PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Nicole Otchy: 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.

Today, we are joined by my client, Kristen Cain, an established personal stylist with over two decades of experience. This is an episode that so many of you will see yourself in, and you are going to love hearing about Kristen's journey from retail to running her own successful personal styling business.

Her story is filled with so many valuable insights about overcoming perfectionism and continuously evolving as an entrepreneur. With a thriving YouTube channel and a passion for empowering her clients to overcome their perfectionism using style, Kristen shares how she recently took her business to new heights by implementing some key systems and marketing strategies after years of trying to DIY the solutions.

Get ready for a very inspiring conversation on growth, not letting your perfectionism hold you back from building the business you truly want, and the power of getting out of your own head and into action so you can grow. Enjoy.

Hello, Kristen. Thank you for being with me today.

Kristen Cain: Hello, Nicole. Thank you for having me today.

Nicole Otchy: You're in for such a big treat today. Kristen Cain is an incredibly established stylist. Perhaps maybe the most established stylist, in terms of years, I've ever worked with. So you guys are really in for a lot of wisdom and a huge treat.

She just completed the Income Accelerator. We're here to chat about that and Kristen's relationship to her business and how long she's been a stylist. Kristen, why don't you kick us off and give us a little bit of background in you, how long you've been a stylist, the kind of styling you do, the whole deal?

Kristen Cain: Absolutely. I feel like I have been a stylist my whole life, although that is not exactly accurate. When friends were getting jobs in high school, I chose the path of retail instead of restaurant or lifeguarding or those sorts of things.

My first retail experience was at The Limited. I stayed in the retail world all the way up until I had children at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s. I worked at Bloomingdales. I worked at Neiman Marcus. I really enjoyed the world of retail.

I also always had a nagging feeling of trying to sell people more things that didn't sit well with me, especially at the really fine high couture level. It felt like if you have one really great Chanel blazer, you should be wearing that season after season, not coming again in the fall of the next year and buying more Chanel blazers. Not that there's anything wrong with too many Chanel blazers, but it just felt like excess.

At some point in my Neiman Marcus time, a client invited me into her home to help her edit her closet before an upcoming trunk show. We did the work and did some great editing. She sent me home with a beautiful orchid plant. I thought, “This is fun. I like this maybe more than being on the sales floor.”

About that time, I was busy having babies and was ready to not be working full-time. I had friends who were also having babies and none of us really had a whole lot of money to spend on new clothes.

Sort of born out of desperation, friends would say, “Can you come over and help me pack for a trip? I'm not sure what to take,” or “My husband and I are going out to dinner and I have no idea what to wear. I haven't gotten dressed in years.” So I would find myself in friends' bedrooms with wine and snacks and helping them go through their closets and get rid of what they weren't wearing.

At some point, in the midst of all of that, my wise husband said, “This could be a business.” I thought, “Oh, no, it's just fun. I just enjoy doing it.” Just slowly I realized, “No, it probably could be a business.”

Men tend to be more when I bring in a new T-shirt, I get rid of a T-shirt. Women don't seem to operate that way. There was always plenty to be edited out. That's where I started. It was back in 2012 when I set up a website and an LLC and really started blogging about things style-related.

It was a glorified hobby. I can say it's a business because I started the LLC then, but in 2012 it was definitely not a business. In fact, it was probably eight years before I really truly turned my attention to growing it as a business.

The last four or five years, I would say it has genuinely been a business and it is the thing I love to do most in the whole world. I now work largely online with clients, which surprises me a lot because I really enjoy being in a closet, and because of my retail background, I like the hands-on element of being in the space with the client.

Yet I have had so much success and my clients have had so much success online that I now understand that it doesn't-- I have clients in Australia. I have clients in Belgium. I have clients really all over the globe. I'd never met them in person. Yet their wardrobes are different because of our work together. The online space works just as well as in person and I'm grateful for it.

Nicole Otchy: So interesting. Your path here, because it used to be such a universal experience for us as stylists. I think it will be different for people who are in their 20s coming up now, but it wasn't a thing that we thought to do. You either worked in retail or whatever.

A lot of clients that were buyers or stuff like that. But this idea that it could be a business blew my mind. It sounds like it wasn't a natural thought to you. It's so fascinating how many of us have somebody else to be like, “You could do this.”

Someone else usually is the person who tells us, especially when we were starting, it absolutely was not a job. It wasn't. That's fascinating. What was the thing that made you think, “Okay, I'm ready to go more all in, grow the business.”

I don't know if you would say it was called full-time by that point or how you would even say it, but you just said grow the business. What was the line in the sand that made you think, “I got to go on?”

Kristen Cain: Very good question. The thing that made me decide to grow the business or to actually turn my attention and act as a business owner instead of just having this lovely fun hobby, was borne of really being sick and tired of myself because I kept thinking it was time to really go all in, but I wasn't doing it.

I was very busy collecting more information, tweaking my website colors, changing the fonts, writing more blog posts, and waiting for clients to drop in my lap, but I wasn't really treating it as a business.

That's largely due to my tendency towards perfectionism. Somewhere in the 2019 and 2020 range, I realized, “Okay, if you could get a handle on how to make this perfectionism work for you instead of against you, you could actually have a pretty lucrative business.”

It was being sick of myself and the perfectionist tendencies that I had had for decades, my whole life really, and understanding that all the knowledge that I had collected if I started to take action could actually start to grow my business.

Nicole Otchy: Wow. So perfectionism is the number one thing that stylists bring out both in a good way and in a bad way. Sometimes it's like, “Well, I'm just slow with content because I'm a perfectionist,” as if like I'm supposed to be like, “Congratulations. I'm so proud of you.”

I can say this because same. But I really used to tell myself that I wasn't a perfectionist because nothing was perfect yet, talk about having a problem, talk about such a problem. So I'm curious, I know this is like asking you to sum up probably five years of a [inaudible] of work and like a sound bite but humor if you will, what have you learned about overcoming perfectionism?

Is it something you think you overcome? Is it something that you think it's a tendency that we have to just manage? What did you learn in that work that you've been doing since around 2020?

Kristen Cain: I mean we overcome it in the sense that we learn to manage it the more we understand it and the more we see it and recognize it, the easier it is to manage and to take action even when that perfectionism starts to kind of flare up and rear its head and make you feel like you shouldn't take action.

It's like anything that we learn and progress through. Sometimes we can't see the change until we really look back from a place a lot further ahead. As a perfectionist, and what I now understand of perfectionists pretty much in general, we tend to not want to take action until it's perfect, until whatever the thing is, whether it's the website, whether it's the Reel, the blog post, the new client intake form, whatever it is, we don't want to share it until it's perfect.

So we continue to sit back and hold back and perfect it and not show up and not deliver it. Or we deliver it when there's a deadline. When there's usually an external deadline when someone else needs it from us, we are great at delivering it and it's fabulous. But when we're left to our own devices, we tend to wait very long.

I realized as a result of the work that I have done now for several years on perfectionism, taking action is the only way to get it to the place where it feels, not like it's perfect but like it's something you're proud to deliver, and the faster that idea of fail forward, I've heard it a million times, I never wanted to trust it and I now recognize that it's not even so much failing, it's just taking an action leads to the next action.

It's that idea that we want to see the entire staircase and really truly if we can trust ourselves to take one step, everything else starts to open up. It sounds so cliche and yet it's so ridiculously true that I wish someone had taught me in first grade that that's how it worked because I think it would have been a whole lot easier along the way.

Nicole Otchy: I think the number one thing I see clients in their business that is really holding them back, but you can have a lot of different reasons why you think it is perfectionism, honestly, what's so fascinating is just like when you're working with a client, if you have ever had a client who's never happy, but they’re like, “I don’t know, there's just something about this” with every single outfit they put on and you're like, “Okay. Something is going on up here because this doesn't make sense to me,” we do the same thing in our business, then we call it something else.

That client wants to feel safe because they don't want to look different or they don't want to stand out or whatever. They're keeping themselves safe and we're keeping ourselves safe.

What's so terrible about it is it's evidence to us that we're also a failure because we're not taking action. It just starts to accumulate like, “Well, I'm not going to business because I'm not taking action.”

No, you're just not taking action. We actually have no evidence about your business. Actually, it's the opposite. When you decided you got to take this business seriously, realized you had to look at perfectionism, what were the specific areas in your business that you felt the most held back by? Because you said you were blogging, you were certainly doing some things. What were the areas where you felt the most paralyzed by your perfectionism?

Kristen Cain: I think the number one place, I would say, was showing up consistently on Instagram and really promoting an offer. I would show up consistently for a little bit of time, and perfectionists like to fall off the wagon, and then we like to have it be a big dramatic reentry once we're off the wagon, and then when it's time to reenter.

The cool thing about any personal development—but perfectionism specifically because it's so near and dear to my heart—is that once we begin to see our own antics, we really can laugh at ourselves and recognize, “Oh, I see what you're doing here.”

It softens it a bit. It's not so much a failure. It's just, “Oh, right, this is how I tend to operate. So I can stop myself and regroup pretty quickly now.” So showing up on Instagram and delivering an actual offer was certainly number one of the very first ways that I changed things.

I did it with a weekly style Q&A where I put up a question box a couple of days before, then I would go live on Instagram and answer the questions. It was excruciating for me. The second one that I recorded didn't have any sound.

It really truly brought up all the perfectionist flares. Yet I kept doing it. I did it for over two years until I finally felt like, “Okay, the consistency is here. I know how to do this. There's a different way. I can use a different medium. I can show up a different way and answer questions.” I don't do that anymore. I didn't need to have two years of it. A few weeks of it really showed me, “Okay, I do know how to show up consistently.” That was definitely one.

The other was changing from hourly to a package because the hourly allowed me to hide and not really deliver a full service. Again, borne of perfectionism and wanting the service and the transformation to be the most incredible, fabulous, ultimate complete situation. So once I really made the leap from hourly to a package, that had me showing up differently because the package included kind of a full range of what the client needed all the way through instead of piecemeal and kind of whack a mole with hourly here and there.

So I'd say those two. Showing up consistently on Instagram and changing from hourly to a package allowed me to move through the perfectionism and show up anyway. The beautiful thing is once we start to show up differently, it usually works. We usually do attract new clients.

We think that it happened out of nowhere when actually it's the groundwork that we've been laying in showing up a new way that leads to the clients, both energetically and actually seeing our work and finding our website or whatever the case is and deciding to book with us.

Nicole Otchy: So fascinating that you shared this about Instagram life. Because when you came into my world, it was when I started the styling consultancy. I don't think we were connected when I was a stylist if I'm correct on that.

Kristen Cain: I don't think we were either.

Nicole Otchy: Yeah. I actually remember your Q&A series and used to think, “Wow, she's so confident.” Because they would be long. You went really in-depth on these questions.

It was like a podcast. Never in my wildest dreams as an outsider, especially someone who's pretty good at gauging things like this, what I guess is that that was born out of your fear of perfectionism.

Kristen Cain: I appreciate it. Thank you. It was in fact born of just that so I'm glad that I had you fooled and depending on when you started to tune in, I may have actually become more confident in doing it.

It got to a point where I really enjoyed it. But it was absolutely, very difficult to make the decision to actually hit go that first day and for several weeks afterward because that was just such an uncomfortable stretch for me.

Nicole Otchy: But what's interesting is that you shared that there's a book called The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin that talks about the different motivation styles. There is a whole motivation style that most of us have. I'm one of them too. I'm trying to remember what it's called.

But basically, you need to have something outside of you to be accountable to to take action. I don't know if that is a wounded view or what, but it's just a fact about that motivation style.

It's interesting that you tied your getting over perfectionism to something that made you accountable to your audience, saying, “I'm going to do this every week.” Actually, I did a similar thing with this business when I started and I told myself I had to do an Instagram Story, at least three talking videos every week for the first six months.

I did it and it made me want to vomit because I hate videos. My first business did not take off this fast, not even close but I knew that I needed to say publicly, “I’m going to do this.” I didn't tell people because I was afraid.

If you're listening and you're like, “Oh, I don't know how I'm going to get over this,” you're going to get over it if you're like Kristen and I and you need that external thing to be responsible to show up bigger. You're going to do it.

Marketing is the best place to get over whatever your BS is and I think because you have to have this public accountability. If you're listening, this is the assignment for you. If Kristen did it for two years, you can do it for two weeks.

Kristen Cain: The beautiful thing is that while it's an assignment that gets us out of our own way and we rely on that external accountability, the byproduct is that the clients who are waiting to hear from us actually get to hear from us.

We're showing up in a way that then the client realizes, “Oh, I can hire her. I've been waiting for her to say this.” Where in my perfectionist mind, it didn't dawn on me that I needed to actually say out loud that there's a way to work with me.

It's a big joke in hindsight that that was what changed my business because I was letting the outside influence be the accountability but really, I was showing up and making an offer and allowing women to be able to work with me.

Nicole Otchy: Yeah, so good, there's so much stuff here. Now we're at what, 2022-ish when you're doing all this, you're kind of out there, you're making more public offers and stuff.

You started a YouTube channel at some point, which I want to talk about because it's so fascinating. Kristen's YouTube following is very big. The first time we worked together was like a one-hour call.

I was so taken aback when I realized she had a YouTube channel. I had only seen her on Instagram. I was like, “This is not just a little YouTube channel. This is a whole world that she has created here.” So can you tell us a little bit about when your perfectionism let you go over to that video medium? Tell me all the things.

Kristen Cain: The YouTube channel actually started before really I went all in on my business. My first YouTube video went up in August of 2015 and it was about the KonMari Method and tidying your home because I had read the book, I had watched a lot of videos on it.

I have a son who was into videography at the time, and he said, “Mom, you could make better videos than these. I'll help you. We'll set up the tripod.” I made a few videos on the KonMari Method and my journey, and we were moving houses. I was decluttering and filming that and had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

I set up the entire thing myself with my son's help and no outside paid help at all, learn as I go. I posted on that pretty regularly random things for a while. I started to dabble in style probably a year or two after that first a few videos on the KonMari Method.

Then I hid again. I posted these videos on style and then it felt too uncomfortable, so I backed off. My channel has grown pretty steadily over the last almost 10 years. I'm super grateful for that because probably for the last three years, four years, I have shown up really regularly on YouTube.

Every Friday, a new video goes out and I have over 140 videos just on style, not including those old KonMari videos are still there and they're kind of ridiculous and give me a bit of a chuckle but the core content now is style related and I have a great community over there and love interacting with those women.

For a long time, I thought that was just a place for me to talk about style and share my thoughts and try-ons and different outfit building and packing things. Then at some point now several years ago, I had a woman reach out to me and she only knew me from YouTube.

I then realized, ”Oh, this is a viable client channel. I had no idea that a client who had literally never met me, never worked with me in retail, didn't follow me on Instagram because of a friend or someone recommending me, that someone just completely unknown could find me on YouTube.”

It was about the same time that I realized I could do the styling work, the editing, and the shopping all online. It really opened the world and opened up my client base because I had this YouTube following and I recognized those women were actually clients as well or potential clients as well.

Nicole Otchy: What's fascinating about this is you didn't do the YouTube channel—obviously, I didn't realize I'd been around that long, so now it makes a lot more sense—from a place of it being a virtual client acquisition strategy. You were mostly doing it in person before this, is that correct?

Kristen Cain: Right. I did it in person. When my business was what I consider a really lovely hobby, it was all in person. It wasn't until somewhere around 2017 that I had been involved with a women's retreat. As a result of that woman's retreat, I started to teach and do workshops. I did style workshops in different venues, in some retail stores, and online.

That was when I realized, “Oh, I can talk about this online. If I can talk about this online, I can probably do the service online.” My first two “clients” were friends who were moving and needed help editing.

But I lived in Colorado at the time, and they lived on the East Coast. They said, “Well, what if I set up my phone? Can you help me be in my closet kind of virtually?” Three hours went by and they had a huge pile to discard and we both kind of realized, “Oh, this would work online.”

That was years before I had ever worked with a paying client online. I did not start my YouTube channel thinking I was going to get clients from there and yet it's been a beautiful byproduct.

Nicole Otchy: It’s just so fascinating because the number one thing I see stylists struggling with when they go from in-person to online is that there are two different mechanisms for getting clients.

The messaging actually is the same. The mechanism is different. The tactic is different. Instead of seeing it like it's a skill set you have to have, to do the virtual, I mean, some people do both, they're both types of businesses, but they don't understand that it's actually two different ways of getting a client. It's just not the same things, but the same words, messaging, and way of talking about style work, that you had built in already, it was such an amazing, not a coincidence.

I think these things happen for a reason, but that in and of itself, I'm sure, fueled your growth in your business when you decided to go all in because that is a thing I hear people getting stuck with a lot.

I'm not saying if you're listening, you need a YouTube channel, if you're virtual. I'm saying there's a way of building a relationship online that is very different and takes longer. It doesn't mean it takes a long time to convert, but you have to stick to it longer in order to get the virtual client because it's out of nowhere versus in person.

It's often a warmer lead because it comes from someone who had you in their home, that you've seen in their underwear. When someone says, “You should hire this person,” there's a lot of built-up trust on that sales call.

This is where a lot of stylists really, really struggle because they don't understand that the marketing mechanism is different so they give up before it's pop, before they get that client.

Kristen just happened to be doing it for a decade by the time that came around. It's just an incredible illustration of that fact. We're in it. We're doing the thing. I just love your YouTube channel and you're a perfectionist. It just tingles me and it makes me so happy. It gives me hope that someday maybe I could do that.

But the question I have for you is—I don't even remember when I met you—but what were the things that you are now established, you have this YouTube channel, you're getting clients online, what were the things that really were coming up for you when you were like, “Okay, I need to get some more help for this to take it even to the next level?”

Kristen Cain: Yeah, so let's see. A year ago, last August, my family moved from Colorado to Utah. It was an unexpected move. We thought it might be temporary. We were still in Utah. It has turned out to be the most incredible situation. I don't know how permanent, how long we'll be here. But we're here for at least the next year and it feels good.

The whole year was wonderful and had more fun and joy than I had had in a long time. At the same time, there was a lot of stress, a lot of unknowns, and a lot of uncertainty. Both things, the fun that I was having and the uncertainty that I was also having pulled me away from the consistency in my business that I was used to, to say nothing of packing and moving from a house we had lived in for 10 years to Utah and having that be temporary.

So we didn't bring all of our stuff with us. It was in storage. So we were Airbnb's. It was a lot chaotic. The perfectionist in me allowed it to pull me away from my business. It was a good excuse. And it was a valid excuse, I think.

There was a lot going on. Yet, had I had the tools in place, I probably could have been more consistent all the way through that year. So I kind of waited once we moved into the house that we're in now and we'll be in for the foreseeable future.

In May, I thought, “Okay, it's time to really get back on this consistency train with my business. I was booking clients in between. It wasn't that I wasn't working at all, but I wasn't showing up with a marketing message that made any sense. I wasn't pausing long enough to create a marketing message that made any sense as a perfectionist likes to do.

We don't want to pause to sharpen the axe, so to speak. We want to just keep going. Then we realize that we're in this swirling mess that we've created and we need to pause.

You were the pause. I thought, “Okay, I need some help here.” In my business, as I said, I created my own YouTube channel, and I made my own website, I'm a very hands-on perfectionist, I don't want to have to pay anyone for anything that I can figure out myself so I'm determined that I can figure out everything myself.

I don't know, four years ago, I hired my very first coach. She happened to be a perfectionist coach. It was the best thing I ever did because had I not gotten a handle on perfectionism, I would never have been able to hire other coaches to help me with other things.

To date in my business, I have hired three people. You are the third. I do not spend money easily in my business. I’m a very frugal person. I don't invest in myself easily or I haven't historically and yet the three times that I have done it in my business over the last few years, I've reaped the rewards literally within 30 days, at least if not sooner, and realized, I'm hoping now that my perfectionist brain recognizes the value in it before I have to push myself to do it, that it doesn't take me as long that I'm quicker to invest now, which I actually guess I am because I invested with you pretty quickly.

I knew that I needed your help. You were the person to do it. I just liked your message. I liked your delivery. I'm originally from the East Coast. Your East Coast sensibility appealed to me.

I thought, “Okay, you can keep messing around with this on your own or you can hire Nicole and have her take the lead.” So I'm thrilled that I did. Absolutely no question working with you was exactly what I needed right now.

Nicole Otchy: So it was really the marketing that was the push to get out of the inconsistency, which was circumstantial and it was a deep understanding that it was the marketing that was a problem.

Kristen Cain: It was the marketing. It was definitely the marketing that I was ready for help with, primarily because, again, I don't want to keep mentioning perfectionism, but it's such a big part of my personal journey with my business. I really, truly had so many ideas.

I understood and had done so much research on marketing strategies, ways to market, and how to create a content calendar. It's not that I didn't understand how to do it, it's that I wasn't doing it with any plan. It was very much random and piecemeal and kind of, “Oh, today I'm going to do this. Oh, no, I was going to do that. Tomorrow I'll do this.” Then two weeks would go by and I wouldn't do anything.

I really thought, “Okay, if somebody can come from the outside and look at what I have here and help me make some decisions and know how and when to show up and what to say when I'm showing up,” because that was the other thing. I had all sorts of ideas for how to deliver the message, let alone what days and what channels to deliver it through. I got way more out of working with you than just the messaging, which I wasn't expecting, but the messaging is what brought me in, absolutely.

Nicole Otchy: Interestingly, you know how clients come to us and they have a thing where they're like,” Oh, this is my pain point. This is my problem. I hate shopping,” if you're a stylist. We'll just use that example.

But then you get in there and you're like, “Actually, you may hate shopping, but there's this, this, and this. You don't know your style. You’re a people pleaser even in how you dress. You don't want to invest.” There are a million reasons. But their feeling about shopping is the cool pain point that they think is the catalyst to hire you.

When you look back at the journey that you just took over the last six weeks, do you realize that, as you said, you've got more out of it, but when you look back at it, yes, your marketing has certainly gotten better, you're showing up a lot more. I mean, anyway, I can see that.

What other things do you now know were the reasons for some of the issues you're having in your business that maybe we're showing up in the marketing, maybe that impacted the marketing, but were actually deeper level business issues?

Kristen Cain: Yep. I think in addition to marketing, I have been in business for a long time. As I said, I've gathered a lot of information and learned a lot of things. It was almost like I had too much happening and didn't have the whole thing tightened up enough to make it easy. I was making it harder on myself.

I thought the messaging was the problem. In many ways it was. It went beyond that because the business just needed an aerial view of, “Okay, you have all these disparate parts, but they're not really amounting to the client roster that you want. You're not fully booked. There's everything you need here, but you're not using it in the best way, I guess.”

I had the ingredients, but I didn't have the onboarding dialed in and I didn't have the offboarding dialed in and I had a consult process, but it was lengthier than it needed to be and was wasting my time, and the client's time and often not getting to a yes or a no even landing in indecision.

It was all of that looking at how can we clean this up pretty easily and effectively and just start rolling out the new? That ironically and interestingly, and of course, that informs the messaging. As I cleaned all of that up, it became much more clear what the messaging should be delivering, what the topics were I should be talking about and the pain points for the client. It was a cleanup really. It was sort of a deep clean for my business.

Nicole Otchy: It was. The thing that's so fascinating when you're saying this, because Kristen and I didn't talk extensively before this, is that I really feel kind of selfishly that by going all in on established stylist, so I am not at this point in the business teaching people how to be stylists, how to start from scratch, I am so niched, it's kind of selfishly because you guys all actually have what you need to get where you want to go and so I know I can get you there faster if I just help you do a little deep clean and look at it, move the pictures to different rooms, give each room a different feeling, all of a sudden now you can fall back in love with your business.

What was interesting watching you is you kept catching yourself and your perfectionism. Part of this program is that you have to actually execute on the things each week. It's not just like, “Let's have a workbook and think about it.” It's like you have to actually put these processes into your business.

Every time you did it, so one of the things we had done even for the program was we had you start selling things you already had in your business. You were just out with your kids thrifting, sending me messages like, “I just made money.”

Tell us all about that because you had all this stuff in your business that could have been making you money, and now it's making you money when you go and hang out with your kids. Tell me about that more.

Kristen Cain: Of course. I'm glad you brought that up. As I said, I had all the parts. I just wasn't having them operate like a well-oiled machine. One of the best things, certainly, that you helped me with was to gather some money that I was leaving on the table for sure.

I want to just mention on the side that as a perfectionist, if anyone's listening who's a perfectionist, we're rule followers. When you give me an assignment, I do it. That outside pressure, again, if you give me an assignment, I do it.

The fact that it wasn't just a workbook, “Hey, print this out and work through it on your own time” was really super helpful for me and my personality because I like an assignment. I like that feeling of school where I have to check things off before the next assignment comes in so that was super helpful.

With regard to the money on the table, I had a couple of courses and in one of early conversations, I mentioned them and you said, “Well, wait, where are the courses?” I said, “Well, they're archived in my email on my computer somewhere.” He said, “Well, get those out and post them at least on YouTube in your description and put a price on them.”

In the olden days, that would have taken me six months because I would have had to figure out where to put them, who was going to host the thing to buy them, and how I was going to make them look better. Because right now they're just a PDF.

I thought, “No, no, we are going to do exactly what Nicole said. We are going to dust these off and make them as current, tweak what needs to be tweaked, and figure out a place to put them and pop them up.”

Yes, in fact, the first one sold when I was thrifting with my kids and I got a message in my email that the course had just sold and I messaged you to let you know that I very much appreciated you helping me get the money off the table that had been sitting there.

I have since sold many of those courses. There are two courses. I have since sold many just when I'm doing random things because now the evergreen nature of them that I intended when I created them can actually be doing its thing because they are available out there to actually purchase.

Nicole Otchy: So many stylists have a version of this. The biggest thing, the reason why it's important that I think they're called action plans versus workbooks, to your point, is that action takers make money.

Money and sales like speed. That's why I specifically, as a fellow perfectionist, have not had a website for a year and a half because I will also screw around with the website when I really just need to be in sales.

So I've been selling off a PDF because I wanted to prove to my clients I was the experiment to myself and to them. What is so fascinating is how much having a coach, and I've learned this too, is really more about getting us out of our own way and getting us to see in ourselves that, “Wait a sec, I don't need all that stuff. That stuff I'm hiding behind.”

If Kristen can put up things that she has had for years that have been doing nothing and start making money because her mindset changed, then that is possible for literally every single stylist who is listening. I love that.

I also, of course, want to talk about your latest one, which has been so awesome. You sent me a message last night saying that you just signed a really ideal client. One of the things that is the least sexy thing that I can talk about, but also probably the most important is systems.

Because I know, I know, guys. You're like, “Ew, Nicole, stop.” I know. I'm gagging, too, as I say this. But I hated systems for years. One of the things I learned was that they helped me so much in my selling, in my client retention.

Kristen was making sales before we met for sure, but she implemented some of the sales systems that we talked about. What did you say about the experience you had on that call with the client yesterday? Because it was so fascinating.

Kristen Cain: Yeah, this client just paid her first payment today. We start to work together on Monday. I have never met her before a sales call we had this past Monday. She found me less than 10 days ago on my YouTube channel.

She mentioned that she has binge-watched several YouTube videos and that she felt just completely energetically compelled to reach out to me, that I was the person she wanted to have helped her on her style journey.

My mind is blown. I'm no longer surprised. I don't any longer believe that clients just fall in my lap. I understand the work that I have done, the groundwork that I have laid in order to make clients find me trust me and like me and feel like they know me. I get all of that.

Yet the fact that the changes that I made, very simple, very quick changes that I made to the systems in my business allowed this client to reach out and book within a matter of just a couple of days that, she would have booked immediately had we not had a little bit of back and forth on email, that there was a little bit of time happening just in our communication.

I'm just really fascinated by the small changes that I made as a result of working with Nicole, working with you, the small changes that I have made, and how quickly they have brought my ideal client.

Part of that too is coaching that I received from you on how to really look at my niche in a different way because I was stuck in this age group situation and you very clearly explained, “Okay, it doesn't have to be age group. Your client is seeking a transformation. They're seeking something that is way beyond the clothing and it doesn't have to be someone in her 50s and 60s and 70s. It could very easily be someone younger who is just further along on that journey than most people who haven't lived as many decades.”

This client is 100% just a shining example of that because she is not the decade that I usually work with or the age group that I usually work with, yet she is at a pivotal place in her life where she is ready for this change.

The changes that I made did not take long. I did not stress about them. You made them very easy the way you outlined them. I implemented them. They are obviously already bringing in a different client and bringing in a client who is ready to do the work with me so I'm forever grateful.

Nicole Otchy: That's so amazing. I think every single person in the program this round signed a client within either the six weeks we're together or the last two weeks or eight weeks out.

Obviously, that's my hope but I can never make that promise. I really, really believe it's because of how all of you just kept taking action. I know at points you guys are like, “Oh, no, thank you.”

But you did it and here we are and the only way you get on the other side of it is the action taking so I'm so excited for you and I'm really curious as we wrap here to hear, what are you most excited about in your business? What are you so excited that you get to do now that you're back in action and life is a little bit more as calm as it's going to be for [inaudible]?

Kristen Cain: Again, this sounds cliche but I think we all do this work because we love helping women—or men, if we work with men—we love helping people really truly see themselves differently through what they wear and feel differently about themselves.

So first and foremost it's that if I'm hiding and holding back and not showing up and not making offers, I'm not helping people. So as silly as it sounds, the thing I'm most excited about is actually working with women, like the one I just spoke to, who really are ready to change and need some guidance. They need a coach to come in and be able to help them make the changes that they want to make in their wardrobes.

I'm excited about that. I'm also excited to really just have a business that feels like all of those parts are put together in a way that, right now, because my perfectionist understanding now helps me realize that this isn't going to stay the same forever, that as my business changes and grows and I change and grow, the systems will need to change and grow and the format and all the things will need to shift for a long time.

That fixed mindset was like, “Well, once it's done, it's done forever.” I now know that's not the case. That's exciting to me too, “Okay, this is how we're going to do it for a while. Then who knows what the next six months or year will bring as far as what I need to shift in order to keep helping women love how they look and feel when they get dressed?”

Nicole Otchy: That is all the result of having confidence and believing in yourself, that if you believe that you're capable, then you believe you'll just figure it out when the time comes and that is very much the person I've seen you stuff into even since I met you a while ago just watching you continue to show up in the face of whatever doubt you've had.

Thank you so much for talking about your perfectionism on this episode because that was not something we planned on talking about, but it is the number one thing that I hear from stylists.

Trust, as I wrap this up, that you've just helped a lot, a lot of people see themselves and you've given them a lot of hope for their business. It means a lot to me and I know it means a lot to them. So thank you so much.

Kristen Cain: Thank you very much, Nicole. My pleasure. It's such a part of my life now. I help clients with their perfectionism in their wardrobes, it’s so integrated and part of me now that I can’t show up and not talk about it.

Nicole Otchy: Thank you, Kristen.

Kristen Cain: Thank you very much, Nicole.

Nicole Otchy: 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.