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.

Here's a statistic that might surprise you. 85% of my clients struggle with reliably attracting the right clients for the level of styling transformation they actually provide as stylists before we work together.

And I am not just talking about stylists who are starting out. I am talking about stylists making anywhere from $60,000 to $250,000. I have a client at half a million and I'm even just started working with a stylist to get her business to a million dollars.

That means that if you're listening and you're thinking, "My business isn't growing because I need better marketing," you are not alone. But what stylists are really saying 99% of the time is when I dig in a little deeper, what they mean is "I don't know how to attract the right clients, the ones who are ready for the kind of work I actually want to do. The ones who don't feel like I am working so damn hard to make happy."

Because if you're a stylist making any sort of sales from your marketing that you're putting out, your marketing is working. It's just not attracting the right people to make that income feel sustainable. You can have the same problems in your business, marketing, or otherwise, at $50k and at half a million dollars if you're willing to work harder instead of smarter.

The only difference between stylists making a lot of money who are burnt out and stylists who are unable to sustain the lifestyle they want with their income is their willingness to raise their prices or add more hours. Doesn't mean that those hours are being used better. Doesn't mean they're being used more strategically.

It's just a matter of how much time and how much hustle a stylist wants to put in. I see stylists hustling really hard to the point of very serious burnout and making a lot of money, but it's not worth it at some point to them. And so today I'm going to show you what's really standing in your way and how to fix it so you can stop over-delivering to clients who aren't prepared for transformation and start building the business you actually envisioned.

Here's the single most important principle that allowed me to get the styling consultancy to six figures in less than a year without a website. That's right. I just had an Instagram account, and that is it.

The client experience doesn't begin when a client signs your contract or pays you. It begins the moment they encounter your content, whether that's your website, your Instagram, your TikTok, your blog, your Substack. I don't care.

99% of the time, when I audit stylist messaging, it is very unintentionally, I will say, filled with shallow or quick fix promises without alluding to any depth of their process. And you're teaching potential clients to see you as transactional. And in many cases, like an outfit errand person, like you're just here to go run the errand of getting them some outfits, not as a trusted guide and expert.

And that's how you end up with clients who flake, resist your process, and treat you like the hired help instead of an expert they are ready and willing to partner with. Meanwhile, so many personal stylists that I work with are delivering these like truly transformational experiences. They are seeing real change in the lives of their clients.

They're helping them step into an entirely new way of seeing themselves, but their marketing is never reflecting that. So let me share how transformational marketing worked on me as a consumer, because I love me some transformational marketing from a consumer perspective. I like being marketed to in a transformational way.

I have spent a lot of money on experts in my business and my career. Not only does it make me a better coach, not only did it make me a better stylist, so many of those things and the people that I worked with, I have integrated across all different types of experts. I've integrated things I've learned from them into what I teach stylists today.

So there's always something that has made me money when I've spent that kind of money. But a few months ago, I hired a health coach. Her name is Ashley Pardo. She's wonderful. You can follow her over on Instagram or on TikTok. And at first, I just wanted someone to tell me, if I'm being honest with you, how to lose weight without telling me that I can't go to dinner or drink wine anymore.

Like I am just going to be totally transparent. But as I was like scrolling through TikTok, because that's where I mostly consume social media in my personal life, Ashley's content came across my feed and it really hit me differently. She was really talking about identity change and mindset and being able to live and eat more flexibly using this concept of body recomposition, which I'm sure many of you have heard of.

I had not. I had mostly been doing Pilates and I thought I knew everything I needed to know about how to lose weight. You've got a calorie deficit. You've got a lot of protein. I was missing a lot of things. And that's what I see with a lot of stylists that come to me.

It's like they kind of get the idea, but they're missing a lot of the details that make that picture really crisp and easy to carry out. Well, that's how I was about this topic. The same way that you just want to make more money and not be exhausted anymore, I just wanted to eat whatever I wanted within reason and live my life. So totally admit that.

I wouldn't say I wanted a transaction. I would say it never even occurred to me that there was something deeper possible. Yet, by the time I paid Ashley $4,000 in full from one quick Instagram DM exchange, I was absolutely mentally prepared for a much longer timeline than I initially wanted. Way more serious inner work to get behind and understand why I was eating the way that I was.

Macro tracking, which is something I said I would never do, and the discomfort of temporary change for long-term gain, and truly really ready for a deeper identity change, I wasn't just signing up to lose weight.

I was really, at that point, completely ready to make over my relationship with food and my body. And that just wasn't the plan when I started looking for a health coach. But Ashley's marketing educated me and prepared me for all of this.

And that's exactly what your marketing needs to do. Prime your clients to expect the process you actually deliver as a transformational stylist. And it's probably not what you have learned so far.

A few weeks ago, you heard me chat with my client, Gab. She's a New York City stylist who went from, I'll take whoever I can get to having clients she is genuinely so excited to work with every day. I will link that episode in the show notes in case you missed it.

It's a really good episode. When we started working together, Gab was doing both hourly and packages because she didn't want to turn anyone away. And this is a huge issue that I see with stylists.

It's so indicative of one foot in and one foot out, even though they know they're capable of being transformational. It takes me about three seconds to diagnose what's happening when I see that on someone's website. And she was basically saying yes to everything, even working with men when she really didn't want to work with men, like she just wasn't interested in men's styling.

And what changed everything for her, she talks about in that episode, wasn't just updating her packages or raising her prices, though we did that. She did the behind-the-scenes work to fully make over her business, implementing systems and understanding why she had the services she had and where the transformation points were within them. And afterwards, she describes in her own words, feeling like she was running a legitimate business instead of being "just a little girl" doing shopping for people.

And she doubled her prices in our time together. Then she immediately raised them again right when we finished. But the real transformation was in her marketing. She went from trying to convince people to work with her in her marketing to getting on sales calls and having conversations where the only real objections she had were time-based and logistical. So things like, "I'm traveling for work, can we start next week? Let me do the down payment now and I'll pay the rest when I get my bonus." That was it.

And she was like, "What is going on here?" What was going on here is that her marketing was doing the work for her and it was calling in people that were ready for the work. In the case of say me and my health coach, it wasn't that I wasn't willing to do the work. I just wasn't aware of the depth of certain people's process.

I was aware that if you're in a calorie deficit, you'll lose weight. But I wasn't aware of, until Ashley's marketing came across my feed, what might be getting in the way of all the times I tried that calorie deficit and it wasn't working. Because after a certain point, you have to wonder, "Well, if I have a plan and I'm not able to stick to it, what could be missing?" And that's what she clarified for me.

That's what the best stylists do in their market. They qualify and explain why you probably have tried all of these things to get where you want to go because I know who you are. And as a result of that, you're missing some pieces. And here's how my process fixes that. And here's what I bring to the table that you don't have on your own in the nicest way. The reason that works is because people trust you.

So I want to talk about the two psychological principles behind transformational marketing that are rooted in how human beings change. It's pretty wild to me that the personal styling world doesn't talk about these two because we talk about things like enclosed cognition, and I hear a lot of stylists in interviews say, "This is really science, like look good, feel good." But the way that they talk about it is actually incorrect.

And the things that actually facilitate change have to happen before the look good, feel good. It's not like put the clothes on your body and then you're a different person. And you know that that's true because you've probably gotten very different results with different clients.

Sometimes people are like, "Oh my God, you changed my life," and some people are like, "Yeah, it's fine." Well, that's because if your process isn't rooted in a repeatable foundation that gets people results because it's anchored in psychological principles of identity change, it's just kind of like, "We'll see what we get," right? The first theory of identity change that I looked at when I was pulling together the marketing that I teach my clients at all levels, but specifically we go into a lot of depth in Income Accelerator is the possible selves theory.

So I'm not necessarily teaching this, but all of the pillars that I pull from are based on this theory. So people are motivated by who they hope to become or who they fear becoming. And your marketing has to paint a clear, believable picture—believable being the key word there—of the version of themselves you help them and unlock with specific elements of your styling process.

That's how you become believable. You need to position your styling services as the bridge between where they are now and where they hope to be when they work with you. And if you have a million services, it's really hard to make that argument.

And if you have hourly and you have packages next to each other, no one's going to believe you because you don't look like an expert if you're giving everybody whatever they want all the time. Sorry, but that is the reality of it and you're really making your life too hard. So I know right away when I see that, that there is no thought going into how a person is led through transformation.

That doesn't mean the stylist isn't talented, doesn't have great skills, hasn't even gotten raving testimonials. It means that they have no repeatable process to get that again. And it probably means they don't know how to call in the right client to do that in their marketing.

The second psychological principle that my marketing framework is based in is called self-perception theory. And this is one of my favorites. It's that—and this is so true if you look at styling clients and what they tell you, but we'll just dive in here—people figure out who they are by observing their own actions.

So when your content invites them in your marketing to take small actions before they hire you—they're called micro moments. I call them snapshot moments in my marketing model—they start to see themselves differently and collect evidence through these micro actions that help them observe themselves behaving differently so that they can get a different result and they're warmed up to getting different results when they work with you.

I say that you can tell that this is true based on what our clients say, because you will notice that a lot of people say like, "I'm bad at style or whatever." And then if you go to their closet, they can only tell you the clothes that they got compliments on.

And that's so interesting because what they're not telling you is like, I wore this outfit and I felt really good in it. Or I used to feel really good in my body, like they'll say, I liked that outfit when I was thin, but I don't like it now. So they're showing you that there are all of these moments that they've collected evidence of who they are.

But they're also hoping that the styling container and their work with you will change them to all of a sudden be someone who views themselves as stylish. Well, it's going to be a lot easier to help rewire their view of themselves if your marketing is doing the work for you. If it doesn't, you're going to be dragging that client through and you're going to get more of people that are telling you what everybody else likes on them versus what they like on themselves.

You want your clients to be able to not just say what other people like, but what they like, because otherwise they're not coming from an internally led, self-focused place. And they're probably hoping with some magical thinking that you can just transform this. This is why—and this has really become a battle cry of mine, and I don't mean it to be harsh because I know people are just doing the best they can—but this is why if 60% to 80% of your marketing is random tips, trends, and tricks, and most people don't see even 50% of your content, given algorithms, you're not building enough evidence through micro actions in your marketing to help them think, "Ooh, their marketing is giving me evidence here that I could actually become the person I want to be," because it just doesn't have the right percentage of the correct information to convert them.

Ways that I do that, I use both self-perception theory and possible selves theory is for example, when I did the transactional versus transformational series that you're listening to now, I kind of painted a picture of two different roads you could go down and two different experiences of your business. And I did that in order for stylists to be able to see like, "Okay, I'm experiencing clients who are behaving like this and I started my business wanting to experience clients like this. I want to be transformational as a stylist," that's 90% of the people I work with want.

I can work with both, but my frameworks are for transformation because they're just two different ways of looking at styling, and not everybody wants both. But most people have been taught how to do transactional styling and then hope to get transformational results, which you can get for the right people, but it will be inconsistent and that inconsistency will gnaw at you and make you feel insecure.

And so possible selves theory, when I think about that and I'm like, "Great, how am I going to relate this to my marketing?" Because I don't teach you anything that I don't actually do and money of these podcasts are evidence of that, I've created series that helps explain foundational principles that you can identify with. And I wrap that, I wrap those foundational principles in experiences you have in your life to show you that you have the evidence you need to believe you can become someone that makes whatever you want to make.

So you hear that all the time here without me saying it. And the second self-perception theory, these little micro actions are things that help give people evidence of who they can be. And so when people say like touch points in your marketing are really important, how many times someone interacts with your content? It's based on self-perception theory, which is why you want to make sure that you're asking the right questions, say an Instagram polls or things like that, because not every interaction is the same.

Some of these things you send me the link to your shirt is not the same interaction as, "Oh my gosh, I never thought of it that way." And that is what matters. Knowing what kind of interaction is actually going to lead you to sales, that's like money in the bank.

When you know that, it will change your life. An example of how, if you follow me on Instagram, I use self-perception theory. And I do this also just because I want to build a community of stylists that change the world.

And so like, yes, it sometimes leads to sales, but honestly, I'm more interested in rewriting the narrative of stylists broadly. And so I do the Monday group chat series, which many of you have seen, which is basically like it's a prompt and a question box where you can respond your answer and people really like this and people really like looking at the responses because it's all about things that you've experienced, things you've overcome, wins you've had, goals you have. And it helps us all keep our focus in the right place as transformational stylists and to build evidence of what is possible for you and who you could become.

And I also do that in my coaching. Like we always start with wins. We always wrap up with wins. I always do that in my one-to-one. I reflect back to clients how far they've come. That is part of being transformational as a stylist, as a coach.

These are principles that you can bring them into any world, but they are reflected in everything I do because I know that you cannot have a transformational experience one-on-one with a client if the work beforehand isn't being done in your marketing. And that brings me to something I want to talk about that I know can be embarrassing. I know it can be difficult, but if you are building your business, imitating other stylists or judging other stylists or looking at what everyone else is doing or comparing yourself and being mean to yourself or guessing your way through your marketing every week.

If your styling offers are designed to deliver real identity change because you copied them, how exactly are you going to consistently create the transformation you're promising people? This isn't about whether you're talented. You can be brilliant as a stylist, but helping people step into the next version of themselves using systems, messaging, and psychological principles is an entirely different skill set than being a good stylist or having a natural eye.

And when you say, "I should be able to figure this out by myself," first of all, that's illogical because no one's born with this, myself included. But you're thinking about your pride before you're thinking about building the business that supports the transformation that you want to ultimately give your clients. It is another skill set.

Being good at style is fine if it's for you or the people in your family, being good at style and helping people be the next version of themselves, and truly be transformational, which again, if you don't want to do that, that's cool. There are other options for you.

But if that's what you say you want, you're going to have to get the skills that go with it and think through, "Why would I think that said something bad about me? If I'm expecting people to come to me for help," because that's going to get in the way in your business. What's really on the line for stylists who cannot get themselves to get help or who dance around experts or get on sales calls and then ghost them is not the other person. Yeah, it's not the best behavior, but most importantly, the difference is that when you are behaving like that, you do not have access to a transformational business model that consistently changes lives.

I'm not saying you haven't changed anyone lives. You don't know how to do that with any level of certainty, any level of repeatability, any level of not burning yourself out and overgiving in order to deliver that result, which you shouldn't have to do. And you are giving up fierce loyalty in the form of repeat clients that will just give you so much more space to write marketing that's transformational, to deliver repeatedly.

If a person acts like a partner, again, it's important to know where our responsibility ends and where's their start. It's also part of being a transformational stylist is holding boundaries really well. And that's why it's fine to look at what other stylists are doing when you're in your first year or two, when you're still looking and dealing with your friends and family.

But if you want to be taken seriously and you want to build a serious styling business and you want to be like the stylist you look up to, many of whom are my clients, people tell me on sales calls, you are going to have to look in the mirror and answer the question, "Why do I think it is legitimate for people to come and look to me as an expert if I believe I am above crafting a business that positions me as one?"

That's the truth. And that will keep you stuck that question longer than just going and getting the answer and moving on with your life. And a lot of stylists worry that if they're honest about the work of transformation, the work of say you're virtual, like you're going to have to return clothes, they're worried that when I tell them to say you're going to see clothes that are not for you necessarily. And that's okay, that's part of the process, they're worried that saying those things are going to scare people away. And I want to just share that that is not true. That is absolutely scarcity thinking.

It's probably the foundation of some of the other problems like raising your rates or overgiving that you're dealing with in your business. I know that because like same, I don't say anything on here that I haven't experienced. So when you're afraid to be honest in your marketing, you're not allowing people to have the transformation they could have because you're not psychologically preparing them for what to expect.

For example, on this podcast, I'm never going to tell you that all of my clients got to six figures in six months or whatever, because not everybody comes into my programs, even though I have levels for programs and I qualify people with the same skill set. Some people are marketing all the time. Some people aren't marketing consistently.

And so they have to build the muscle of being a consistent marketer. Maybe it's going to take those people a year or a year and a half to build up enough great dream clients to have them repeating. So they get to 30 or 40 percent repeat client rate so that that six figures comes easily.

Other people come to me with lots of ideal clients because they've been marketing for a long time. They also have lots they don't want to deal with, but we have more data. We have more information, right? They've raised their prices more.

Maybe they're coming in with higher prices. And so they get a result quicker, but it's not about how quick it happens. It's about whether or not with the skill set you have, you are able to apply it and get the result.

There's no timeline. You can buy a client a whole season's worth of clothes. They may not all wear them in that season. Doesn't mean they didn't have a transformational experience. And so you have to not be as attached to what the client does with their results. You have to be attached to guiding them through the process and being honest about that process.

Because if I told you everybody in my programs gets to six figures in six months, number one, I would be lying. Anyone that says that is lying. That's just ridiculous.

And also, logically, can anybody promise that? I can't promise you that people are going to do the work. So I can't promise anybody a result. You can't promise that people are going to wear the clothes.

You can't promise they're going to feel confident. And when you take too much responsibility for your client's part of the process, them being responsible for themselves and communicating and being a partner, you will worry about your communication scaring people away. That is your codependency.

And that is what's getting in the way, not what you're saying in your marketing. Transformational clients are not just hiring a stylist for cute outfits. They're hiring a leader to guide them at a critical point in their identity transformation.

And so the difference between stylists that do incredibly well and make it are ones that don't just see themselves as stylists. They see themselves as transformational guides for people that are already in the process of identity change. They are not trying to drag or convince anybody that they should try to change their identity.

And people like that want honesty, just like I wanted honesty from my nutrition coach, because I am a person that is committed to transformation in all areas of my life. I just wasn't as aware of what was possible for me until I met my coach's marketing. And because of who I am and because of the point in my life I'm at, I was educated pretty quickly and signed up with no problem.

And I'm getting a lot out of this experience. And I'm already thinking of signing up again, because I get that identity change takes time. So I am not trying to rush the process. And I am not questioning her credentials.

The methodology that I teach stylists, my marketing methodology, shows them how to take their experience with their best clients, their own perspective, and their philosophy on styling to create marketing that works for transformational clients. It will not attract people that don't want to do that type of work.

So you don't have to even worry about getting the wrong people. And they may not be 100% the best fit. But if somebody doesn't want to do returns, and you talk about that, and why that's an important part of the process, because they're going to understand themselves better, even when they find things that they don't like, you will teach them how to analyze that piece so they know not to buy it again.

If someone's down for that, someone's down to actually understand themselves, the returns will not be a big deal. If they just want you to be an outfit picker and errand person for them, then they're not going to be interested. And your marketing just saved both of you a lot of time and money.

And so when you learn how to take the things about your perspective, and your experience with the clients you want to work with, you're not ever going to sound like anybody else on the internet. It's not possible, because nobody else can replicate your perspective and your experiences and put them together in the same way. So ultimately, this is about trusting yourself to mine your own experiences as an expert instead of looking at what everyone else is doing.

Because transformational marketing focuses on depth, not speed. It frames style as a reflection of identity, not just some cute clothes or saving time. It attracts self-aware growth-minded clients who value the process, because without a clear process, they can't relax enough into it to trust you.

And when you market this way, clients feel at ease with you before they ever reach out because you've already started building trust with them. That trust starts their transformation before they ever work with you and it makes your life so much easier. Because now most stylists are hustling in their marketing to get whoever they can get and then over-delivering because the client isn't a good fit.

Imagine if you could just sit down and market once, using all of the things you put into a business that's intentional and not a rip off of someone else's and get the right client and then not have to work as hard to do the job you already are qualified to do, wouldn't that be wild? Amazing, right? It can all work together. And in fact, it should.

So if you're done attracting misaligned clients, ready to stop guessing about what to say in your marketing and serious about building a business that reflects the expertise and voice you have worked hard to cultivate—I know that because you're listening still—that is exactly what we do inside Income Accelerator.

And the last round for 2025 starts September 29th. As I record this, there are three amazing women who have already enrolled before I've even had a chance to do any marketing. So I'm mentioning it in this episode because I don't know if we'll even have spots left by the time I mid-launch in August.

There is an application in the show notes if you're interested in one of those eight spots left. And if this episode gave you a new perspective on your marketing, share it on Instagram, tag me and tell me what stood out for you. I want to cheer you on because this episode alone, I think could make huge, huge, huge impact on how much money you make in the latter part of 2025 if you really take to heart some of the contents we talked about. So I'll talk to you in the next episode.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me. It turns out that social proof is actually pretty important. So if you 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.