PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Welcome to the Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast, the ultimate no-BS business podcast for ambitious personal stylists ready to build a six-figure and beyond personal styling business.

You won't hear the typical snoozefest business advice that most personal stylists get told all of the time. Nope. Instead, I'll be sharing business-building strategies that will help you create a killer personal brand, a cult following of loyal personal styling clients, and make a ton of cash while creating lasting style transformations for your clients.

I'm Nicole Otchy, your host and a former personal stylist of 14 years who built a lucrative styling business in three major cities, but only after spending years trying to crack the six-figure styling business code without burning out. And now I'm here to tell you how to do exactly the same. Let's get into it.

If you have ever thought to yourself, “How come I cannot get out of this feast-or-famine cycle in my personal styling business?” today's episode is for you. This is the number one issue that I see so many stylists struggling with on the way to six figures.

I definitely dealt with this for a long time. It really took me a while to crack the code, not just on how to get myself out of the feast-or-famine cycle in my business, but also to understand why it was happening in the first place.

I think that is so critical for you to understand, because if you don't, it can feel like you're just in action, you're doing the thing, but it can be hard to see the patterns behind what is working to get us out of it when we are also doing all the other pieces of our business.

We're marketing our business. We're delivering our styling service to clients. We're trying to make connections and build networks. You're basically doing all of the billing and the sales conversations, every single aspect of the business as you're getting to six figures is typically what most stylists are doing on their own.

In today's chat, I want to give you a sense of the three biggest reasons why I see personal stylists struggling with these great months and then these pretty terrible sales months and what you can do to start to turn that around.

I want to first say that it's totally normal to have slow periods in your business. It's not a problem. The number one thing that is really critical is to know that there is a solution to this and it may take a little while for you to figure it out because you're going to have to notice patterns of your own behavior and then you're going to have to notice the responses to your behavior.

You're going to market, you're going to notice how often you're marketing, and then you're going to notice, “When I talk about this thing, I tend to notice an uptick in my business over here.” But so often because we're not running our business from a strategy and a plan that's holistic, we miss that.

It's totally normal to have these ups and downs. And there are two different times you're going to see this in your business just in terms of your maturity as an entrepreneur.

I want to say that at the outset. The first is when you're first just trying to get the business off the ground. You're trying to get outside of the sphere of people that are in your inner-inner networks, like friends or family that you started your services with, and you're trying to get outside to what I like to call the general public, people that you don't know.

That can make it really tricky. That's often because we don't really know who we're talking to at that point. But then I can happen later on when we get a little bit lazy in our business and with our marketing because we are having success, we are doing a good job, we are getting clients far more than when we started, but because we take our eye off the ball and we don't have the same intensity towards building the business that we had in the beginning, you'll start to see this happen again.

Sometimes when you have dips in your business, they're just really a sign that it's time for you to go in a different direction and try something new. But usually not until you have actually overcome the three issues that I'm talking about now.

For example, there are times when I see stylists that have a dip in their business because they don't really love their offers. They have styling services because they have the same ones that everybody else had and maybe those styling services aren't really working well with their personality, their energy, or their lifestyle so they're a little hesitant to market them.

I want you to just be aware of this as we're talking in this conversation because I want to make sure that you're aware if you are having these ups and downs in your business because you don't actually like the thing you're selling because this conversation presumes that you do.

If you don't, that's a separate issue and I see it all the time. That's totally fixable as well. But these things have to be handled. They can only really, truly be handled if you understand why you have the offers you have. In other words, they are for your target market. And you enjoy delivering them. You want the sales, you are just not clear why you're having these ups and downs.

The first reason that I see this happening to personal stylists, and it's a very specific thing to the personal styling industry, which is why I noticed that it tends to be a lot more pronounced in the personal styling industry to have these peaks and valleys in your income, that is because so many of us as stylists inadvertently really put our foot on the gas when it comes to fall and spring.

Now that I am in a different position in the industry, I'm following so many stylists on Instagram and TikTok, I noticed that right before and right around when magazines tend to come out and you start to see headlines on websites for spring style or fall style, you will start to see a shift in the behavior of how stylists market.

Stylists that I've not seen for a while tend to come out of hibernation and all of a sudden they're speaking to the seasonal change. While there's nothing wrong with that and I think that that should absolutely be a portion, like maybe 20% of your marketing, it shouldn't be the thing that gets you out of hiding, if you will, when it comes to marketing. It should be a part of your content strategy. It is not your content strategy.

If you are heavily leaning on seasonal content to drive your marketing, you are creating your own feast-or-famine cycle because the truth is the average consumer, the person that wants to hire a personal stylist, sure, they're aware that the seasons are changing and they're probably a little bit more aware of their clothes because of that. But they have style problems they need you to solve all year round.

The fact that so many stylists are just speaking to the trend cycle, and I don't just mean like the clothing trends, I mean like the ups and downs in terms of seasonal upticks in their marketing like the fact that now fall is here and so stores are putting out more, I mean, that trend, not like what is actually in the store trend.

Because that's happening, you are only getting your client's attention because of the uptick in your marketing during these periods of time. It's really a reflection of what the stylist is into, not necessarily what the client is. If you're someone that's only talking heavily about closet edits during the spring, that's a really good indication that you don't have a marketing plan that is integrated for the whole year.

Because if that's such an important thing for you to be talking about—and by the way, you don't have to talk about closet edits, but I see a lot of it in spring—then you should be talking about that aspect of your service and how it relates to your client and the results you get, and the intricacies of it, and whatever you want to talk about, if it's so important to the transformation, I shouldn't just be hearing about it when it gets warm and I shouldn't just hear about it when the weather turns a little chilly in the fall.

This is one of the number one ways that stylists particularly shoot themselves in the foot. I want to remind you that your marketing is not for you. Your marketing is for your clients.

While your clients, I'm sure, are interested in some of the seasonal-specific stuff, they're most interested in how your styling service is going to impact their identity and their everyday life regardless of what season it is. That is a really important one for you to be on the lookout for.

For you to really take note and look back at your social media stats, you can do that in the actual apps, or even if you don't schedule your posts ahead of time, you can use one of the social media scheduler programs to look at your stats and look back at the data.

Were you noticing there was an uptick in your content around that time? Are you doing it in fact because you're following so many other stylists that their uptick in marketing makes you panic so then you're doing it?

That is another behavior you need to keep an eye on. Because again, we're not marketing for other stylists or for ourselves, we're marketing for our clients and to our clients.

The second issue that I see that contributes to these seasonal ups and downs in a stylist business is once they do start getting clients, whether it’s because they're seasonally marketing or whatever the reason is, their head is down, they're serving the client, and they are not marketing anymore.

I know how hard this is. This is something I see with all kinds of entrepreneurs. I have struggled with this in this business and the last business, but the way that I get myself around this is that sales-generating activity is the number one thing I do every day.

It doesn't matter what's going on in my life. It doesn't matter, I mean, short of me being in the hospital or my child being in the hospital, I am going to show up. Maybe I'm not showing up publicly, but I'm reaching out behind the scenes. I'm definitely connecting with broadening my network and make sure I have better referral networks going on.

There are a lot of ways to show up, but you cannot take yourself out of the game when you have clients. I see it all the time and then the stylist gets really, really disheartened about the state of their marketing or the fact that they're not getting a lot of engagement when really it is a direct reflection, not of their work or their efforts being bad, it's just a reflection of their effort being inconsistent.

Again, this can happen for a lot of reasons. Sometimes we don't even know we’re doing it, so that's why this conversation is so important. But it can also happen because your business model isn't allowing you the bandwidth, the room, and the space to actually have the time to do that because you need to take so many clients.

What stylists really miss about pricing is, again, they look at it through the lens of what they could afford or what they need, but you're not your ideal client, even if you have some commonalities with them, like say you are a stylist that struggled to find clothes that worked for your body type so maybe you became a stylist because you found that you overcame this issue and you wanted to help other women. Love that. Excellent.

However, that still is not the same as your client. Your client probably isn't interested in that. They want an expert and they want you to help them get to the end result that they want in their closet quickly.

What they don't necessarily want is to become an expert for all the people. They probably want to be an expert in their own style. When this happens, stylists don't realize that they are leaving a lot of people behind, quite honestly.

When you are pricing your services and you are so incredibly busy in order to make ends meet, you're missing that part of the pricing of your services needs to factor in the cost of getting that client, and the cost of getting every single client is the marketing time.

This is not something we talk about a lot and I'm sure I will touch on it again in another episode that is more just marketing-specific, but it's important to know that it's really hard for you to become someone who gets good at sales, which is different than marketing, if you are not consistently marketing.

What do I mean by that? I mean that so often, I hear stylists getting people, so they're marketing, they're getting people on calls, they're getting sales objections, they're not able to overcome them and to become more skillful at sales conversations because then, after they have those conversations, they go back into hiding because they're back with their clients, putting their head down in doing the work to deliver their services because the business model is not supporting them having any time to market.

Then the next time, the next two, three months later when they get on sales calls, their muscles are weak in sales conversations because they're not having them enough to truly understand how to overcome those objections so that these peaks and valleys get smaller and you need to market in order to get the sales conversations and get better at them in order to close this gap.

The marketing, like I said earlier, in having it be overly seasonal is one thing, but I also see it in cases where maybe it's the middle of a season, like it's mid-spring and the stylist is so busy that she's not really touching base and/or she's putting out content that is just not relevant to the person that's watching the potential client's journey.

It's too advanced. You're talking way too far down the process for the person that's watching. That's really, really important for you to think about is where are the clients when they come to you, what are they saying their problems are? Because that's what your marketing should be speaking to, not how you've been working with this client for five years, and her style is amazing, and you're showing pictures of her incredible closet, that's fine, sure. I guess it's a bit of a testimonial, but that's not conversion content.

That's behind-the-scenes content. It validates you doing what you say that you're doing in the world. I think that is important, but it's not the thing that gets people to buy because people are selfish.

They're looking at it like, “Can I see myself in that experience she's having with the client?” In order to see themselves in it, they need to see where that person started. I don't mean see that actual person, but they need to hear about what that client was experiencing when they came to you. Not what the end result is.

You can get there. You can take them on that journey. But so often, I see stylists showing these incredible closets, these beautiful spaces, and these very, very stylish clients, well, that's wonderful and you should have those types of clients, you also need to speak to maybe some of the challenges that those clients had so that the person that's watching it who's not a client yet can see themselves in your service and then be more likely to get on a sales call.

You really need to be thinking about, yes, show the behind-the-scenes, take the people along for the ride, but make sure you're not starting in a place that is way, way advanced for the person who's trying to see themselves in your service.

Number two is if you're not marketing consistently because you get busy, then you are not strengthening your sales muscle, which means you're also not able to skillfully have conversations on Instagram Stories, in your newsletters that help overcome those sales objections before the person even gets on the phone with you because your marketing should be specifically to train your potential clients to be your client.

You want to call in the right people and help develop their thought process about personal styling, and then you want to repel the people that are not going to be a good fit for you.

If you are coming in and out of the conversation because you're busy and you're not marketing anymore, you're not going to have the sales skills to then begin to help you overcome objections in your content so that by the time someone gets on the phone with you, it's a done deal. The sale is done, they just have some logistical questions.

That's really what I want for every stylist that I work with, which is why it works so much on the marketing and the messaging because this is something that stylists struggle with, I would say, more so now that the field has gotten big and there's this oversaturation of people seeing the same thing. The same, “Do you have a ton of clothes and nothing to wear?” Nobody even hears it anymore.

That's why you really have to be consistent with your marketing. It takes a while to notice what's working, you have to say things in different ways. But when you do that, you do shorten the gap in the plateaus in your styling business. It's worth making that the biggest priority in your day no matter what.

Then the third issue that is also very stylist-specific is that a lot of stylists have peaks and valleys in their business that are pretty big, pretty significant because they do not have a styling service menu that takes the client on a journey. It doesn't really make a lot of sense sometimes for the identity of the person that they want to serve or the psychographics, which is something I talk about a lot.

Honestly, that's because when you first get started, you're in that transactional mode that I've talked about—and you can stay in the transactional mode. I've talked about this in prior podcasts—but you're just trying to figure out what you like. You're trying to get a lay of the land. You're getting good at closet edits. You're getting good at styling sessions. You're getting more efficient at shopping.

But what could also be happening in that time is that years go by and you don't look up and think, “Huh, do I still like these services? Does this even make sense now that I've had enough clients to know who I really want to work with versus taking everybody that comes in the door?”

I want you to begin to think about how do you want to become more discerning? Because being more discerning about the clients you take means that you can charge more, and it means that you can create this type of service menu that serves each of your clients for longer, so that you have more bandwidth to do the issue number one, and issue number two I talked about, which is stay consistent in your marketing and don't just be a seasonal marketer.

If you have a service portfolio for your styling clients, that takes them through the different levels of figuring out their style and also what happens after they worked with you for a year, after they've done that, what happens to those clients after that when they're established? How are you nurturing those clients? What kind of services are you offering? Are you going deep enough for where you leave them after they've worked with you for a year or whatever, fall and winter and then spring and summer?

Say you do two really big packages with them in a year, do you have a back-end established client service menu that keeps them in your pipeline? Because that is another reason, is that stylists are constantly trying to start over with new clients and they're not seeing that if you don't have a retention of 30% to 40% of your established clients, because remember personal styling is incredibly personal, nobody wants to go out and find another person to explain all these issues to, they really want you to get it, they really want to be a good fit for you.

Ideally, that's what they want, especially if you attract a client who hates shopping. If you guys are a match made in heaven, it makes their life so much easier. But so often, you are a match made in heaven and the stylist isn't thinking, “How do I evolve these services? Now that I know who I want to work with, how do I get more of these clients?”

The answer is you create an entire ecosystem of services that are juicy, exciting, and fun, and take them to whatever level of depth they are ready for based on your client and customer journey.

These are the three things that I see stylists floundering with that I floundered on and that I really struggled to figure out why was I having $10,000 a month and then if I was lucky, $1,000 month, or some months, no clients.

When that happens, as a side note, I also just want to add this, the other reason that it's really critical that you figure this out is because I can see and I have experienced myself the tremendous impact on a stylist's confidence not figuring out this has.

Because the longer you're away from doing the thing that you're so passionate about, the more room you have to doubt yourself. When the reality is, I'm sure you have tons of clients that loved working with you, but when you're not in the game working with the client and you're not relating to potential clients through your marketing consistently, it can feel like that self-doubt is super loud and it can take over and I don't want that for you.

I want you to really think about these things and figure out which of these are you doing and what can you go ahead and fix completely within your control. All the things I'm talking about are things you have control over. It's all about how you show up.

When you just take small steps every day to close some of those inconsistencies in your own behavior, you're going to see far more sales in your personal styling business. 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.