PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Nicole Otchy: What if I told you that the amount of money you make in your business isn't actually a very good indicator of how successful your business is, or how experienced you are, or even how long it's going to take you to reach your next income goal? I know that sounds a bit strange, because if we're honest, income is often the scoreboard most of us use as business owners. And when working with personal stylists for years and having been one myself for 14, I've noticed something that happens when we get into this mindset over and over again. At some point, the internal conversation shifts. It goes from, I wonder why my income has plateaued, or I'm not getting the results I want, to I must be doing something wrong. Everyone else has figured this out and I haven't. And if that thinking goes on long enough, it becomes maybe this isn't possible for me, period. And the number in your bank account stops measuring your business and it starts to measure the way you value yourself, or what you think is possible. And here's why that is such a problematic thought. Income tells you where you are. It doesn't tell you why you're there. It doesn't tell you whether you plateaued, because your positioning needs work, or your styling offers aren't clear, or you're talking to the wrong people for the prices you want to charge. All that your income tells you is the outcome of a ton of choices you've made up until now. It just doesn't tell us anything about what created that outcome. And if you don't know why you're getting the results you're getting, you won't fix the right thing. At that point, all you can do is guess about what you don't know. And I actually think this becomes more damaging as stylists become more experienced and they have more years in business, because the guessing gets very expensive. They spend money on strategies they don't need, they invest time fixing problems they don't actually have and eventually they stop trusting themselves, which I think is the most expensive. And worse, they stop believing that there is a solution in the first place. And they often start convincing themselves that nobody makes six figures in this industry or that this just isn't possible.

Today, I'm going to reframe the role of income in engaging your success as a stylist and show you why it will never tell you what you actually need to know to get to your next level. 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.

It's so easy to look at your income or a slow month or a slowdown in inquiries and decide that those things are the problem. But more often than not, they are symptoms of a pattern of actions, behaviors, and systems that lead to the outcome you are seeing in your bank account. They are not the actual problem. What they're useful for is telling you something is happening, but not what's causing it. I'm going to give you an analogy that I think a lot of you will resonate with. If a client came to you and said, I want to work with you, because I hate everything in my closet. I don't like anything. You wouldn't say to her, okay, we're just going to go buy you new clothes and ask no follow up questions. You wouldn't decide that her taste changed so dramatically that shopping is the only answer. You'd ask her, why? Did her body change? Did her size change? Did her lifestyle change? Did the way she wants to show up change? Did her budget change? Saying I hate my wardrobe is just a symptom. The cause could be 10 different things. And the same thing happens in business. Income drops, you see a slowdown. Everybody reaches for the same fix. They either lower their prices, they turn up the volume on their marketing, they redo their website, they move to a new marketing platform, but they rarely stop and ask, why is this actually happening? And they rarely also ask, is the thing that I'm going to reach for actually the thing I need to work on?

Because most of the time I don't hear a stylist say, you know, my business as a whole isn't working together. They say my marketing is broken. I don't have systems. I got one bad client. So now I need to redo all of my intake. When the reality is businesses don't work that way. They work as a series of systems. So if you try to isolate one problem, but you haven't looked at how all the systems work together, you're going to, by definition, reach for the wrong problem. A lot of the time in going about looking at your business this way, because you are so fixated on income, you're going to throw away the things that are actually going well, the things that could give us the clues to what we need to fix that isn't going well. The reality is, income is easy to see. The reason behind it isn't. And that's why we keep treating the symptoms, especially in the online space, where this is incredibly pervasive, because people speak to the symptoms in their marketing. And so it's easy to think, I'm not getting a lot of leads from my email, I must need an email code. When the real issue could be that you don't know how to talk about your services in a way that makes somebody want to buy them, whether it's in an email, in a networking chat, on an elevator, or in an Instagram post.

And when you understand that there's potentially a bigger issue at play here than the mechanism through which you are presenting the message, so the platform, email, whatever and it's the way that it's being delivered, all of a sudden you're able to see the problem underneath it. You need more clarity in your offers. You need to be more bought in, potentially, in what you do. You don't see what makes you different from everyone else. So of course, writing an email or writing a social media post is going to be hard. It doesn't matter where that messaging goes. Pretty much every stylist I work with, even the ones making a lot of money and I work with plenty that are making a lot of money, think they're problems in marketing. Because in the online space, you're being marketed to constantly. So marketing becomes the easy answer. If you're not making enough money, it must mean that you're not marketing enough. I hear people say, this is a leads problem. I need to put my messaging in front of more people. So I'm going to run some ads. But the truth is that if your messaging isn't accurate for the right people in your organic social, or if you're not confident talking about your offer in the way that makes people want to buy on your Instagram stories, or you don't really like your offer, or your offer is piecemeal and confusing, or it doesn't get the attention of the people that are seeing that messaging, then an ad isn't going to convert.

And this is why when people come to me and say, I really want to work with you, but I only want to work on the marketing, or I only want to work on your systems, I say, you have to understand how businesses work. Hiring someone for a content plan or a social media strategy, when you don't have the foundation clear in your business, is not going to fix the problem. And a lot of times the real issue when I boil it down is positioning. So positioning is what comes before your marketing. And if you don't have your positioning straight, all of your marketing is going to be kind of a mess. And you're always going to feel like you're just talking to the void and nobody is listening. Stylists who've been working in isolation don't always know who they're talking to, or why what they're saying is valuable. And they're often intimidated by the people that they actually do want to talk to, the niche they actually want to go after. And they have doubts about their pricing. So they don't really talk with their full chest about the transformation they offer, because they are secretly afraid that they're charging too much, or they wonder if they're charging too little. They don't know how to put together offers that actually get people to the point of buying.

And all of this is lurking under the surface, but you think you have a marketing problem. And so you spend money trying to get a content plan, but your income doesn't move. And it's in this moment, where the damage is created, because your income hasn't moved and it's installed a belief that help doesn't work. And I'm not going to tell you that I've like never had that thought myself, or never had an outcome I wasn't excited about, after investing in something. But what I realized every single time is that believing help never works only puts you further in the hole. It's a way of protecting yourself. And the truth is, when you're a business owner, you're ultimately responsible for understanding your own business. It is not unethical of a marketing coach who doesn't know the industry but believes that, you know, her marketing approach works for everyone. It's not unethical for her to tell you that, yeah, your problem is marketing. But if you don't know the industry and you don't know, you, the business owner, don't know what people need to believe, what they need to hear, in order to trust you, what actually makes people buy personal styling services in different demographics, then that person who doesn't know your business and what you're trying to get at well enough, can't fix the fact with a marketing strategy that you also don't a hundred percent know, if your pricing is right for the industry, that you're not completely bought in on your offer, that you're not actually sure if the people that you want to help are even the kind of people that would pay for styling services.

It's not the fault of the coach in that instance. It's not that the solution that they're offering is invalid. It's that it's a mismatch, because what came before it wasn't clear. It is on all of us as business owners to know enough about our business to do that work first so that when we seek out help, we can actually understand, but we get very caught up in what level we're at, in how much money we're making relative to everybody else. And so we keep reaching for things to soothe the discomfort of that comparison and not look at the real problem. The real damage is the belief that because you aren't moving forward in your income, you're not that good at this, this isn't meant for you, you shouldn't trust anyone else in your business, that this just isn't happening in the industry, which is a whole other end of the spectrum. It's either people internalize it and they say, what am I doing wrong? What is it about me? Or they go to the other end of the spectrum and they say, yeah, I don't think anyone's making six figures in this business. This must be a marketing thing that people are saying. But there are dog walkers making multiple six figures. There are dog walkers that are millionaires. There are people doing crazier stuff than personal styling that are making six figures. So that's a cough out. We are an incredibly niche industry that a lot of people don't understand, but that doesn't mean that they're not solutions. And so when you sit with the same income, the same problem and you now have trust issues on top of it, this becomes a really expensive problem that's been misdiagnosed. This lack of belief comes from only asking why am I not making enough money and never really digging into how did I get to this amount and what is working and what's not working.

So let me give you a really good example of how this conversation actually came up recently, because I want you to hear it, so that you can catch yourself if you are thinking the same way. I was recently on a group coaching call talking with a stylist who asked me a marketing question. She said, I've been on Instagram and my reach is not very good. What other platforms should I be on? Or if it's not the platform, maybe I should be creating a different type of content. I'm making a lot of talking head videos, maybe I should be making carousels. What do you think? And her talking head reels were actually really, really good. They were well produced. She was clearly passionate. I asked her a couple questions and one of them was, has your reach been good before this? Like, when did reach become an issue? When did it slow down? And she said, actually, in the years she's been on the platform, she had never really, A) been consistent putting out reels, and she had never really gotten great reach to begin with. When she looked at her phone, the stats really weren't that different. And so, okay, fine, what platform should I be on? And so when I asked more questions, because this is like wasn't adding up to me, the reality was that she never had actually gotten clients or reach or engagement from any of her content on any platform ever. It's not that she had like zero likes. It's that it just like wasn't moving the needle forward. And if you add on to it that there was an inconsistency in her output, it's not particularly surprising that Instagram wasn't rewarding her with reach. The problem was never Instagram. A new platform isn't going to fix it. She was just going to bring the same things, the same issues to a new place and stay stuck there.

But if her content on Instagram wasn't doing its job to attract the right people, to start conversations, to help them think differently, to help them understand the cost of their problem and she had also never really mentioned her offer in her content, she was just giving advice, that whole plan that she was going to bring over to Substack was going to put her right back where she was on Instagram. The real question here wasn't, why isn't this platform working? It should have really been, why is this messaging not working? Another thing that she said here is like, I don't have enough followers. My followers aren't growing. But when I looked, she had plenty of followers to hit $100,000. I had like 500 followers when I was well into six figures in this business. If the depth of the message isn't there, people are not going to move. They're not going to like things. They're not going to watch things. They're not going to respond to things.

And so then any platform isn't going to reward you with more growth. Especially if you're positioning yourself as a higher ticket luxury provider and presenting yourself in messaging like you're the cheapest thing on the block. Because ultimately your positioning is off and that gap is going to follow you wherever you go. So spending months and sometimes a lot of money building on a new platform isn't going to help you. But what it will do is it will reinforce the belief that maybe you're just not cut out for this, because you didn't ask the right question about why the content on this platform isn't performing in the first place. Not, how do I jump ship to the next thing? And when you don't know enough about your offer and you don't know enough about who you're actually talking to, you're not going to be able to get them to buy, no matter where you are. All the messaging in the world isn't gonna fix that. It's just effort for effort's sake. So once you understand that two personal stylists, both making say $50,000 a year, can have the same bank account number and completely different problems keeping them from their next level, say 100,000, you'll start to understand why this matters.

There is so much business advice online that bails people because it's prescriptive. Do this, then do this. And I actually do believe in giving people a clear step-by-step process. But it always has to come with a diagnosis first. So programs that promise to teach you how to build a styling business, or how to make a certain amount of money, or how to grow your Instagram account, usually aren't built to help you figure out what is actually broken first and what's actually working that you can capitalize on. And so a real diagnosis takes knowing not just the industry you're trying to get ahead in, but what is already working that you may need more of and what's not working. Is it the delivery of the message? Is it the message itself? Is it the lack of belief in what you do? Is it that you've changed your prices so many times that you don't even know if the offer is worth it anymore? Is it that you never actually attracted the right client, so every time you try to talk about your offer, you doubt yourself? And who would even invest in this in the first place?

There are a thousand reasons that someone can be stuck at $50,000. And another stylist who's stuck at the same number might have problems that have nothing to do with marketing at all. She could be getting all the leads she could ever want, but her systems are so bad and her services are so convoluted and they take so long that it's slowing her ability to take on more clients. Another one might be undervaluing what she does, because she's afraid that if she raises her prices, nobody where she lives will hire her. Everything can look fine on paper, but there's this deeper mindset issue underneath it that needs to be solved by raising her prices, doing the thing and realizing that it's not going to be the end of the world. Somebody will buy. And so once you know what is broken, the fix is going to look different. The strategy will change. It's not that each way that we address these things is reinventing the wheel. Like if I find out that somebody has a positioning problem, I address the positioning problem in the same way. But not everybody stuck at a certain place or not everybody failing to grow on Instagram is having those problems for the same reason. Once you understand that everybody comes to business with different strengths, weaknesses, beliefs, business education, you can understand that of course two people making the same amount of money and having the same symptom may need a different strategy to fix it, because they're not the same person taking the same actions, even if their bank account is the same.

I want to tell you something else. I once made a reel about looking at my own numbers or failing to do that, when I was a stylist, because I was afraid that if I did, I would feel emotionally overwhelmed, back, a long time ago. And that it would make me feel so insecure and so bad. And what I realized once I actually started looking at that is that I had been choosing to feel bad over and over again, instead of actually getting over it. And for a lot of us, right, when we get obsessed with what other people are doing or comparing ourselves, you have to really look at, are you doing that? Because fixing what's actually broken can actually feel scarier than not fixing it. Because we carry this belief that getting better or doing better is going to cost us something that matters. And this is a conversation for another day, but it's worth naming here, because this is exactly why diagnosis before fixing things, matter so much, especially when I'm dealing with people that have a lot of mindset stuff. Because they don't often realize that it's mindset stuff. It’s often the people that go after mindset stuff that have the most strategic issues in their business, if I'm honest. It's not often the case that people that are constantly buying new marketing programs and doing another template realize that they have a mindset problem, if I'm just being honest.

When someone asks me how long it will take them to hit six figures in their business or multiple six figures and I just met them, or just started talking and I don't know enough about their business, I tell them the truth. I don't know. Because I don't know exactly why you're stuck where you are. And I also don't know what belief might be holding you back from the outcome, until I find that piece too. And so once you get to the bottom of both of those things, you can actually move forward. And once you become someone willing to look at and diagnose real issues, it comes with a level of trust in yourself that no one can ever take away from you. And when you become someone who always trusts themselves to find the solution, you become someone that gets to the next level faster. You get more comfortable doing the honest thing in your business, when you realize that you have to diagnose things first. And the timelines that we're so afraid about taking forever collapse, because you know that you're looking for the next right thing, not just to do anything to spin your wheels.

And I think this is something that's very, very important the longer you've been in business. Because someone who commits to fixing what's actually broken, instead of sticking their head in the sand, is always going to win. Because that's what actually serves you best. It's going to always serve your clients best. And it's the only honest way forward. So, if you're at a point in your business where most of what you tried feels like it wasn't worth the investment, I want to remind you of something. It's probably because the solutions you were chasing weren't aimed at fixing the right thing in your business. And maybe the reason you've been working so hard, without seeing the results you want, isn't because you personally are missing something. It's because you've been trying to solve a problem you don't have. And we need to figure out what that actually is. That is not a personal issue. That's a business problem. And that's good news, because those are fixable. 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.