PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Nicole Otchy: There's a version of success in the fall, or at any time in your business, but fall is when most stylists are looking for that dramatic uptick that we don't hear a lot about in the industry, because it's often not big enough really to post about. It's not a big six-figure reveal. It's not that your content went viral or you landed a great press placement and now your business is in a new place. That's sort of this like Cinderella version of business success that I think a lot of us think we need, to get to the next level. It's just a stylist who walks into fall knowing what she is selling, why her marketing is working and what to do each day, to move the business closer to her bigger dreams. That's what this episode is about. It is the last in our four-part summer series and I want to give you a realistic and honest look at what the beginning of having a successful business actually looks like, when you have been in a season of struggle.

So let's get into it. 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 standard in the 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.

So I want to talk about what this vision isn't first. If you caught last week's episode in the series, you heard me walk you through a four area audit to run on your business before fall gets here. To be clear, you can do this at any time. I'm releasing this in the summer, but this is a great thing to do quarterly. If you didn't listen to it, go back, definitely take a listen, it will be worth your time. But either way, I want to be clear about something before we dive into the meat of this episode. The audit is not a business overhaul, it is a diagnostic. It gives you a few specific things to fix that actually move the business forward, when you have time and the bandwidth to fix them. These are hard things to fix in your business when you are, you know, filled to the brim with clients, when you are feeling like you don't have any gas in the tank. So I want to paint a picture of what focusing on even just two of the areas that we went over in the audit, will mean for you come the fall.

The first is that when your offer is clear, your marketing gets easier. If you spend any part of the upcoming summer committing to one offer, as I highly recommended and focusing your marketing on it, something will shift after 60 or 90 days of sticking with it. Most people will not stick with it. I'm just going to say that. But if you can deal with the discomfort of having to talk about the same thing, having to, you know, create content around it a few times a week, you will inevitably get better, across every part of your business. Because when you sit down to write content, you will be forced to know who you are actually talking to. You can't start with yourself and think about what inspires you. You're not quietly trying to serve three different buyers, because you have all these other offers and you don't even know where to start, when you post.

When you start to get traction in your marketing and people start reaching out, you will know that they are inquiring, because your marketing has been saying the same thing consistently for two months, three months. And when you get on sales calls with people who see this marketing, the calls start differently. You are not convincing them that this is something they should invest in. They are just on the call, as most of my clients talk about, after they sort of work with me for a while and they use the content method I teach. They're shocked to see how much of the calls are just logistics. It's not even about, I can't afford this, or I can't afford this, or I'm not really sure. It's like, when can you start and give me a quick overview of the process, so I know that I have the time in my life. It's not about people being sold. It's about people just needing to figure out the details. And so that doesn't always feel dramatic, right? And to the point where I noticed that a lot of my clients, when we work on this, when they get on a call with me, you know, a week or two later, after they've signed a client, they like forget. Even if they came to me saying, no one will ever pay these prices. When you start to get in the groove and you start to believe you're an expert and you start to have services that actually reflect what you're excited about and you talk to the people you actually want to talk to, it feels like relief. It doesn't feel like, oh my God, I'm successful.

And I think that's where a lot of stylists lose steam, is they're waiting for this feeling of legitimacy that isn't coming. It's just over time, you realize you're better than you were before and then that becomes your new norm. And I want you to slow down for a second, when and if, you choose to do this, because if you do this audit and you really do start to look at your marketing and your messaging and only talking about, you know, one offer and getting good at it and then you start to see traction, it's really easy to like blow right past it. Because we're usually looking for the next thing to fix, especially the women I work with. They're driven, they're highly sensitive, they tend to like want to do the best for other people, right? They have a lot of integrity. But you have to remember that the relief you feel from your wins, even the ones that aren't flashy and aren't super public, is actually data. And it means something is working. And I say this, because I feel like a lot of people that I work with, they tend to focus on what's not working more than what is. And that just doesn't help you ever feel like you arrived. That's not how you get to expert status in your own mind, let alone externally.

Which brings me to the next thing. When your credibility is visible, the right people start to notice. If you went back and you decided to focus on the part of the audit, where you're putting your background into your marketing, the quality of your inquiries, the quality of the conversations you will even be having on social media, or in your inbox, when people reply to your newsletter, will start to shift, before the volume does. I want you to hear that again. The quality of inquiries shift before the volume does, when you are adding your credibility into your marketing. Because what we talked about last episode was that when you actually put in your background, the things that make you unique, people will start to reach out faster. And that matters more than a lot of stylists realize, because what they're looking for is something too dramatic. And so they don't understand that if you have 40 people on Instagram, for example, or on TikTok, or anywhere really, who have been watching your content regularly, opening your posts and none of them have converted, you are potentially sitting on a significant amount of revenue, but worrying about the wrong metrics, which is then pushing that revenue away.

The answer is almost never more content. It is clearer content. It's content that actually says who you are and who you are for. One of the most surprising pieces of coaching that I give a lot of my clients is, I need you to post less and I need you to post better, because people that are serious buyers don't need you to post every single day. Neither does the algorithm, by the way. It needs you to post things that people actually care about, that people actually sit with. And it may not be that they like it, but that they keep going through that carousel. They hit save, they send it to themselves, right? Those are the things that are quiet indicators that people are paying attention. Yesterday, I was talking to one of my one-to-one clients, who has gone through a period where she just felt like, I don't know after 10 years if I can keep this up anymore, because her results were so inconsistent. And so we haven't even gotten to our marketing call yet, but I tend to be someone that weaves marketing into everything that I do with clients, either in my programs or my one-to-one. And she finally got an inquiry on her website from someone she had never met. A lot of the inquiry she was getting was from, you know, word of mouth, or referrals, or people that she had already worked with. And the woman who reached out, wrote paragraphs in her contact form saying that she had lost herself after a recent death in the family. And just reading through her website, reading through her content that we had just redone, made her feel like the stylist actually got her. And here's the thing, this client was not posting more. I would say she was getting back into a more regular rhythm, but we're not talking like, you know, four or five posts a week. At most she was doing two and starting to show up on stories and starting to share her background, starting to share who she was, some behind the scenes of her as a mom, what she stood for, her values, her background, some humor that I really enjoyed seeing. But she wasn't posting like more or even a lot. And she just really got clearer on who she was here for. We reconnected her to her joy, which I would like to just add is really hard to do, when you're in a slow period.

And so the better you can get at these exercises that I gave you in the audit, the faster you'll be able to do that. And so the posts she put out were not like a ton more since our work together, but they actually mattered when the right person came across them. That's what I mean, when I say the quality will shift, before the numbers do. Even if this person never works with her, that inquiry form made that person feel so seen that it reinvigorated what my client understood about her purpose in this business. And that is such a gift, whether somebody hires you or not. And as someone that has the pleasure of getting emails and getting DMs, where people tell me how big of an impact the content I put out has made, I can tell you that can get you really far. So while I'm not here to say that your content shouldn't make you money, I want to remind you that it can also do so much more than we give it credit for, in terms of touching other human beings. And when you start to look at your content like that, when you give people things to connect to, because you're putting your credibility and your humanity into your content versus just like checking off boxes, you will see that, again, the right people start to find you.

It's not like this deluge, but most stylists I work with don't have business models that could support a deluge of new clients. So that's the good news, right? We don't want you being afraid of success. We want it to feel safe and comfortable, like you're in a relationship with someone who you know you can trust. That's what it should feel like. I think everyone's waiting to be like Emma Greed or something. Like Emma Greed didn't wake up as Emma Greed, right? You have to build the muscle of being able to handle that kind of success. So again, if 40 people who are not your friends and family are following you right now on social media and they got hooked into your content for the next 90 days, you could be sitting on a lot. I mean, tens and tens of thousands of dollars, because you actually focused in on what mattered to them.

If you did the audit and fall came around and you actually are someone that sat down and looked at your data, you would be someone in the fall that stopped guessing about what is going to make a difference in their business. So if you ran the 90-day diagnostic in your marketing that I talked about, you would be going into September with something most stylists don't know, or when they know it, quickly forget, because it's uncomfortable. What is actually working and what is not working? You won't be inventing content from scratch every week, if you can just stick with looking at the data from 90 days ago. You would know which posts are generating conversations and which ones are not getting anyone to speak up or to come forward. You'd know what content to repeat and what to stop spending your time on. And that would mean that when you sat down to market, you would feel sharper, clearer and you would actually be projecting a sense of expertise and authority, because you would know, okay, I know when I say this, people respond. Not what I think people want to hear, what I know people want to hear. That's a lot of clarity and a lot of pieces of comfort and stillness and not spinning your wheels and franticness that I think an audit can give you. And one of the things I noticed, and the reason why I decided to go forward with this series with an audit versus something else, is because the thing that most people are very uncomfortable with doing is looking at the facts of their business.

And, you know, there's a lot of like mindset stuff in the styling world, in the coaching world and I'm not saying I don't believe in it, but one thing I do believe is that if you don't look at reality, you'll choose the wrong mindset issue to focus on. And what an audit does is it means you will have to honestly look at what it's going to take for you to get to the next level. Because you'll have to look at what's working and what's not. And then you'll also have information not just about what's not working, which is what I think a lot of stylists focus on. They don't want to hurt their own feelings. But the flip side is you also get the leverage and the ease that comes with looking at the data, looking at reality, because some things are probably working, if you're a working stylist. And because you're not slowing down enough to pay attention to them and you're just often adding in, like I have all these clients that are like, adding in more substack, adding in another social media. Now they're going to add in threats, then they're going to… but they don't even know what's working on their Instagram account that they've had for three years. That, if you're more willing to add something in, then you are to look at what's actually working and not working in your business. You're not trying to run a business, you're trying to avoid your feelings.

And you're basically at a point where you're in a codependent relationship with your business, because you're trying to feel successful, without doing what it actually takes to be successful. And the reality is it will also make your life easier, because now you don't have to guess anymore. You need, you know, 60 or 90 days of putting a bunch of different types of content out there and seeing what works. And then you get the ease of knowing what does. Like I just signed a new social media manager and she's like, oh my gosh, you have so much information about what actually works. It's like, yeah, because I'm not out here like wasting people's time, right? And so that is all true. If you're willing to do that, it will also just make you a better business person. You will feel more legit, when you do this, because you'll also see all the things you're good at. But there's a whole other side of this that isn't going to change. And I'm not going to lie to you. And I don't want to skip over it, because it matters as much as everything else.

One thing that's not going to change from doing a summer audit is your pricing. And the gap between what you charge and what you feel you are worthy of. usually doesn't have to do with confidence, when I'm talking to an established stylist. I know it feels that way, but hear me out. It has everything to do with who you are actually here for. And when you are trying to serve everyone, which is a super normal and common impulse, when you first get started, because you're like, I am just happy to be here, right? The number that you charge, often doesn't really feel anchored to anything. Most stylists are charging what they think they can get. But it's really hard to believe in a price and in the value of the price, meaning like what the intangible parts of the service are that people get from their experience with you, when you can't picture the specific person that it is built for. And what the audit can do is show you where that gap is, what the person that you want to be working with, what resonates with them, how they think. Because when you look back at the content that you've created and you've seen what has sparked sales conversations of what has gotten people to reach out to you, or what people have referenced back to, you get a picture of what matters to them, versus what you think matters.

That gap between how you think about your pricing and your service and what people tell you resonates with them, that closes in your own mind, as your marketing gets better, because you begin to understand in a very specific way, what people are actually wanting from your service, because of your messaging. This is why I tell people all the time, when they ask me, like, how long are we going to work on messaging and how long are we going to work on marketing and your programs? It's like every single day you're working on your messaging, if you are truly transformational, because your business plan, your pricing, the way you talk to clients, the way you move in the world, the things you believe about styling, all of it is connected. They're not separate, right? And when you get that, all of a sudden, you don't have to sit down and make up content. It just flows, because you understand what the people that you want to serve most, are looking for. And your messaging is the first signal of that. And so then that can inform how you think about positioning your services and how you write those offers. And it all goes together. It's always this like back and forth relationship. It's not pricing over here, services over here, marketing over here. That's why it feels so hard to be in your business. Because like, how could you keep all of those things in your head, if there was no connection between them? And if that feels hard for you, of course, it feels hard for people that don't know anything about personal styling, right? But know they have a problem.

And so I want to just share that, that like the next question I often get ,after I help people through this thought process is like, what about my services? What about that? But like doing the… spending the time and really getting good and noticing and becoming like studying the people that you want to work with and listening to how they talk and listening to what they tell you they want. Not what they say they want, not when they say I want to be pulled together, like what they actually want. The thing they actually tell you once you're in their closet edit, right? The thing they tell you after the fact. That is what you need to speak to in your content. And the better you get at listening for that ,in that time and having conversations, whether or not it's with people that will hire you or not, to have conversations with anybody in your demographic, ask them questions, find out how they think and then put it in your content. And as you do that, something else is going to happen that I want to talk to you about. Because this kind of may sound on left field, but it's all connected.

When I'm talking to established stylists, one of the things that comes up at this point, too, is, okay, but how do I get more repeat clients? And the answer is, how you talk to people up front, impacts what happens down the line. And when you start to get people in your content, the way that I just spoke about it, they become lifers. And I can say that as someone that has a very high repeat client rate and has had it in both businesses. And it's not because I'm doing extra marketing to my clients. It's because they listen to this podcast, which is the best compliment anyone can ever give me. Yeah, sure, lots of people can tell me they like my content. But when an established client of mine tells me that they listened to the podcast and it felt like I was talking to them, I know that I am on the right path, because truly transformational marketing grows with people, right? Because we're very multifaceted. People always have stuff going on and the message will hit you at different times, depending on what's going on, which is why you really need to think about, do I need new things to say or do I need to say the same things differently?

Because what happens when you start to get good at the main messages that your audience needs to hear, is that your repeat clients start to come back more, because they're also like taken in by your content, because you're not selling the service, you're selling the possibility, right? And like the growth that is important in transformational work, whether it be coaching, whether it be styling, whether it be like, there's tons of ways to be transformational. It's a modality. It's not like the main event, right? It's a way of working in any particular expertise area. And so when you understand that your established clients will also come through this content, you can evolve your content sort of into levels. The same opening problem may look differently once a client understands how their style is expressed and what it looks like season to season, right? And they'll come back. It's a cycle. It's not like you start marketing up front and you've had no leads and then one day all of a sudden you have this high repeat rate. It takes a while. Sometimes it can take a year or two years, because people need new clothes. They need to have those sales triggers to say, okay, yeah, now I really do need to spend this money again.

And your content can continue to do that. So when I say that this is worth doing, all these parts of the audit, I really mean it. Because it's not like, oh, you sell in the back end to establish clients. I mean, you can, for sure. I certainly teach my clients how to do it. But nine times out of 10, I'm not almost ever, a few times a year, I'll have a little offer that I give to my established clients, but I have a really high repeat rate, but I'm just marketing to everyone, because I think the conversations are universal. And I want to add that in, because a lot of people don't realize that they're just not staying visible long enough and deepening the conversation long enough for past clients to hear that and then come back. I want to just add that in, that there's like a bigger overall strategy here for the health of your business, which is why I think that taking the time to do an audit in summer before you go into fall is just so valuable.

And last, I just want to close with when you are working on your business instead of in it, which is what an audit does, you will go into the fall, feeling like you have put down things that were kind of in the background, like having all the tabs open. And so you feel a little fuzzy, but you can't exactly put your finger on why. The issue is that when you have to really drill down to the things that matter, which is what the audit makes you do, you will leave behind the things you were never fully committed to in your business, which drain you in ways you don't even realize. Like, you know, having a million offers on your website, but never being sure if you should sell them, or how to talk about them, or how to differentiate them on a sales call. You know, having all this marketing data that you download, but you never look at or do anything with. It's not that summer is necessarily the best time to look at it. I think you should look at it whenever you can. But there is a feeling in fall of like new beginnings for your clients and for you. And I want you to capitalize on that. I want you to feel like you're taking your wins with you and you're leaving behind the things that aren't really doing you any good and are just kind of open tabs in your brain. So doing this work is going to help you put something down. Maybe it's going to help you put a few things down and that will change the quality of how you walk into, what could be your best fall yet? Not because you did it perfectly, but because you did it consistently and there is a lot to be said for walking into a new season, feeling more in control of your business and its future. 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.