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.

Welcome back to The Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast. Today, I am talking to the stylist out there who has implemented the marketing advice consistently, knows they have good styling offers, is posting content, and showing up on social media more days than not and they’re still not seeing the results that they expected.

You're someone who is not new to this work, but your momentum is not where you think it should be. And your first instinct might be, "I need a better content plan. It's my prices. I need to change my services." Before you do any of that, what I'm going to offer today might hit you a little differently.

It's a bit of a different approach than the clear business strategy advice that I'm often giving. Because in my experience, having done this work now for many, many years—not just in the styling consultancy, but with stylists when I was a stylist, and also in my own experience and journey of visibility, which has been a difficult one—I don't come to visibility very easily.

I'm not someone who loves to be on camera. I'm not someone who is naturally delighted that I have to be front and center of everything, though I have radically changed my view on that in the last several years. So I know what it's like to feel knots in your stomach showing up.

And I think that there are plenty of stylists that don't have that particular experience, and they’re not necessarily afraid to be visible, but there is some underlying visibility noise and insecurity that maybe is not as obvious as what I experienced and some of my clients experience, but is still sabotaging results.

Because I was always clear why I wasn't getting the results I was getting. I wasn't super comfortable showing up in ways that would engage my audience. So I got it. Like, I really did understand that that was something I would have to overcome.

But the people that I see struggle the most are stylists who are kind of not at that degree of struggle like I've had, but the ones who are able to be consistent, but they do it in a way that is overly safe and sort of like they're just checking the box off.

So those are the people that I notice actually will tend to stall out their results longer versus the stylists I work with who are more like old me—who were scared, were scared, were scared—but then when they did put themselves out there, they usually tend to be the person that says the thing that needs to be said, right?

They're scared because they know the depths of the message, and they're afraid of how it's going to land often, versus people that are keeping it very surface level and maybe just sort of giving a lot of tips, giving a lot of tricks, doing a lot of safe stuff in their marketing in order to say, "Well, I'm doing it. I don't know why it's not working."

You may genuinely not know why it’s not working. So it's not that most people I work with have a lack of strategy. I don't see a lot of stylists that I talk to on discovery calls or work with that aren't showing up at all. Like, by the time you're getting to this podcast and you're engaging with me, if you're a good fit, you’re consistent somewhere. You're doing the work somewhere.

So it's natural to think it's the strategy. But it's actually, nine times out of ten, for those people, those higher performers, those people that are being consistent, a lack of visibility capacity. Not visibility in the sense of more eyeballs, more people to follow you, more people to watch your Instagram stories.

I mean visibility in the "Can you handle being seen as who you really are?" way. I mean visibility the way that stylists mean visibility when they talk about blocks to people being seen as their true self.

So this is going to have a lot of overlap, this episode, between what you are experiencing with your clients and their visibility blocks, and what I'm seeing in my clients in marketing. What's really valuable, I think, about this episode—and one way I'm going to coach you, if I may, how to listen—is to think about if you don't struggle with these things, to hear some of these points and think about how they may relate to how your personal styling clients experience themselves when they start to dress differently and get more attention and be seen as their true self.

Because we act like that's not a big deal but it's a very, very vulnerable act and some of the reasons stylists are not really signing high-ticket clients consistently is because they're skipping over that reality. So I want to talk about a misconception about visibility that is in the online space.

This doesn't matter if you're an in-person stylist or a virtual stylist or both. I just mean the way we are taught to market in a world that is online. You've probably been taught that visibility means showing up consistently, posting five times a week or whatever that number is, doing reels, showing your face on video, building a newsletter, having an opt-in, and that is all part of building a successful business.

But it is surface-level visibility. What I see over and over again, especially with stylists who are "doing everything right," is that the problem isn't always their marketing strategy. It is the performance underneath it. It is the safe, polished version that they're putting forward in their content.

It is the watered-down voice you use so that you won’t be judged, misunderstood, or seen as too much. It is the fear of saying what you really think because, deep down, you're afraid of what it's going to cost you.

And there's usually a part of us that knows it's costing us not standing out in a sea of people who are doing the same. Because if you've ever created, or wanted to talk about something that's more bold or honest, and then immediately posted a "Five Things to Wear This Spring" carousel—no shade—but you will have experienced this moment where you think, "Let me tone it down," if that is you, this episode is specifically for you. Because I have a lot of sales calls where people tell me this. Let me be clear: none of this makes you a bad stylist or even a bad marketer.

I mean, I've seen people go viral with those posts, though it doesn't usually help their bottom line. It just means that, perhaps potentially, your nervous system isn't fully on board with being seen. Your sense of what makes you safe in the world has not caught up to where you are now.

If you don't address that, you'll keep showing up, it will keep falling flat, and it will have an impact on your identity and your self-esteem in a way that will make getting to your next level hard, because perhaps you're missing the real issue.

I see this a lot with stylists who tell me, "I've done this program. I've done that program." But they're getting on sales calls, they're watching my content, and they're like, "I like what you're saying, but I just don't really trust anyone anymore."

I see this a lot in this community. The issue here is not actually that nobody trusts me. The issue here is that they don't trust themselves.

Often, that's why I think this conversation is so important, because sometimes the visibility thing is actually the root of what you are not able to trust about getting to your next level. Like, you don't trust yourself in part. So you're waiting and hoping that somebody else, some other expert, is going to give you the magical formula that’s going to get you to the next level and allow you to stay safe.

That's why I talk the way I do on this podcast, because I'm going to give it to you straight, in-person, in this podcast. What you see is what you get.

I wish somebody had told me that all the years I was looking for a strategy to keep me safe, but also "successful," that it wasn't actually possible to be the kind of stylist I wanted to be. It wasn't that I'm unsafe in my marketing now, or that you have to feel unsafe. It's that you have to build your capacity, you have to build your tolerance for being seen and saying things that are not surface-level.

Because people are expecting a lot from you when you're a transformational stylist charging thousands of dollars and helping them make decisions about their appearance. We can get stuck in our own world and our own insecurities and our own inner swirl of, "What is everyone going to think about me?" and forget what is actually on the table for the people that are trusting us.

So I see a lot of, "Oh, invest in yourself. Oh, be the person you really are," from stylists. And then I don’t see a lot of depth of marketing from them that matches the call to action to the client. There are definitely some stylists that I follow who do this incredibly well. I make a point to tell them that because I am so impressed and proud of the industry when I see that.

I am really proud that I think I work really hard to develop stylists who have this capacity and depth to them. Because when you are able to do this in your marketing, you're also then able to do it in your client transactions and in your client interactions.

One of my clients, Gab, who you're going to hear on the podcast, talks about this significantly. About how her marketing, which is just really, really great and calling in dream clients, how her ability to go first in her marketing was a little bit more opinionated. I wouldn't even say particularly controversial, but really standing in her opinion, started to call in clients that were so amazing. And started to call in better client conversations, which then informed her marketing.

And it becomes this self-feeding system that is at the root of transformational styling. That's why you cannot be a transformational stylist and not create transformational marketing. I see a lot of people taking the names of these services from my podcast and putting it on their website, which is great. I love that we're developing a community of people that see themselves as transformational.

But if you're also not showing up in your marketing and showing people what they have to be ready for, then you're going to have a huge disconnect and it's going to feel a little bit off to the potential client. So your marketing has to match the depth of the transformation that you're promising.

And that's where a lot of people are surprised when they go through my programs and learn, "Oh, now I get why I couldn't charge $4,000 for styling services and talk the way that everyone else is. Ah, now I get it."

So what you need to be aware of is some of it is knowledge. Some of it's understanding like, "Oh, I just didn't know this was possible." I think that's true for most people. But some of it is not knowing about yourself yet because you haven't tried it or you stop yourself every time you go to try, that you don't have the capacity yet, it's like a muscle you haven't built to be that person online when you market your business.

So one of the things we can tell ourselves is that, "Well, I'm not loud. I'm not someone that's confrontational. I don't like to have direct conversations." But real visibility isn't being loud or confrontational. That is a delivery style.

It is about being present. It is about being willing to say the thing you need to say to be of the highest service to the right client. It's about posting the idea that everybody else probably doesn't have so that you can actually stand out.

It's about cultivating your expertise publicly so that you actually have a perspective that makes people drawn to you. Nobody is drawn to someone to hire them because of tips. They're drawn to them because the worldview that you're providing makes them feel like something is possible for them, especially when you're selling a high-ticket.

And so you're going to have to do that even when your hands are a little bit sweaty saying the thing. I know that because when I launched this podcast—I mean, I know that because I've been doing that for many years—but when I launched this podcast, I still had days.

Like when I came out with the Transformational and Transactional series—my podcast editor can tell you this—I was really nervous about it. I know it probably sounds crazy, but I was like, "You know what? I'm putting my stake in the ground and I'm going to talk about how we are not being conscious of how we are creating stylists anymore."

To me, that really felt like an edgy thing to say because I was putting new ideas out there. I was putting, "What if everybody was like, yeah, whatever. I don't like that?" Or part of me thought people that were doing hourly would think that I was saying there was something wrong with their talent and skill, and I wasn't.

It was just there are two different types of interactions you can have, and one isn't bad and one isn't better. It's just that if you want to charge thousands and thousands of dollars, then you have to behave in a certain way.

There's an expectation of people right now in culture that you're going to help me go a little deeper. But I wasn't seeing that reflected in what was going on in the industry, as someone who's been in it for a while and knows a lot of people in it.

That to me, because my identity was a stylist and fitting in was part of my identity, was scary. So I had to have a lot of conversations about that. Of course, once it went out, nobody cared, no one thought anything, and it did really well, and it's become a huge attractor.

But I've known in my life that the thing I'm afraid to say—as long as it's coming from a good place, like I mean in my content, not like to somebody that I know or something—it usually does really, really well.

But the cost of what that does for me over the scheme of time in my business is having to overcome my own fear of visibility or rejection or whatever that is. And always, I do know in the back of my mind after all these years that no one's paying that good of attention.

So usually what happens is the people that are attracted to the message rise to the top. They're in my DMs, we're having conversations, they follow me. And then the people that don't, they just fall off. No one's in my DMs telling me that I'm a terrible person because I created that series.

Of course, they're not, it doesn't matter enough to anyone's life. I'm reminding you of that and sharing that story with you because most of the people I work with have a version of that.

Maybe it's not a series, maybe it's just one post. Or maybe it's just one point of view, or maybe it's just one story, or one belief they want to share. But if you don't know, because you've not been in business communities enough, and you don't have experience as a business owner, this is why I think that there's a point to paying an expert just to have access to this understanding of what's normal and expected, that you will think there's something wrong with you or that that nervousness is a sign to stop, but it's usually a sign to keep going.

So if you're exhausted from your marketing, if you're over-delivering in your business, if you're doing content planning marathons but you're not getting any traction, you probably have a nervous system issue with being seen and going to the next level and saying something that's actually going to move your business forward, because it feels edgy, not an actual marketing strategy problem. Because your body is always scanning for rejection, as is your client’s bodies. That's why it's so hard to make change.

So your subconscious is editing you to be palatable. The problem with this is it's editing you to be palatable to the world you know. But that's not your client's world. So we edit ourselves to be palatable.

If I'm being totally honest with you, we are mostly editing ourselves subconsciously without realizing it so that we will not be rejected from the people in our actual life—our parents, our friends, the people we see all the time—not the people that are our actual clients.

This is why knowing a lot of the things I talk about—your positioning, your messaging, your marketing, who your ideal client is, why your services are for them—is almost like insurance against your brain and its fear of rejection. Because it's going to bring you back to what you're used to and the world that you come from.

Those people, love them as you might, are not your ideal clients. Even if they were psychographically or geographically and demographically the right kind of people, they know you too well to get the level of transformation that they would need in the styling container, which doesn't mean you can't help them.

But you know what I'm trying to say. You know them. There's a lot of shorthand that happens in the relationship. So you're not dealing with the same people, you're not dealing with the same beliefs in your marketing when you're talking to your audience, but your brain and your body is trying to keep you safe for the context you know.

This is so much of the work I do with stylists, reminding them and keeping them present to who their actual client is, not what they are familiar with in their life. When you are trying to get clients without letting them see the depth of you, but expecting that you're going to get people that want to "transformation," then you're going to see this fall off.

This is a hard thing to see about ourselves. I really had to be given this straight from many people in my business experience and in my life to finally do the deeper work on myself that I needed to do to be able to talk the way I do now in this podcast.

Some of that work is just really the work of being an expert and perfecting your work and learning why you have the services you have and refining it and getting systems so that you feel legit. Some of it is expanding your understanding of the world and what is safe for you so that you can show up in a way that speaks deeply to the people who you actually want to work with.

If you're not doing the work to expand your inner capacity, there's not a content, calendar, schedule, or social media firm in the world that is going to save you because you will still be hiding in plain sight. Literally old me did that for years and acted like I did not understand what was going on. I had the worst crippling visibility blocks. Some people—coaches I worked with—said they've ever seen.

So I'm going to give you a phrase that I've been using a lot in my client conversations, as I've been going through positioning intensives with folks: performative consistency. This is when you're posting regularly, but literally nothing's landed. You have no conversations to go off of with your audience. People aren't interacting, they're watching, but they're probably just giving a head nod.

You're ticking the boxes and you're showing up on platforms, but you're wondering why you're not getting dream clients or enough clients, or why there's just drastic, drastic periods that are dry in your business and no one's coming through on sales calls.

Performative consistency looks like sharing tips and tricks, but never giving your real opinion. Avoiding what you think are controversial takes, even if it's just like, "Here's how tariffs will affect clothing prices" or whatever—even if it is true to your values, and hiding behind strategy instead of actually showing up with your own opinion.

You're not willing to post something because you haven't gotten it cleared by an expert. So in all honesty, a lot of us are doing this because we have been trained, especially with the tips and tricks versus our real opinion, we have been trained to earn our worth through performance, through being a good student, through being helpful, through always putting our needs last.

We were taught that success and being liked meant doing this. But in a transformational business where you are the expert and you are the CEO, you won't be able to build to your next level by doing more of this. You'll be able to build to the next level by being more real because—because, because—and this is the critical part: because it is the thing that keeps you competition proof.

Saying who you really are, saying what you really think—and I'm not saying you share things before they're processed or ready—but let me give you an example. A lot of stylists are just unable, for some reason, to talk about any of their own style challenges.

I'm not saying if you're in the moment of a bad self-esteem flare that that's what you get on Instagram Stories and share. If that is something you've dealt with and don’t have coping skills for, that ain't it.

But if you are someone who on their journey to being a stylist five, ten years ago you were in a really low place and used style to feel better about yourself or to change an experience in your life, and you're past that, and it’s something that feels like a distant memory, that's something I'd be sharing in my content.

But there's a real desire for stylists, I think—especially ones that are not in community with other stylists, which is why I think that's so important—because there's a feeling of, "Oh, I have to be the coolest. I have to have all the designer stuff. I have to show myself this way."

That's really just stylists performing for other stylists or for their friends, or to look a certain way online. And I don't really care what you wear, but that is not what gets people who want to do the inner work to hire you. That's what gets people that want transactional work to hire you.

And that is fine if that's your business model, but there's often this disconnect. I've had clients that are like, "I just want to be transactional at this period of my life. I don't care." I'm like, "Great, let's build you a transactional business."

It’s not a lot of clients that I get, but I think a lot of people want something deeper. And when it's not going deeper, or they're not able to get the kind of client they want, and they are going, going, going and blaming other things, it's usually the last thing they're willing to look at, especially if they're people that really struggle to ask for help.

I see that a lot. It's like, "I shouldn't need to pay for this. I shouldn't need to." Well, if you have that view, you're likely going to get other people that kind of have that view, too.

So why should they trust you to style them? If you're someone that won't trust an expert, why should people trust you as an expert? If you had that kind of wariness, not a surprise.

So that's why we have to be aware of what's going on in our internal world and aware of the fact that if we grew up thinking that we had to prove ourselves all the time, then sharing an experience, and sharing depth, and sharing our opinions versus "getting it right," will feel unsafe to us, even though it is the work we need to be doing as an expert that stands out.

It's not hard to stand out, because if I took every single one of your beliefs and every single life experience you had and packaged it together, there would be no other stylist that had your view.

It can be as simple as: you hate capsule wardrobes, you think color analysis is great, or not great, you were a buyer at one point and have lots of clients that were buyers and what you learned in that experience.

There's a million ways that you take all of that, and then demographics and psychographics of your ideal client, and put it together, and you are absolutely competition proof. It's all inside you.

But that is the thing that we resist, because that is ultimately what feels most unsafe. And again, that's also why people come to you and want to look put together, not like they are self-expressed.

This is what happens in the styling industry. So if you want people that just want a transaction to look put together and your content is speaking in a certain way, you'll get them. If you want people who want to do that inner work, your content has to show them a preview of what that's going to look like.

And so you're going to have to go first, or you're going to have to do client stories about that, or you're going to have to show that in some way. And it's totally possible. And what's amazing about it is how it's hard to a degree, but it's the thing that's always waiting for you.

You could always get to your next level if you do this work. You just have to be willing to sit with the discomfort long enough to do it and then prove to yourself, "The world did not burn down."

On the other side of that discomfort is the greatest—especially if you do it consistently. This is not going to be an overnight thing—but it is the greatest feeling of self-love and self-confidence you can have.

There's no way that that doesn't go into your styling business and change someone's life to another level. So it's this beautiful ecosystem of you learning to be more fully yourself so you can show up online and be more fully yourself, so that your clients can go out into the world and be more fully themselves and get better results, and then it just keeps going.

That's why I do the work I do. That's why I sit here every week. Not because I'm obsessed with clothes or stylists. I do love stylists because I think they agree with this view of the world, and I see it in them, and I see it in the conversations I have.

Ultimately, that has always been what got me out of bed, and it's what gets me to fight for this industry being at another level. Because we're asking a lot of people and we are not rising to the occasion. And that includes me back in the day.

I've had to do a lot of work to forgive myself for it. I genuinely didn't know. And if you're not ready to do this work, you're not ready to do this work. But it's not that hard, and it really has such a wildly massive impact in a positive way on every area of your life.

Your kids will be better. Your marriage will be better. You will take things less personally. You will take people's ghosting less personally. You will take people reaching out and telling you you're the best thing in the world, and then ghost you in DMs—which happens to me all the time—it has nothing to do with me. It has to do with someone else's integrity and their journey. It's because I did this work that I can deal with that.

So what is the way that this looks? How do you actually do what I'm saying? Integration.

Integration means that your marketing reflects the depth of the work you do behind closed doors. That you are able to share the beliefs, the takeaways, the maybe slightly spicy perspective that you have behind closed doors with clients, in public, on your Instagram stories, in your newsletter.

It means that you are not pretending anymore that every part of styling is fun or glamorous if it requires some emotional depth from the client. So it means you're going to have to present, like, "Hey, there are parts of my service where you are going to have to do returns online, for example. It's no one's favorite, but that's what we do."

Because we do that, what ends up happening is you trust yourself more. You explain the parts of the process to your clients on sales calls and in your onboarding and all of these places so they feel emotionally safe and prepared for what comes next.

Because you're not people-pleasing and skipping over the parts where they could get stuck, because you're more committed to them getting a transformation and helping them through the discomfort of any parts that things could come up.

So that's just one example that I hear. But a bigger and more universal one is, we're going to pull things that you're not going to like. I'm going to show you things, that's part of the process.

That's a small thing to say to get people to chill out. So that if you do pull things on your third appointment with them, they're like, "Oh yeah, she told me I wasn’t going to like everything. I'm not going to panic."

That's the kind of thing I mean. You have to say it to the client. You have to say it in your content. You have to be like, "It's cool. I got this." You have to be the expert.

Sometimes being the expert means saying the thing that isn't people-pleasing. Like, "Hey, I can't help you if your self-esteem is in the trash. You gotta have done some self-work first."

That is going to be the game changer. That's what integration is, when what's happening behind the scenes and the depth of what's going on in your mind and with your clients is showing up online.

That is going to change your life. Because now you're going to attract the right clients. Your frequency and the signal you're putting out is going to be so clear that the right people can tune in to your station—your styling station, if you will, if this was radio—and hear exactly the frequency they need to meet you. Real you. How you're going to be when you meet them in real life—in person or online or whatever that container looks like—in a way that helps them get results because they feel seen in your marketing.

No one feels seen in tips. No one feels seen in tricks. Again, there's nothing wrong with them now and again, especially if you're wrapping them up for your ideal client to feel like, "Wow, she really knows how to find jeans for me specifically, a middle-aged mom of nine" or whatever. That's great. But that isn't going to be the thing that really gets someone who's ready to do the deep work. It's not going to signal.

Any time you're thinking, "Is this going to make me look like a real stylist?" I want you to remember that that is not you standing for a transformation for other people. That’s you trying to fit in in the styling industry.

The ones that do the best in the industry are the people that are not thinking that. Because they know that that's not what they're here for.

So maybe that means you unfollow some people or mute them. But when you are thoughtful and intentional about what you're putting out and you trust that the right people will find you, because you like yourself no matter what, you're going to be unstoppable in your business.

And that is not something that someone can give you in a strategy or a system or even a content plan.

I hope that this potentially missing piece of the puzzle helps you with your visibility and getting to the next level in your business and really trying to find your own voice so that you are coming from power in your visibility, not performance. I'll talk to you 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.