like not having systems is really, really critical and keeps a lot of stylists burnt out, because they don't know what content to repeat. But between those conversations with clients and looking back at what got saved, what created conversation, what got comments, you're going to get a better sense of what to keep repeating, which will also help with you being more effective as we get into fall, because you know, okay, this actually works.

And the fourth thing I want you to do is leave the house or get off a screen and strengthen your network. I highly recommend in person, whether you're virtual or not, because I think the internet is moving people currently to more in person, which is why it's reflected in my own business model. I don't ever tell you to do something that I don't do, but I think that a lot of stylists are paralyzed, paralyzed alone in their house, quote, marketing and they are losing their connection with other human beings, particularly, when I say it, virtual stylists. I also think that they're the people that are at the most risk, because algorithms are going to start to change the way the industry looks. And people that are burnt out from algorithms, which are going to be the people that are making the most money, are going to want more in-person, because that's how it works. Just like every trend has a backlash, there will be a backlash. So in-person will be more prized. We're already seeing this across all industries. The desire for meetups, for people being in person, for retreats, it's just, it's through the roof as social media goes down. And so I'm not saying that you can't be virtual. I think for a lot of people, they have to be at least somewhat virtual, because shopping options, but try to get as many in-person networking, you know, business connections under your belt, even if it's just other business friends, because it's going to keep you engaged with real people.

It's going to give you a checkpoint of like, you probably know more than you think you do. Go to local networking groups, go to book clubs, even things that are not business related, especially in big cities, you'll meet other entrepreneurs. I meet other entrepreneurs and stuff constantly that has nothing to do with business. But big cities have more entrepreneurs often. And so start a list of people who you know have a similar audience online or off and just start interacting with them in their content, or tell them, reply to their newsletter, tell them you like it. Ask if you can take them to a cup of coffee. Like, be a person. Have relationships. Get used to saying, I'm a stylist out loud and not feeling weird about it. I mean, that's something I wish someone told me, because there's a lot of emphasis on online marketing. But when I have conversations with stylists, what I see is the ones that are struggling the most, have lost why they're here. They forgot that we're not here for Instagram likes. I'm not saying it doesn't matter. It matters. But it's very disproportionate. Like, I go to meetups with stylists now and I hear what their concerns are and it's always their Instagram followers and their friend, or this person who's doing better and you know what what they're like to know what status is, or what their shop my status is. And who's getting… and it's like if that's what you want to do that's totally fine, but like that's not what we're here for. And the more chronically online you are, because you're comparing yourself, instead of spending more time offline, thinking through what's going to be a value, going for a walk and voice noting thoughts to yourself. Thinking about the last conversation you have with your clients, talking to other people that have your ideal clients and seeing where the overlap is and their pain points, what they come to them for, so you can do more interesting, better collaborative content, or events or whatever. That is going to change the nature of your business, because you're now not just going to be a content creator, which is what most stylists are, because they're not making sales, right? So what I want you to think about is 30 minutes having coffee with someone who could be a really great referral partner, who you genuinely like as a person, who has your same audience online or off, could make you more sales than all of the posts you're doing with high reach, because that's a one hit wonder. Relationships that are nurtured, even lightly, this is not like hard work, can really change your life.

And I think the other thing that you need to understand is that personal styling is by virtue of what it is, a high touch, high level service, meaning you may underprice yourself, but the way that the field is perceived is high ticket. And that is just the truth. So whether your price is reflected or not, the perception of the industry is that. And that has always been and always will be how very, very high end services have always run. Because people that are in those levels and these are just normal people, right? These are people that are making multiple six figures that are just like you and I, they're no different, they are more likely to be in relationships with other people that hire service providers. So they take those recommendations seriously, because they're in networks of people that actually spend money for these types of services. Trainers, private chefs, or just meal plan services. All of these things are part of when people scale up in their career and I think a lot of stylists think I'm talking to people that are like billionaires and I'm really not. There's also a ton of people making enough, or prioritizing their income in such a way that they know they have to spend money to make money and stylists are part of it. And that's really critical for you to understand. That's why you have to get into the right networks, because ultimately, a lot of stylists, as people get fatigued online, are going to see that that is one of the ways they can create cash injections pretty quickly.

Okay, so how are you going to sit down and do this? Well, first of all, you're only going to take an hour, because this might sound overwhelming. So I've walked you through the four areas. For each one, I just want you to do a quick brain dump. I want you to choose sentences of where you think you are, or what you think you see. So we'll go from the bottom up. How strong is your network? Do you have people that you feel like you either need to touch base with again, or need to find to build that network of other service providers, people that interact with your ideal client? Have you looked back at your last quarter of marketing to see what has gotten engagement? What has gotten saves what's gotten comments? What has come up on sales calls? Have you done that? If not, that's pretty important, because it's kind of a waste of time to make more marketing, if you don't know what's already working.

The next one is are you comfortable with and this is probably one that you should just journal about, are you comfortable with adding in more of your own personal story and credibility markers to strengthen your personal brand to increase your sales, okay? And then the last one we talked about was going back and looking at how often you're actually selling your offer. So pick one or two of those, not all of them and decide which of them you are going to fix this summer. Now you may end up being able to fix all of them pretty quickly, but if you just fixed one of them, or two of them, you would be in a drastically better place in September. Because I find that a lot of my clients think that if they can't get all of these things done, then they'll do none of them. And then they end up exactly where they were before. And now the pile has just gotten bigger. So I want to just break you of that thought right now, because you're going to have it. The goal is not to have a perfect business by August. This is by no means even scratching the surface of the work that needs to be done to fix, you know, a business that isn't necessarily generating sales. But all of these lead you back to the people you're here to serve. It centers them in the data. It centers them in your connections. It centers them in what they're resonating with. Not, oh, I wonder if I'm inspired today, should I create some content? No. What do they need to hear? Who do I need to connect with to influence them? How do I need to create content in the coming season so that they are with me and we're going on this ride together? What do they need to hear to feel like they can trust me? That's where most stylists go wrong.

And it's easy to do that because we're all sitting here in our houses not having any connection, but most of you got into this game, because of connection. So I want to bring you back to that North Star with these strategies. This is why you have to have this strategy, but you also have to have that creative drive and that caring about people. And I find that the more you care about other people, the better your business goes and the less this sort of comparison and perfectionism and all this kind of stuff comes up for most of my clients. That is your work, that's how you're going to get yourself on track to be playing in the arena in the fall, so that you are always clear on what your next step is to lessen those high highs and low lows in your business.

Next week is the last episode of the series and we are going to talk about what it actually looks like when you do this work in the summer. Not the vague, you'll feel so much better. It'll be crossed out on your to do list version. What your fall can actually look like, because I think a lot of stylists are not clear and I want to paint the picture for you. So 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.