PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Nicole Otchy: What if you actually have enough people in your world right now to build the business you say you want to six or multiple six figures or beyond, but you have no idea how to tell? Because there comes a point in your business where knowing more isn't necessarily going to help you. You know how to do the work of personal styling if you are in this camp. You have worked with clients who are strangers, who have paid you, you have an idea of who your ideal client is, and you have made money from those people.

You’re marketing and probably have an email list. You have past clients who rave about you; you've probably gotten referrals. And yet, every time revenue gets quiet, you start looking for something new to fix. You're wondering if you need more followers, to run ads, a different offer, is it your pricing? And you can spend an entire year doing that without actually ever figuring out why your income isn't consistent. So today I want to show you what I actually mean when I talk about looking at your styling business as an ecosystem. I want to show you a peek behind the curtain of how I think and how I coach my clients.

So I'm going to do that by talking you through the business of a completely fictional stylist who is sort of a mashup of a lot of stylists I have worked with over the years. We're going to call her Sarah. I want you to listen to this like you're sitting in a coaching session with me because I'm going to show you what I would actually be looking at before I told her what to change and exactly what I would have her focus on, if this scenario sounds familiar to you.

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 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.

So back to Sarah, she's been in business for about three years, and she's worked with more than 25 paying clients during that time. She has had enough experience with different people to know who she really likes to work with. They're generally between 35 and 55 working professionals. She offers both virtual and in-person styling, though she definitely prefers in-person over the others. But if it's the right client, she'll do virtual. She sometimes wonders if her systems for virtual are set up right, but we'll deal with that another day, she tells herself.

In her career, she has made between $30,000 and $70,000 a year total. That is not her take-home, that is what she's made all in. Some years she has made less than $70,000 after hitting $70,000, and some years she has stayed around that $70,000 mark. And this is where things start to get very frustrating for her because she knows she's capable of making real money. She's done it before. The problem is she doesn't know why it happens when it happens.

She tends to have these spikes in the fall and in the spring, and then things go quiet, right? She gets referrals, but they're not consistent, and she can't quite tell what triggered that client or that friend to refer her. She has clients who she really hopes will come back because she's really sure they had a great experience, but she doesn't really follow up with them because if they wanted to, they would, right? If they wanted to talk to her, if they wanted to find out how they could work with her again, they would do that. After all, they reached out the first time, right? She markets on Instagram, but often falls off when she feels uninspired and has to get back on the horse week after week.

So she'll have a week where she's really into it, and she's posting, and she's showing up, and she's really thinking about her business in this creative and interesting way. And then she'll have a week where she doesn't feel like doing any of it, which is super normal. Every week, she dreads most, she tells me, looking at her to-do list because she knows she's supposed to be posting something and growing her audience, but she doesn't know what to say.

And then there's the numbers. So many numbers. Every time she looks at the numbers, she doesn't feel so great about them. Sometimes those numbers are in her bank account. Sometimes it's the numbers of her Instagram followers, which at the time of this conversation is 897. And see, the problem is 897 doesn't feel like enough to Sarah.

She looks at stylists with thousands or tens of thousands of followers and thinks, that's why they're making more money than I am. But when we actually look at her followers, fewer than a hundred of them are people from her personal life, which means the majority of them are strangers. And when I really take a look and dig in, they're all pretty much women in that age range that she really enjoys working with.

So at first glance, you can never know for sure. They are broadly in the market she wants to work with. She also has 250 people on her email list. She has no idea really how they got there. She thinks it's through her LinkedIn bio. She doesn't really remember. About 30 of these people, when we look, are friends and family who have subscribed when she first got started, but the rest are people she's collected along the way. She doesn't even have the email of all her established clients in there. And that's something we flag to work on.

Her stories on Instagram get somewhere between 50 and 150 views on a given day. And she has no idea what makes somebody watch the story or what makes those numbers go up versus other days when they're down. And so when she looks at this whole picture, her first and immediate thing that always gets on that to-do list she's dreading is to grow her audience. And this is where I slow her down. Because I'm not interested in whether she thinks 897 followers sounds like a lot. I'm interested in who these people are and how they are interacting with her.

Because the truth is, and I'm going to remind you of this too, no matter what your follower count is, if you put 897 people in a room and fewer than 100 of them were people you already knew, that is a very different situation than it is when you're just looking at numbers on Instagram. If you had to work with or sell yourself to 897 people instead of just thinking you're collecting followers, you would act differently. And this is such a common conversation I have with clients.

And usually I have it more than once, honestly, because we are brainwashed into believing that followers equal revenue. Stylists look at somebody else's audience and assume that reach is dollars and that that stylist must be making so much money. But that's not how it works.

In my career over the last almost 20 years as a stylist and then in this company, I have never had a massive following. I don't have anything against having a massive following. I just know that it has nothing to do with how much money you earn. I have made significantly more money than people with audiences 100 times larger than mine that I have worked with. So I'm not going to automatically decide that Sarah needs to get more followers in her case. Here's where I would, though.

I'm just going to add this as a caveat. If she had grown her following, say, when she was working with male clients, but now she only wants to work with women or she had a local audience in, say, Virginia and then she moved to Kansas, I would say, Okay, we do have to go and look at that because she only really wants to work in person and we built our audience in a different complete market or gender or whatever. That is a valid strategy to pursue.

In a minute, I'm going to get into the numbers that Sarah needs, I’m just going to explain to you why this following issue is ridiculous. And since it's not the case that we need her to grow her following immediately, not saying she couldn't do that if she had the time or if she had the inclination, but right now she's pretty frustrated with her marketing. I'm going to ask what is happening and how are the people who are already following her or subscribed or in her orbit, how are they acting? Because if I can see that there is a legitimate potential client roster on her follower list, which it looks like there is, the question becomes totally different.

Why aren't more of them buying? More stylists that I want to admit look for how to grow an audience before they look at relating to in a different way or analyzing how their current audience is looking. And why is that the case? Well, often because it's easier to blame the algorithm and try to play that game than to try to take responsibility for the fact that you're posting, but it's not going anywhere. And honestly, most of my clients and former me didn't even know what would matter anyways.

So you just think it's a numbers game. I need to just keep moving the bigger, the better, but that doesn't work that way. And so I don't mean what is she doing wrong? I mean, what is happening between somebody finding her and somebody deciding to hire her? So that's where I start looking as a business consultant and coach.

And then I look at her Instagram stories and she tells me that one day she gets 150 people, some days she gets 40, other days it looks like nobody ever even saw it and there's 15. She has no idea why. Okay, well, that's an issue we can solve here because we can go back and look at the data and we can see when were her numbers the highest, what topics was she looking at, et cetera.

So we can try to figure out what gets people to move. She knows the number is changing, but she doesn't know what creates the change. And that will seem like a big mystery the longer that you don't know how to intentionally create engagement, what gets people into conversations in your DMs that have nothing to do with sales, how to warm people up to a sale. And this is where you start to see the difference between having information about your business and actually understanding your business. Because this client, Sarah, has a lot of information everywhere. She has follower numbers, she has story views, she has likes, she has clients, she has referrals, she has revenue spikes and then plateaus.

But she doesn't know how those things relate to each other. And then we get to her clients. And this is where I start asking Sarah questions that have nothing to do with her marketing.

Tell me about the clients you've loved working with, not just what age were they, what did they do for work, how many kids did they have? That's fine. You can tell me that. But tell me what made them good clients to you. Who did you feel trusted you from the start? Who communicated well? Who didn't question your rates or what was going on in their life at that time? Who made you feel valued for your expertise and what you were doing? Who did you finish working with and think, I could take a thousand more of them? Because that information is gold.

You can have a quote, ideal client on paper and still not understand the people you actually want to build your business around. And once we started talking about those client details, we'll start to see some patterns, what makes them buy, what they value by what they value in her. We can see what's happening in their lives when they decide that they need to have a stylist and this investment is worth it.

We can see what made them trust Sarah. And then I'm going to ask her this question once we suss all of that out. How many clients have you worked with who actually looked like this ideal client? Because when she slows down, she discovers that she has already worked with a handful of exactly these kinds of people that she wants more of.

And as soon as we shift our attention to being curious and excited about those people, instead of who's not here, who's not at the party, we get more of them. So we're mapping all of this out together, and I want to understand what she's doing with people once they have signed with her as clients. So we're going to take a look at her revenue goals relative to her offers. She tells me that she wants to make next year $125,000 total, not take home. Okay. So we're going to do some very basic math.

If she needs roughly 38 paying clients over the course of a year, which is way less than most stylists think when they're looking at their Instagram numbers and feel like they have to have millions of followers, she's looking at an average client value of around $3,300. And so that's a very different business from one where she's trying to sell $1,500 services to as many people as possible and be booked and busy all the time. And so suddenly, when Sarah and I do the math, she doesn't really care as much in terms of her to-do list, about having only 897 followers when she's worked with less than 50 of those people.

Because the reality is she doesn't need to sell to 10,000 people to make the kind of money she wants. We need to think about how we can create 38 clients. They can be new, or they can be overall, the longer client lifecycle with her established clients, meaning they come in maybe at a $1,500 rate, but then they go into her established client menu, and over the course of a year, they equal $3,300 each, meaning she doesn't even need 38 new clients. She may only need 28, and she has 10 established clients who will come back. You can never know the exact numbers, but this is where a lot of stylists don't understand that not only are the numbers usually lower than they need to be if their pricing is right. So the social media issue is just a distraction. But on top of that, if you have a good repeat client rate because you're marketing to the right people, so you understand who to market to so that they stay with you longer, you don't have to do as much selling upfront because you have those people in your stable.

That's the business that she actually wants to build because she can see how the business she has now, where she's constantly chasing numbers without any foundation in reality, is exhausting her. She doesn't need a client base with hundreds of people that warrants her putting her blood, sweat, and tears into a larger IG following. Again, if it happens, great, but that's not what we need to do immediately to fix these plateaus.

And so we got to look at getting the people that are there to move, the people that are following her now, because if they're following her or they opted into an email list, there is a reason, and she was doing something right. And this is something that we can often forget because we feel out of control in our business, but those are feelings, not facts. So now we've established how many clients she needs, and her resting heart rate has gone down dramatically. This is good.

Now it's about how we can get them and how we can turn them into repeat clients. So let's look at what she's going to sell. What are her services, and why are they structured that way? This conversation alone changes a stylist’s life because they often have no idea, and it's really hard to sell things that you don't understand. So does it make sense for the people she says that she wants to work with? What did those people hire her for? What service does she sell to them the most? Does the price make sense for the transformation she is offering to that person? Does her customer and client experience support the price? Does the way she's talking about those offers on social, if she's talking about them at all, make the right people feel immediately understood and think, oh my gosh, she is talking to me, is she in my head? Those questions matter a hell of a lot more when you're an established stylist than whether your reel got 27 likes and why your views are tanking.

This is why I know established stylists get stuck because I have been there. You're not a beginner anymore, and that's actually a bit of a problem because now you know that there are things to improve. You know your pricing could be better. You know that your marketing is inconsistent. You know that you should be following up with your clients, but you don't know which of those things matter first. But that doesn't mean you know what needs to happen first.

And so this is where a lot of people start changing everything, or they go into overwhelm for a period of time, and then they have to motivate themselves out of it because they're shut down only to be faced with the same issues all over again they need to fix. But then we have a plot twist, right? Sarah knows all this stuff, but then her revenue goes up in the fall. All of a sudden, there's a client increase and sales calls on her calendar, and she thinks, oh my gosh, thank God, fall is here. I'm busy again. But again, she doesn't know why fall is busy. And while she knows some of these things need to be worked on, she hasn't decided yet which of those things she's going to work on.

So she gets busy in the fall, she puts her head down, she stops marketing, and then her revenue is down in January. And she thinks January is always slow because people have spent all of their money. But the truth is, that's not how everybody lives. That might be how Sarah's family and friends live, but there are plenty of people who have plenty of money and plenty of things to do after Christmas or after the holidays or after New Year's that they need to get dressed for. And so that's her projecting her life experience onto her clients and not the reality. Then she gets a post that goes viral, and she thinks, this is what my audience wants.

So she does another post on the same topic, and it gets 15 likes, and she thinks, oh no, nobody wants to hear what I have to say. And even though she had a great fall, even though things have picked up, she hasn't really gone back to dig into how she's going to fix those services or change her prices because people were signing in the fall; she doesn't want to mess that up. She doesn't respond to the clients she had in the fall to follow up.

She doesn't really put herself out there anymore because she assumes that her marketing isn't working, people don't really want to work with her because if they wanted to, they would, right? They'd have reached out. And this is where the problem starts to snowball. Without understanding what she needs to focus on next to actually drive this business forward and making the time to do it, she will move according to her feelings, which aren't facts, and build a business on reactions, not reality.

And I am not saying that as an insult. I lived this for seven years. You are a human being running a business. Of course, you're going to have feelings about what's happening. You better - you should care about this. So I don't find that to be the problem. But if you don't have a way to separate your feelings from the information your business is actually giving you, your feelings will drive the business. And then your behavior will become inconsistent. And then your income and your revenue will become inconsistent.

And then you're going to wonder, is anyone actually making the kind of money that people like Nicole on her podcast are claiming they do in the industry? And the answer is they do. It's not as many as I would like, if I'm being honest with you, but they aren't moving the way Sarah is at this stage of her business. They're not putting their head in the sand because a few more inquiries coming in the fall and forgetting what it was like the months before.

It's not that people who don't have this issue anymore don't have big feelings about their business or get disappointed or feel overwhelmed. New level, new devil - that doesn't go away after all these years of business, I can assure you. It's that they don't make the mistake of thinking those things are data points that they need to act on.

Because if you market when you feel good, and you stop when you feel discouraged, if you only reach out to follow up with people when you feel confident, and you don't reach out when you're worried that somebody didn't like you because you suggested ruffles on a top, you are not running a business. You are letting your business run you. And if you keep going every three to four months saying, I don't understand why nothing is working, but you haven't actually tried to solve these problems or understand what these numbers mean, is it really a surprise? And here's the thing that so many people that I have worked with who have never reached out for help or have this view that they should be beyond this, no matter how much money they make.

I see this at a lot of different levels. I see people at $70,000 thinking that. I have people at $30,000. I have people at multiple six figures thinking, I should figure this out. Is that what they don't understand fundamentally? No matter how much money they're making, when they're stuck, what you did three months ago is what is creating the results you're looking at today. And this is always going to be true in business.

And so you don't get to put something out on the market today and know tomorrow whether it worked. Nobody is hiring a high-ticket business owner that they actually need to trust and believe in after one post. Someone might buy like a $9.99 PDF, but you have to stay in the game long enough to actually collect information.

And this is where things get really tricky for my client, Sarah, because I can tell her you need to market consistently for the next 90 days and she can nod her head, and she can agree, and she can understand what I'm saying completely. And then day 17 happens, and she put something out that she thought was really good, and she worked really hard, and then only 10 people liked it. So I tell her, go back to that post and tell me how many people saved it. 35 people saved it. That tells us something. That tells us something she may not have known if she hadn't reached out to me.

Something really key. That when your saves are higher than your likes, the lurkers are lurking, and high-ticket buyers tend to be big lurkers. So instead of doing less of that topic like she would have done because she was so disappointed that she put her blood, sweat, and tears into the post and only got a few likes, I'm going to tell her to do a few IG stories with a different CTA and change the wording a little bit based on our work together in her marketing plan.

And we're going to see if that generates conversations because a lot of people right now don't want to be seen liking certain content that shows people you have a problem because, unfortunately, social media now shows people what you like but doesn't show people what you save. This is the perfect example of where on day 17, if she was following a plan without any coaching, and any framework, and any sort of support, she would have folded. She would have taken that information to mean the wrong thing when actually what she needed to do was adjust and test it before we made any decisions. Sometimes we need to just go for a walk and not make every post a big deal or every unreplied email an indictment of our worth.

And sometimes we need to change the strategy. But that's why there are people like me. That's why I do what I do, because I don't want people like Sarah making that decision because she woke up anxious on a Tuesday and mad because she got 10 likes on a post she spent four hours on. This is the part of coaching and consulting that can be very difficult to explain if you have never invested in something like this before or you've had a bad experience. Because the valuable part of the offers that I have specifically created isn't that I tell Sarah to market. She already knows that at her stage of business.

I don't work with clients that are established that don't know that. The valuable part is that when she starts spiraling, I can look at what actually is happening with her business specifically and help her as an individual figure out whether the thing she's reacting to actually means what she thinks it means. Because a lot of stylists are actually trying to fix themselves so that they can become more consistent.

But I don't think that's the goal. I think the more realistic pattern here isn't to try to become a new person so you can post on Instagram and get success. It's to understand your patterns.

I want you to be able to recognize, oh, this is that thing I always do. Here we go again. Here my brain goes again. I always decide that a quiet month means my business isn't working. I always compare myself to somebody with a bigger audience. I always want to change my offer when I haven't actually given the current one enough time to collect data.

And once you see that pattern, you can actually do something differently. You don't have to change yourself. The thought doesn't mean that you're going to act on it, but you have to catch the thought and you have to catch, oh, this is me doing that thing I do again that's not helpful. And once you see the pattern, you actually have a shot at going where you want to go. It's not as big of a deal as changing yourself. Because yeah, maybe that person doesn't like you and that's why they didn't reply to your email.

Maybe they're going to say no about working with you next season. Maybe that post just wasn't that good. Fine. But none of those things mean anything about you. You can take action and see what happens despite those things. And you can take action despite those things and eventually get someone to say yes to you or get a client from Instagram even if you never have before.

And that's how you start building trust with yourself. That's the thing that Sarah was most lacking in order to get to her goals. Now by convincing herself that everything is going to work out, not some kind of toxic positivity, but by having enough evidence that you don't have to blow up the plan every time something feels a little uncomfortable.

And that is why I don't want this episode to end with me giving you 10 things to do to get consistent revenue. Because if you're listening to this, you've probably taken notes on my podcast before. You've saved it. Some people tell me they screenshot Instagram posts. I'm not saying that I'm so great. I'm just saying I hear this all the time from people in this world.

You probably have a notes app full of ideas. You probably know that you should be following up with people. You know that you need to post more consistently. You need to ask for referrals. That's not the reason your business is staying inconsistent, and you feel like nothing is working. You have all the knowledge.

The gap you need to solve, if this is resonating with you, is being able to look at your business and know what actually matters right now. And then have someone there when you inevitably hit the normal part of difficulty in business where your brain tells you to abandon the plan because it feels unsafe. Because when you're inside your own business, everything feels personal because it's your money, it's your reputation, it's your clients, it's your Instagram feed, it's your future. And most importantly, from one former stylist to another, it is your dream. And when something doesn't work, it can be incredibly difficult to tell the difference between the strategy isn't working and I am failing because those two things are never the same.

And I think that distinction is one of the things that I see keeping really talented, established stylists stuck. You've built enough of a business that you can see all the things that are imperfect, but you're still trying to figure out which things actually deserve your attention. And that's exactly where I want you to be if you're considering my upcoming accelerator mentorship program. Not because you need me to tell you to post more or be more consistent. You do if that's an issue you have. And definitely not because I'm going to just sit here and tell you to believe in yourself, though we'll work on that. You need someone who understands a styling business well enough to look at the entire ecosystem with you and help you prioritize.

Someone who can look at the clients you've actually worked with, the offer you're actually trying to sell, the money you're actually making, the audience that's actually right here right now, and the behavior you're actually exhibiting and help you figure out what the hell is actually going on. Then we make the plan. I vet it. You execute it. And when you hit the part where you're second-guessing yourself, because that's human nature, you're going to bring that into the room with me instead of quietly changing everything behind the scenes. That's what the work looks like to move past this phase of inconsistency in your business.

And that's why Accelerator is not just about handing you more information. It's about getting your business into motion, helping you make better decisions while it's moving so that this becomes who you are, not just what you do in a program, because I'm not interested in that. I need you to think like a creative CEO, which is why I give you frameworks.

Yes, I'll also give you templates and the things I need you to do to move faster so that we can more quickly see where you specifically get stuck and address that. Here's the thing. I have looked at the numbers from the many years I have run this program, and I can tell you, in all honesty, that between 75% and 80% of people who go through Accelerator - which is about 20 people a year, it's a small program, between eight and 10 people each round, have sold their packages at a higher rate to the tune of double what they were charging when they came in during the program or within weeks of it ending.

And that isn't some kind of magic. It is math, to be honest, but it's also because when we're working together, they are in action in ways they haven't been before. They're getting real information from their market, and they're getting feedback and implementing it in real time, and they're actually making those decisions that they've been sitting on for a long time.

They're not disappearing every time something feels uncomfortable. So if you're an established stylist and you're sitting here thinking, I know I should be further along than I am, but I actually don't know what I'm supposed to work on next, that is exactly the conversation that I want to have with you. Go into the show notes of this episode and fill out the Accelerator mentorship application.

I'll be in touch to schedule a call because I don't think you need another year of guessing, and time is going to pass either way. Why not do what you need to do now to ensure you don't end up in the same spot next year? I'll talk to you in the next episode.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me. It turns out that social proof is actually pretty important, so if you can help me out, I’d so appreciate it. You just had a quick free moment and leave a rating or review on the podcast app would be a killer, and even better if you want to show this episode on Instagram and tag me, that would totally make my day. It would bring much more awareness to the podcast. It 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.