PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Nicole Otchy: Welcome back to the show. Today's episode is a little different. I'm taking you behind the scenes of what it really looks like to elevate your personal styling business, the mindset shifts the challenges, and those breakthrough moments that change everything.

You'll hear directly from personal stylists who have transformed their business in their own words. What really struck me in these conversations was how universal the experience of feeling stuck is, even among established industry experts, some of whom, like my client Kristen, have almost 20 years of experience under their belt.

Whether you've been styling for two years or 20, you'll likely hear your own thoughts and challenges echoed in their stories. Let's dive into these honest conversations about what it's really like to level up and build a six-figure personal styling business as an established personal stylist.

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.

Do you know what I've noticed after working with hundreds of stylists over the years in my career, even before I launched the styling consultancy? The ones who hit six figures all have one thing in common. They've mastered the art of confidently owning their expertise and their pricing.

It's really the cornerstone of everything else in a business. If you think about it, if you're second-guessing your rates or your value as a stylist, how can you show it powerfully to your clients? This really hits home in what Brigitta shares with me in this clip.

She talks about only feeling confident selling low-price styling offers, something I hear from stylists all the time in my DMs. But listen to how that transformed when she developed what she calls her clear signature service.

Brigitta: I'm a very trial-and-error-driven person. That's just how I roll. I leap first and think second. I really felt like I just had this growing offer ecosystem and none of it made sense. I would get an idea and I was like, “Oh, I'm going to develop this and I'm going to try and sell it.”

That was really difficult because I was constantly trying to sell something new and I didn't have full-on confidence in my offers unless I sold one for very cheap. If I was like, “Hey, this thing is $100,” I could talk about it all day long because I was like, “I know I can deliver on that value.”

I was like, “I've got zero worries of me being able to not let somebody down.” Now there is like a single entry point and that being like, “You want to work with me? Here's a signature service.” That's something that now is highlighted on my website. Just knowing that if somebody comes into my world, if I want to get them results, then they're going to go through this experience with me.

Versus, I struggled when somebody knew would follow me or when somebody would literally at an event be like, "What do you do? How do you work?" I struggled with that answer. I was like, "I don't know, it depends." Like, "Oh, check my highlight."

The actual re-jigging of the service was a fairly low lift. What did feel, I wouldn't say high lift, but what was a lift for me was customizing like onboarding and off-boarding because that's something that I didn't have so I was like, “Oh, This is amazing,” because I know how great having an onboarding process is and so I would do this with clients in person.

It honestly felt like such a waste of time. I was like, “I am spending time with them and I'm not getting them results. I'm just telling them stuff.” and creating that in just its own document that lives on its own and interacts with the client without me really having to do anything other than once and putting their name on it, honestly, I got those done and as soon as I sent them off to the clients I signed I was like, “I now feel like I'm offering a five-star service. I now feel like this is worth me increasing my prices.”

It really took care of a lot of imposter syndrome because when I look at something that I consider a five-star service, it has all these amazing, amazing elements that are very, very client-centric, and it was missing that. Without that, increasing my prices didn't feel like a no-brainer to me. I always wanted to feel like a no-brainer because that's like going back to me marketing it like it's $100 or it's $10,000 like whatever, I really want to believe in it and it helped me do that.

Nicole Otchy: Another client, Katie, experienced build on this. She discovered that by getting clarity and certainty on who she serves and how she serves them everything else fell into place.

Katie: The work that we did I think was so valuable because now the packages, they're not completely different, they're just tweaked and I'm way more clear on who I am talking to, who I am serving, and how I am serving that client. I think clarity is important in all aspects of being a stylist.

The clearer I can be upfront in my marketing and my messaging, I think it will also, as you've shared with me, help my clients convert faster. I think that for me in particular, it's just this beautiful freedom to put some blinders on and just say, "Hey, I am here for my client. I am going to focus on them solely and that is going to be where I get my energy from."

Nicole Otchy: Wait until you hear Kat's story about a client who called her deliverables insane in the best way. It's a perfect example of what happens when you build rock-solid systems into your styling service offerings. Have a listen.

Kat: But the templates you gave were so nice. I actually just recently got off an off-boarding call and whatnot with one of my clients. I just have to say, from a business perspective, she was like, “Your deliverables are insane. They're actually the way they look. This is a crazy deliverable.”

I was like, "Thank you." That's such a good thing. For those physically tangible things, oh, my gosh, your templates are amazing. They helped so much. Then when you had me niche down and you were like, "Okay, now you're just dealing with these people," it was so much easier to be like, “I know all of you guys have this problem. I know all of you guys deal with this.”

My services being just more refined and making more sense for my clients specifically, and also, just the client journey and established client journey and keeping a client, that was a huge one is figuring out what the cycle life of my client is going to be and how that works for them and also for me.

It's a huge one. Then pricing, of course, understanding that doing the math of like, “Okay, let's look at what you're doing. Let's think about the value that you have as a stylist. Now let's take the styling industry as a whole. Now let's calculate how much you’re ‘worth.’”

Also thinking about, “Okay, cool, now what is that worth to your niche?” Picking that apart to then make it make sense of like, “Okay, now do you understand why your services should be this price and more?” That was a huge thing that you shared with me because honestly, my prices were embarrassingly low.

Nicole Otchy: Once you've established the foundation of confidence in your expertise and pricing, the next crucial piece of building a six-figure styling business is knowing how to communicate your value effectively because you can't simply attract premium clients without mastering the skill. It's not an option.

Marketing shifts dramatically for most stylists and how they look at it when they nail down their positioning. Katie actually describes this perfectly. She went from throwing content at the wall, in her words, to see what stuck, to having a clear strategy that resonates today with her ideal client.

Katie: I knew that there was a wider reach, especially for the virtual client that I was hoping to get. I wasn't really able to figure out how to make my marketing and my message convert to show people that I was open for business in fact, taking virtual clients, and then speaking to that particular client.

The marketing and sales strategy that you presented was hands down. I felt like it was a missing piece that I needed. I knew that I wanted to talk to my clients in a certain way, but my messaging wasn't landing. I thought I was just trying to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what you struck.

I didn't have a clear idea of what is sticking, what really resonates if you come with so much expertise in the marketing and the sales aspect of it that I really understand how I need to do that now.

Nicole Otchy: You'll hear Brigitta share how she moved from wondering if anyone was even paying attention to her content to having 130 people sign up for her challenge.

Brigitta: Being able to go through like your marketing plan and just really flesh out things that I want to talk about and how I can relate them back to that person who I'm speaking to was really, really interesting and gave me a lot of content ideas that I could feel like proud of that I was like, “I'm going to put this out. If I get four likes on it, I'm just happy that it's out there because I know that eventually somebody is going to go through my feed and they're going to find this and I want them to hear it.” It really helped me reframe my content because I know that I'm not necessarily creating content for growth.

I am creating it for conversion because the eyeballs are there, but they're just waiting for me to see them and for me to say that this is what you're running into. This is what you're experiencing and you're feeling a certain way and this is how I can help you feel better and navigate this easier.

Your process to really understanding what somebody goes through from the moment they realize that something's off to the moment where they would actually hire a stylist or hire me, there was a lot happening there and I think that I was focusing on the very early stages of the belief system of somebody decides that they just don't know where to shop.

They're just at a loss and they have no idea where to start. I think that I was talking to that person a lot more than to the person who's like, "Okay, I want the outside to match the inside. What do I do? How do I accomplish this?"

Nicole Otchy: All stylists want this level of confidence and their expertise and the ability to communicate that expertise effectively so they can work with more dream clients. But for just about everyone, at some point, something holds them back from getting what they need to achieve these two critical skill sets that they know will make the difference in their business and their confidence, this next section will probably really hit home because it is really honest.

In fact, it's so honest you might be surprised that I'm sharing the reasons my clients second-guessed their decision to work with me. I'm sharing it because these conversations and the truths around these conversations matter.

Kristen openly shares that she's traditionally been very frugal about investing in her business. Katie talks about making the decision to invest during a really dry period, which might seem counterintuitive, but turned out to be exactly what she needed.

Kristen: As perfectionists like to do, we don't want to pause to sharpen the axe, so to speak. We want to just keep going, and 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.

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, and 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 have seen and I've reaped the rewards literally within 30 days, at least if not sooner, and realize I'm hoping now that my perfectionist's brain recognizes the value in it before I have to push myself to do, that it doesn't take me as long but 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 or take the lead.” So I'm thrilled that I did. Absolutely no question working with you was exactly what I needed right now.

Katie: I invested in this program during a completely dry season in my business. I hadn't been on a sales call since the summer. Nothing was really panning out the way that I was anticipating or planning it to. So I didn't necessarily have the income at the time to invest in the business.

But I had a choice to make. I could say, “Okay, I'm either going to do this during my dry period and figure out a plan to go forward or I'm going to wait until I'm super busy.” What's that going to get me? Am I going to even get super busy because I don't know how to do it?

Obviously, there's something that I'm missing here, I might as well take advantage of the time that's a little bit slow, iron out the kinks, and go forward full steam. That's why I think that sometimes when we get this little bit of a drier season, that might be a signal. Maybe we need to shake something up, maybe we need to invest in something, maybe we need to do something different, that's the mentality I took when investing at this time. I think it's the best money I've spent on my business this year, by far.

Nicole Otchy: If you're resonating with what these stylists shared today, whether it's Brigitta's journey to confident pricing, Katie's transformation in her marketing, or Kristen's initial hesitation to invest, I want you to know that while your expertise as a stylist is unique, whatever is standing in your way isn't.

There is a path forward to get your styling business where you want it on your own terms. If you've been listening to the podcast lately, you know that the Income Accelerator Program is open and taking applications. There are just a few spots for established stylists who are ready to make these same transformations a reality in their business.

I'm not going to be opening the program again until fall. So if you want to learn more about how we can work together to build your confidence, clarify your marketing, and create a sustainable six-figure styling business, head to the show notes, and fill out an application.

We'll hop on a call to see if this program is the right fit for you and where you are in your business journey. I would love to hear your story and explore how we can transform your business just like the amazing stylists you heard from today. Thank you for tuning in. I will 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 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.