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.

So the inspo for this episode came from the social media trend: "Things I would tell you if I wasn't afraid to hurt your feelings." I love it because the information that people were sharing out of this trend ended up being some of their best content that I had ever heard, and really made them seem like an expert. So I think that part of it is that you shouldn't need this social media trend to share the things with the people that you're serving so that they can go into the experience and the transformation as educated as possible so that they are locked in and you don't lose them.

I think we've become a little too fragile around the truth of what it takes to get results. What I found is that telling people the truth when you consistently show that you also care about them and have their best interests in mind actually does really well for business and honesty is not salesy. It's just honesty. People trust you as a result. You don't have to do a hard sell or be manipulative or do those "hey, girl" Instagram DM tactics.

Because most of the time, when I look at a stylist's business, the reason they're struggling is because they're not actually telling their audience the truth about what will be required of them or what this transformation actually looks like. It's not that they're actively lying. They're just not confronting the things that they know they need to say. So I am 100% at the end of the Income Accelerator enrollment window as of the airing of this episode. So I am going to leave you with three truths that are either going to wake you up and move you forward because it's last call, or they're going to sting a little, and maybe you'll realize that you're not ready.

But I would rather you understand why you're not ready versus just telling yourself that there's going to be this perfect day when you will have everything in your life sorted. Then you'll get your business where you want it to be. Because that's not actually how life works. It's not how running a successful business works either.

So the first truth that I want to share with you is you're not signing clients from your marketing, because you're waiting to feel inspired, or you are only creating marketing from what inspires you.

So if you're waking up every day trying to figure out what to post, not knowing where to look in your current business to pull the information you need in order to draft content, or you're looking at what you're wearing or you like or what your style struggles are, you are not marketing your business. You are journaling on the internet. Marketing your business requires you to start with two things, the offer you're trying to sell at any given time, and awareness of what the people that you are trying to sell and serve to need to hear to buy that offer.

Marketing is intentionally speaking to the right people in a way that either moves them toward the decision to hire you or away from it. Both are perfectly great. The reason you don't have enough clients, the reason you're not signing people from all of the efforts you're putting in Canva and then posting, is not because you're not talented. It's not because of the price of your offers.

Now, I'm not going to say that your offers don't need to change. I don't know you. But I'm telling you that if no one is converting to a sales call, never mind to an actual sale from your marketing, it isn't the price.

But it's always easier to blame the market than it is to blame your marketing. The difference between people who act as professionals in this industry and people who are over here taking it like it's a hobby is that they don't blame their market. They blame their actions, and then they fix them. By blame, I don't mean shame. I just mean they take responsibility and they say, "Hmm, how can I do better here?" Not "Does the algorithm hate me? My account isn't growing. I have thousands of followers, but none of them are the right people to buy."

You only need 30 people to buy from you in a year. None of the thousands that follow you are the right fit. Yeah, I don't think so. The platform and the medium you are using is about you and your desires. Where do you want to show up? Where do you enjoy interacting? What medium of content do you like putting out? Video, written, whatever. That's about you. The actual content that you put out in those places is about your ideal client and it should be based on your offer and how it is right for them.

When stylists want to add more of themselves to their business, they tend to do it in their marketing based on what they're inspired by. That's like a really expensive place to make this mistake. I would so much rather you put who you are, your experience, things you care about in your offers, in your positioning, and the way that you create your client experience, because that's actually going to make the difference and make you unique.

I'm not saying I want you to post the same things as every other stylist because it's not going to get you anywhere. Of course, I want you to sharpen your perspective in your marketing and how you talk and try different angles, but not from a place of necessarily what inspires you. It may inspire you, it may not, but instead from a place of being clear. These are the things that I need to say to move people closer to a sale repeatedly and over time.

You have to remember that people need to see and hear about your offer by name, which means you can't just say any offer. You can't just say get on a discovery call and talk about the actual offer between seven and 12 times within a relatively short period, meaning in the course of a few weeks for somebody to buy. Now, imagine also that people don't see everything you post, that if you take days off on social media, that you're lowering it there, which means if that's the case, if you're taking days off, which I do, then your messaging has to be salient every time you show up.

I want you to have the problem that I have in my business. The problem I have marketing my business is that I have so many places to pull ideas from, I don't have enough time to do it. That's how I teach people to conduct their business, because your business should be feeding your marketing, not your inspiration. This is why so many stylists that I work with market less, after they learn my marketing method, because they are producing content that is so much better and so much more salient for the people that it matters to.

This is why it is absolutely necessary for you to be putting out really, really, really good content when you are putting it out. Not perfect content, but good content. Because there is no need for you to be putting out content five or seven days a week. I don't do that. I don't expect my clients to do that. Eventually, if you have a team of people working with you, sure, fine, great. But I only want you looking at and replicating content that we know is leading to sales.

There are very specific types of content that do that for people. So that is the metric I want you to track, not how excited you are, not how many likes you get, not if you go viral, because many of my clients have been on here talking about how that is not a metric that has done anything good for their business. So that's what I want you to think about. Am I starting my marketing every time I market, thinking about how I'm either warming people up to hear more about my offer, talking about the offer, or inviting them into the offer?

There are a lot of ways to do that creatively that don't stress people out in terms of constantly just talking about your offer. You can make it lifestyle-based. You can make it a client story. You can do all kinds of things, but I am always talking about an offer even when I'm not overtly selling because I know how often people need to hear about the offers, and that's what you should be doing too, or else you're not marketing your business. You're just messing around on the internet.

Truth number two, everyone you admire in the styling industry is paying to play. I used to be so wildly naive about this, and I did not understand that the people who were making the best of Boston or the best of Chicago or whatever list were basically paying for that in some way. They were either paying for ad placements throughout the year in the magazine. They knew someone. They were going to the events. They were doing charity stuff. They were asking people to vote for them in all these other circumstances or paying to be in contests to be the best coach in the world or whatever. They were paying essentially for expensive PR through some means.

It was so eye-opening to me when I started paying serious money to be in masterminds to get into higher-tier clients. I think the first one I ever did was like 30,000. Because I realized how many people were paying to get that as seen in Forbes on their bio. I just want to be clear about something. I have no problem with people paying to get these things. That's the way the game works. But if you don't know it, you're not playing the same game as the people you admire. I'm not saying every single person that got good press or media placement paid for it because that's not necessarily the case.

But there are a few big ones that people get, like Forbes Ad Council or Forbes something council, I forgot what it's called. But those people are paying for that. The reason why people pay for coaches, consultants, socially acceptable validity like Forbes is because they get there faster. They go where they want to go. But very few people in the online space are doing it with sheer talent, yet so many stylists who are struggling to get to consistent income months and are struggling with their marketing who can't seem to figure out how to piece it together think that they just need to try harder.

I'm not saying that when you pay for those things, you don't need to try in terms of the execution. You do, probably more than you realize. These are not magical keys that unlock hundreds of thousands of dollars while you sit on your couch, but you won't even know the rules of the game if you're not paying to get into the game. The people that you admire, the people who I look at, who I'm like, "Wow, they got there in eight months. They got there in a year," meaning six figures, multiple six figures, they paid for that speed. That doesn't mean that they didn't also earn it. It's both. They're some of the hardest workers I know.

But it's interesting how so many people that work really hard and keep not getting to where they want to go feel like that's a badge of honor and talk down the people that are paying for mentors and masterminds and this help to get where they want to go. But only one of those people is going further faster. It's not the person who's judging the other one.

So you have to understand that right now in the styling industry, and I've talked to multiple people in fashion tech over the past two weeks who are building platforms or have platforms or are looking to hire stylists as consultants, which is going to be a massive amount of money in this industry very soon, some of my clients are doing that right now, they are telling me about what they're seeing and what I'm seeing from sales calls.

There are men and women leaving multiple six-figure jobs. We're talking lawyers, brand consultants, people that are CMOs of big companies who are putting the money from their corporate jobs into their styling business right out the gate. They're not playing the same game as people who are over here doing it a little here, a little there when the money comes to them, because the money never comes to them. These people know that. That's why there are people commanding rates that have been in the industry for a very short amount of time way higher than people that I've worked with that have been in the industry for a decade.

It's because they invested and they got the skills and they understand luxury business and everybody else doesn't. That's the bottom line. So if you're out here thinking you're going to piece together or you're just going to spend money on things like a photo shoot here or a little design update on your website here and you're going to get to where all these people are that you admire, the people that you are stalking on social media, you're not even playing the same game. As a matter of fact, you're not even playing on the same field. They're in another country playing an entirely different game and that groundswell of stylists that are coming in from the corporate world and investing right off the bat is getting bigger every single day.

So this idea that if you just grind harder and hope for the best, those days are over. But it's not unethical also. This is where I want us to check our thought process. What are we getting out of telling ourselves the story that those people are bad? Because they're trying to help the people they came here to serve faster. They're not bad. This isn't illegal.

Let me just remind you, people go to college so that they can get into rooms they wouldn't be in before, so that they can learn things they wouldn't have been before, so they can get into networks they haven't been in before. But because everyone else in your life does that likely, you don't think it's bad.

But you probably don't have a lot of people that are willing to pay $50,000 or $100,000 like I have, to get into the right rooms and then be able to take that information and help more people with it. So you tell yourself that it's bad. But it's literally no different than all the other things. It's just not as normalized because most people don't have the guts to do it.

So you can white knuckle it on your own and stay stuck and wonder how they got there, which is why I want to share this with you. Because I know the top stylists in the industry. Many of them are my clients.

I am constantly telling people who come to me and say, "Oh, I admire this person. I admire that person. I can't believe you work with this person or whatever," like, "Yeah, they paid money to get where they want to be, not just with me but with tons of other experts." So the thing you admire about them is totally available to you, but you think $3,500 to get your business where it needs to go is too much. That's a bigger mindset problem because to those people, that's nothing. That's what gets them out of bed. That's not the fee that would have them stumbling over themselves.

I get it. The first time I spent $15,000, I thought I was going to vomit. I couldn't even believe it. But eventually you acclimate because that's how growth works. So if something in the way of this for you feels really edgy, this conversation, that's your work, because you own a business. This isn't a charity.

So when you want to get where you want to go, you do what you got to do. What's standing in a lot of people's way is the unchecked assumption that spending money to get somewhere makes you bad. It's just not true because you've done it in multiple places in your life, I bet. But it's been normalized, and so you don't even realize it.

When I think about what people tell me about stylists who they admire, and then they tell me what they're doing, it's like one is out here doing the thing they need to do every day, not necessarily feeling comfortable doing it, by the way. They're not magical unicorns, and the other one is journaling and hoping that it happens, they're again not playing the same game. They bought a ticket to their next level and other stylists, the majority of them, because only 12% hit six figures. So the majority of stylists are out here journaling and trying to manifest something while everybody else is just actually doing the thing scared. That's the only difference.

Here's the other thing about getting in the room and understanding what it takes to be successful. I'm not saying you bankrupt your family. But one thing I did realize at one point that was very eye opening and a little bit uncomfortable was that when I started getting in the rooms with people in these masterminds and professional groups, I didn't realize that my prices and the way that I was talking about what I did was literally repelling people that would have been the right fit because I was too afraid to bet on myself and be bigger. I was too afraid of how it would look to the people around me.

But once I started spending money to get into the right rooms with people who were far surpassing me, I had no choice but to up my game. I know a lot of people are afraid to get into rooms and spend money because they've done it before and they've been burned in the online space. That's why also you need to understand that people are afraid of that for hiring you.

So why you need to spend time really thinking about your marketing and being intentional and not just starting with your inspiration, like I said in point one, is because people need to trust you. It's why I give away hours and hours of free content, because I know the ask is big and I don't even charge as much as I could be charging.

So the industry is changing. What you're going to see is that AI is absolutely reshaping who will be willing to pay for styling from a real-life human being. So trust is going to get higher because people will have access to styling tools for free or very low cost that don't even require them to be in an interaction or be "inconvenienced" by another person.

So if you don't know how to position yourself now to be one of the stylists that people actually go to, because AI is going to take over transactional styling, we're already seeing it, it is about to be a situation in this industry where people that are not just dabbling, not really taking it seriously, maybe they look legit on the outside, those businesses are about to absolutely crumble.

You're not going to be able to charge people a couple of hundred dollars here, a couple of thousand dollars there when you feel like actually marketing your business. You're not going to be able to treat this industry like a hobby because it is about to explode in terms of what is available in terms of technology, in terms of shopping platforms, in terms of ways that stylists are going to be able to do their job better.

So if you're in this mindset still of "I shouldn't have to pay for any professional software," you're about to be blown out of the water because it's not just going to be about the software. It's also going to be about the fact that people are going to be able to do things faster because of AI within the industry. So we're about to see an entire shift, an entire shift.

It's not that people won't go to stylists anymore. It's that it will require more of stylists to actually make it. That was happening anyways. Because again, only 12% of stylists ever hit six figures. That means the majority never actually hit $50,000 is what the data shows us. The majority. That's not great. You could make more working for someone else.

The thing is, it's not actually hard.

You just have to be consistent. So if you want to be where those other people are, they are spending money in anticipation already of those changes, you're going to have to make investments before you're comfortable and before you're ready, because you are going to need to understand that there are rooms and information that you don't have access to because you weren't born in them, nor was I or anyone else, that are going to give you the rules of the game. Sometimes you need to pay to play the game. Otherwise, you're just standing in the parking lot of the stadium.

Number three, growth in your business is going to require growth in your emotional maturity. This one might sting a little bit, but I have to say it because I can't share the other two tips without this one. If you are relying on your business to give you validation and dopamine hits or proof that you're good enough, you're not going to be in the headspace to make the kind of decisions that will actually grow your income.

You can't market for likes or for validation or when it's convenient. Because studies are showing that 87% of the time, when people are on social media and they see someone share a link, they go right past it because they are sick of being sold to all the time.

So if you're constantly, for example, throwing up links to clothes because it makes you a little bit of affiliate money because you don't really want to do the uncomfy work of learning how to sell or learning how to market properly, you're losing people every time you put up an offer that's yours, a styling offer, because you've desensitized them to links. Now they just think of you as the person they either get what they want from, or that's it. They don't think of you as an expert.

So when you're uncomfortable doing the hard things in your business, so you're taking these shortcuts before you have the foundation, I'm all about a shortcut, but first you have to have the foundation and get how it works so you can take the right shortcut, and I think that's a good example, the linking one, because it's not that there's a problem with you giving out links. I help a lot of clients figure out how to build out that income, but it's always in a gated way. It's never in a public way so that we're only front-facing and selling the actual offer.

What comes up for people is that this feels uncomfortable. So if you have a limited ability to deal with short-term discomfort, or you are obsessed with likes or validation, or looking popular on the internet in order to get where you ultimately want to go, that's going to require some emotional growth on your part to get there.

It's going to require you to be able to sit with being consistent when no one's clapping. It's going to require you to learn how to take yourself for a walk and chill out when a client tells you that they don't like everything. It's going to require you to not be looking at what other stylists are doing and sometimes taking yourself out of spaces where other stylists are just hanging out and complaining about how hard the industry is right now. You need to put yourself in the spaces and in the mindset and in the emotional headspace to be successful. Because the reality is, the only hard part of becoming good at something is sitting with your own discomfort.

You don't actually have to be perfect. You don't have to have designer clothes or a perfect house to show up on Instagram stories. You just have to be consistent. Consistency itself is not what's hard. Because we all brush our teeth every day, right? We pack our kids' lunch even when we don't feel like it. So why can't we be consistent in this thing that's important to us? Because your emotional regulation skills aren't where they need to be, because you are looking for validation from something that isn't its job. You should be just as proud of a post if it gets two likes or if it gets 2,000 likes.

You have to keep showing up when your launch is quiet. You have to keep showing up when you aren't really sure what your next step is. You have to keep showing up when somebody else gets the opportunity or the deal that you wanted. You have to do it without making your business responsible for how you feel about yourself. Because there are so few stylists at the income level that would even allow them to get some help and get some breathing room, you're seeing that without that skill, people don't last long.

That's why I'm saying you have to get the basic skills of business so that you could be successful enough to get help, so you can have breathing room. Because even in the online space, there are people making hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. But what they're not telling you is how much it costs them to make that, what it costs to launch, what it costs to do those things. What those people have that you don't is the ability to take risks and sit with the discomfort of it. I'm not even asking you to take a risk yet. I just need you to take the risk of putting yourself out there when everyone isn't clapping or paying attention.

Because that's the first and only risk you have to worry about. All the other ones will get easier once you build that skill. Growth in your business is not the same thing as being perfect. It is the exact opposite. It is being imperfect and allowing yourself to be imperfect until you master something. There is nothing you will become good at in your life from walking to tying your shoes to eating food to raising your kids, that didn't take practice.

But yet it is wild to me how often people expect that they're going to launch a little business on the side here that involves other people's feelings, emotions, and image, and it's going to be easy. Truthfully, it isn't hard; it's just hard to sit with yourself when no one's clapping. It's truly not hard. I don't know what else to tell you. Doesn't mean it's easy, but it's not hard. So, without the skill of learning to validate yourself, soothe yourself, be with yourself, not assume people are rejecting you when they're actually just ignoring you, you are not going to get where you want to go.

When you have that skill locked in, literally the world is going to be eating out of your hand because that's all it requires. That's it. Inspiration is not a strategy. People are paying to play a game that you may not even be aware of because you're not putting yourself in the position or in the rooms you need to. You're not going to get to the levels and the places that the people you most admire in the styling industry and outside of it are without learning to regulate yourself when no one's clapping for you.

If any of these landed for you and you feel in your gut that this is what you've been avoiding or this is what you need to hear to lock in to get to your next level, this is your last call for the fall 2025 round of Income Accelerator. The next one will be in six months, and in six months, you could have an entirely different business and reality.

Reach out, DM me, let me know what you're thinking. Fill out an application in the show notes as soon as possible when you hear this. If you come to this episode later, all of these things are incredibly valid. Maybe you'll be ready for the next round of Income Accelerator with me. I'll talk to you next time.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me. It turns out that social proof is actually pretty important. So if you could help me out, I'd so appreciate it. If you just had a quick free moment and could leave me a rating or review on the podcast app, that would be killer. And even better, if you wanted to share this episode on Instagram and tag me, that would totally make my day and it would bring so much more awareness to the podcast and would help other stylists just like you who are looking to build lucrative styling business because the better each of us does, the better all of us do. Thanks for hanging out with me and I'll chat with you next time.