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.

You are listening to the Six Figure Series. This is a series for stylists who have crossed that six-figure mark but are still feeling like they're carrying the entirety of the same business problems they had at $60,000 on their back.

Over these episodes, I'm breaking down what keeps you from scaling with ease and what you can do to break out of that feeling of technically being successful but never feeling like you've earned the rest you deserve. Today is part two in this series, and we're covering a conversation I'm having a lot this year with my stylists who are already at six figures: creative CEO decision-making skills.

I want to talk to you about why this is the point where I most often have this discussion with stylists. Once a stylist hits six figures, they finally have the revenue to hire help. Usually, they have to be into six figures, like $150,000. It's usually not just $100,000 because again, you're not taking that home, right? But this is usually the point where they're able to get a VA or maybe get a marketing contractor, a PR person, someone that can help them do some of the work.

That's why I focus on this six-figure mark so much in my content. But without realizing it, a lot of stylists hit this point and start hiring people, often to the detriment of even being able to pay themselves. So they're really working to hire people, not to pay themselves, and to hire people, which is a massive problem I see in this industry. Not enough stylists are actually writing themselves a paycheck, which begs the question of “How are you at multiple six figures hiring people, but haven't figured out a business model where you can pay yourself and hire people?”

There's a real problem there. That's why I say to stylists that are at that midpoint—$40,000, $50,000, $60,000—you can have the same problems at multiple six figures as you do with $40,000, $50,000, $60,000, because I see it every day. They're not paying themselves at $50,000. They're not paying themselves at $150,000. So this is why I came out of the gate in this business really talking to that mid-level, because that mid-level—what you do there, the habits you have there, regardless of your years in business—that level of income is where you often get stuck in your decision-making and your business savvy, to be honest.

I know that because I work with so many stylists who are at multiple six figures and are still, in many ways, executing on a day-to-day basis like they did when they were making half as much, even though they have a team. Because what happens is, without realizing it, we hand over the keys to our business and expect these people we hire to drive the business, while we stay stuck in busy worker mode, not in growth and expansion “next level us” mode.

Your real job is to step into the role of a creative CEO the minute you start thinking it's time to bring on a team. You're expecting the people you hire to not just do the work, but to make the decisions that grow your business. This is where, unintentionally, the success that you may have spent so much time trying to reach starts to feel like a very expensive additional stressor in your life. It's like having more kids that you have to manage.

This happens because instead of seeing those new hires as execution support, a lot of stylists hand over the decision-making in their business and think, “Great, now I'm just going to style. I'm just going to do what I got into this business to do. I don't have to make decisions anymore.” That is where the problem begins. It's also why a lot of stylists at six figures have a lot of shame about getting help because they realize that something is off here.

They realize that they shouldn't be spending this much money for help and not getting where they want to go, but they're not quite sure how to turn it around. Oftentimes, the hiring of people becomes a status symbol in the online world and in big masterminds and fancy networking groups. I'm not saying I'm against it—we're going to get into how to do this better—but it becomes a source of shame to have to cut it back in order to rebuild it forward.

I want to talk about it because it shouldn't be. You can pay for someone else's time in your business, and you should, but you cannot pay to outsource your responsibility for the direction of your business. Many business owners, not just stylists, hit six figures. They start building a team, and then they assume that their business is going to run itself if they just throw enough money at those experts.

Because if you don't understand why you are doing something in your business, how it fits into your larger business ecosystem, and what metrics matter—hint, it is not likes and comments—you will end up paying people to run strategies that keep you in the role of constantly being on a hamster wheel of busy and booked out, but never give you the breathing room to build what is going to get you to your next level and give you more freedom and not have you constantly in execution mode.

Examples are you hire a social media team, and they grow your following. Your posts are getting likes. Maybe they're getting comments. Maybe they're going viral or getting saves, but you don't have sales calls. You hire a PR firm and they get you press mentions in some impressive places, but you don't have any sales calls. You hire a VA and your inbox looks neat, but your calendar is still overstuffed with clients who you shouldn't have to take because they're paying you for a rate that you had five years ago that you're still letting them pay you when you should have said, “Hey, that rate has expired. You're either coming with me at my new rate or we'll part ways.”

Guess what the hardest part of this is, and why I think so many people that are in this position that I've talked to struggle to get help, because they don't even know how to express the issue. Because, technically, all of these contractors are doing their job. They're growing your account. They're getting you the cool placements in PR. They're making your inbox look good. They have fulfilled their side of the contract, and this is something I've had to coach many of my clients on.

They want to blame their social media strategist they saw once, but the reality is they didn't give the people that do that job the metrics. They just defaulted to whatever they said: “Oh, look, we got you more likes.” “Oh, that's great, thank you, I'm so excited about that.” But they never said, “Yeah, but after six months, I'm not getting sales calls, so we got to fix this strategy.”

The people that you hire to help you don't see your clients in their homes and in their closets. They don't know why, unless you tell them, people tell you on sales calls that they wanted to hire you specifically. They just followed the deliverables that they promised in their contract that they give to everyone else. You agreed to it because you didn't know maybe what success looked like.

You hadn't figured out what converts your audience to begin with. You hadn't thought about where PR fits in the process. You hadn't thought about how you're going to convert people from website views. So they did their job. This is why it's tricky. You can complain, but you get stuck in the sense of “Well, but if I get rid of them, I still need to put out social media, and I'm still left not knowing what to do. At least I don't have to do social media.” I get it.

But this is an expensive trap, and it's not the cost of a team. It's not like this is how it has to go. The real trap in this situation is not the money you're paying for people. It's the cost of believing that other people should own the decisions and the success of your business. It's often an unintentional belief. I don't know anyone that's like, “Yes, that's what I'm doing.”

For better or for worse, when you own and run a business, it will always be your job to make the decisions about what success looks like. It will always be your job to know ultimately what your clients need to hear to buy. This is why—and I'm not just saying this because it's me, I just want to say that because I have been in this role when I was a stylist—but why it is very hard for many stylists to work with coaches that don't understand the industry isn't because they don't understand personal styling. It's because they don't understand what actually gets people to move and take action toward the sale, because it's not the same as what most coaches out there are telling people in business.

I say that as someone who has sat on both sides of this equation. I know that one of my absolute superpowers is being able to look at any niche, any group of people, and say to a stylist, "Here is the actual thing that they're buying when they hire you. It is not the five extra minutes you're saving them in the morning. It's not that you're quick. It's not that you have cute clothes. Here's what it is. That's why you have to do this. That's why you have to say this. If that doesn't work, let's look over here. Here are the questions that you have to ask in order to clarify this."

They just don't know enough. Again, I think this is true. I have friends who are interior designers that hire coaches, and they have hired coaches who don't know how to help them figure out how to deal with different elements. They buy the furniture for the client, or how to invoice people because they have their hours, and then they have the amount of product that they buy, and they have all this stuff. They just can't help them through some of those systems. I've talked to them about that.

This is where there are really, really important elements, especially when you're getting started or you're stuck at the $50,000 to $60,000 mark, where having someone that gets the industry is just going to cut years of crap out of the way and years of experience that would take forever to gain, that would be really, honestly, very unprofitable for you to try to struggle through, and just get it from someone who knows what they're talking about and has years in the trenches, and then move along your way and worry about other problems so you can get a team of people and you can be the one that ultimately knows how to run that team because you know what matters to your client base.

Then you can focus on what your vision is for yourself and what you want to be known for after you get to the couple of hundred thousand dollar mark. Again, it's not that it's a problem to have a team. It's that you have to have the solid foundation much earlier, or else you just bring really expensive problems with you into the multiple six-figure mark. Then you pay for them twice—with your time and with your income—because you're hiring people to make the same mistakes you made at $40,000. Let's not do that.

When you hire help in your business, what you are doing is buying hours back. Even if you hire a consultant like me, you're buying time back. You are not buying a vision. You're not buying the conviction you have about where you're going and if it's going to work. I cannot give you confidence. I can help you see things and think through it so that you have more conviction and confidence. But I can only give you things to respond to in order to build your vision toward where you want to go.

Ultimately, you, me, everyone that owns a business is responsible for feeling into the strategy that someone gives you and knowing if it aligns with where you're going and who you want to impact. A social media manager can schedule and design posts. They can't decide who your dream client is or what you need to say to move that client to invest with you. A PR team can get you featured. They can't decide whether that feature supports your positioning or attracts the right buyers. You had to have done that work before you hired them, and you have to have told them that so they could get you the right type of feature.

A VA can run your systems, but they can't decide which systems you actually need for the level of growth and where you're going, or for what your clients need. That's the distinction that a lot of six-figure and multiple six-figure stylists miss. You're paying for execution, and you're still the standard holder. Without clear decisions and standards about where you are going, the business becomes a machine that you have to keep beating.

You always end up just as booked, just as exhausted, just as struggling to get a week on your calendar where you can go away and actually unplug as you were years ago. Now you have to pay a bunch of people on top of it. Standards are the dividing line here. Standards are the thing that are going to make the difference—standards for who you hire and what results they are accountable for, standards for which clients you take and which ones it's time to release, standards for how marketing success is measured, not just your likes but your actual sales calls.

That is all that matters at the end of the day. Not virality, not comments—sales calls. Here's the part that I think most of us who spend many, many years in hustle mode forget: standards require decisions. You can't just have standards if you don't communicate the decisions and the choices behind them.

If you're burnt out, it's rarely because you have too many clients or too many moving parts. It's because you have the wrong clients at the wrong price point and potentially the wrong moving parts. It's because you haven't made hard calls about what belongs in your business now and what doesn't because it's from the past that you actually are changing and willing to go into the direction of your future with.

You need to remember that the more you stay booked and busy to support a team—and again, I want you to be booked and busy, but I want you to also have the breathing room to make decisions and to clarify where you're going—the more you will earn more and more, and every day will feel like Groundhog Day because it doesn't feel like it's getting easier or less stressful.

Here's what I really want you to take away from this episode: No matter how much money you make, you will always be the decider in your business. That should be a very good feeling because ultimately, you are the one whose reputation is on the line. If your business feels messy, if your marketing isn't working, if your team isn't delivering, it is your responsibility—not because you should be doing everything yourself, but because you are the one setting the standards and making the decision and deciding what the vision is for this company.

Scaling past six figures does not give you permission to stop deciding and outsource this. It requires you to become sharper, faster, and more convicted in your decisions and where you are going. That is the work of being a creative CEO in any industry, but specifically this one.

Money can buy you support, but it can't buy your way out of responsibility at any level. It's ultimately always going to be on you to decide. So if you think that one day, when you hit a certain income number, all of this stuff is going to disappear, I have good news and bad news. It's not.

The fact that it's not means that you can stop searching for somebody else out there to fix everything for you. You can stop wasting money that you should be spending paying yourself, so this is actually worth it on people that you're waiting to save you. The faster you free yourself from this cycle of hustling harder and hiring more—to either be a status symbol or for someone to actually correct this problem—the more you're going to actually step into the role of a CEO, and the more you're going to feel like all of the years of hustling and grinding and work you put in are starting to pay off.

Inside my Creative CEO package, that is exactly what we build—the decision-making skills, the frameworks, and the standards for the people that you hire or the people that are already on your team, that's going to let you scale with conviction instead of outsourcing your power, and where your company is ultimately headed in your future. 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.