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're listening to the Six-Figure Series, the series for personal stylists who have crossed the six-figure mark but still feel overworked and burnt out despite making their dream styling business a reality. In this, the fourth and final episode in the series, we're talking about the biggest shift I work with stylists at this stage to make—positioning yourself as a thought leader, not just for your clients, but also for your team.

In the last three episodes, we covered creative CEO decision-making, getting out of fight or flight, and what it takes to step into your next-level identity to support you writing this next chapter of your career. Today, we're talking about why none of that matters if you're still positioning yourself as the person who executes tasks instead of the person who shapes thinking.

Here's what I see at six figures. Stylists hire teams, but they cannot delegate the messaging because they haven't clarified what they actually believe in. They land podcast interviews, but nothing comes from them because there is no foundation beneath that tactic. Thought leadership isn't just about more exposure or better placements in terms of PR or podcasts. It is about expertise, perspective, and conviction.

The hardest thing stylists grapple with is that earning more money from your messaging rarely comes with growth and popularity or a viral reel because your message gets more precise, more specific, more transformational. When you produce deeper content, you don't need to post as much to be remembered. That is a little hack that I love about thought leadership. The world of thought leadership opens up so much more and pays you back in terms of your income and your impact than popularity on the internet for the sake of it ever will.

So at six figures, thought leadership takes on a different meaning than when you were just starting out or a few years into your business. When you're building to six figures, thought leadership is about standing out. It's about having a clear point of view so people choose you. It's about rising above the noise. But once you're past six figures and you have a team, thought leadership becomes about positioning yourself as the expert, not just for your clients, but to your entire industry, to potential partners that you might work with as a consultant, to media outlets that will find you on their own when they're researching stories, and most critically to the people that you lead on your own team and in your own world.

Because what happens is that without that foundation, your team cannot execute without you having to constantly micromanage everything. They cannot lead the messaging. They cannot take the reins when it comes to client experience. They don't know how to help you make your business better because they don't actually know what you stand for.

Your social media manager can schedule posts, but they can't write captions that actually convert because they don't know what you stand for besides needing to have more clients. Your VA can organize your inbox, but they can't respond to inquiries with conviction that closes sales or calms down a client who's worked up about something because they don't know your philosophy on client management.

You end up being the bottleneck in every piece of content, every client touchpoint, every strategic decision. Not because the people you work with and have hired aren't capable, but because you haven't given them the framework to operate from because you've been too busy executing tasks in your business day in and day out because feeling busy makes you feel important.

Thought leadership at this level is about codifying your beliefs, really thinking about your methodology so that you can talk about it in your sleep if you need to, your standards for why you do what you do and who you do it with, and your vision for this next chapter of your styling business so clearly that your team can represent you without you being in the room and that people that watch your content know what you stand for the minute you come on their screen.

When you get this right, everything shifts. You stop being seen as a service provider and you start being seen as a trusted advisor. Your expertise commands not just higher rates, but retainers, speaking fees, licensing deals, and partnerships that don't require you to be in everyone's closet day in or day out in order to get paid.

One of the hardest things about thought leadership for lots of folks in the styling world—because they haven't seen it modeled, and quite frankly, we often need to go outside of the industry in order to get the examples that are going to be a good fit for you to even understand what this looks like—is that a lot of people think that thought leadership is gained through tactics instead of through becoming someone that has more substance.

Lots of folks will pay to be on podcasts, like the big podcasts. They'll hire PR firms. They'll post inspirational quotes with their face on them. Then they're confused why the fact that they're not doing trends or not doing more top-of-funnel, internet, quick hits, or things that might make them go viral—when they walk away from some of those tactics and they start to do these things—they're like, "Wait a minute, where are all the sales? Where are all the opportunities?"

But the problem isn't the posts or the PR firm or being on other people's podcasts or even paying to be on them. The problem is that there's nothing of substance underneath it, so it becomes hard to create an output system that is sustainable.

If you go on, say, a big podcast, paid or not—it's not that common to be paid to go on podcasts, but there are definitely networks of podcasts that you can pay to be on that have big listenerships—another thing you may not know about the other side of online business, ang you can't articulate a clear and compelling perspective beyond "everyone deserves to feel confident." You're going to sound like every other stylist.

If your press quote is some generic statement about helping women dress better to feel better, you just paid to be forgettable. Thought leadership without real substance and honestly, real conviction, is absolutely expensive noise in your business.

That's why I'm saying you have to have the space, as we talked about in the last episode, to decide and to clarify what you want to stand for. What do you want to be known for? Here's what I mean by substance. You need to know specifically what you believe about personal style, what you don't believe about personal style, why it matters in a way that is specific to your ideal client, and what transformation happens not just on an outer level, but on a day-to-day lived experience level for your ideal clients.

So that when someone works with you, they are very clear from looking at your marketing that what you do goes beyond a new wardrobe and being someone who shops for them.

So let me give you some examples of what I mean. If you work with high-achieving women in leadership, your thought leadership is not about dressing for success at this level. That is tired. Everyone's doing it. It's just not going to work anymore. You can't just recite, "It takes less than seven seconds for someone to create an impression of you." We've all heard that. So what?

Your thought leadership might be about, for example, how the mental load of getting dressed is stealing your cognitive bandwidth from strategic decisions as you rise in your career. Or how women in leadership navigate this very interesting thing that many of them say, which is that they want to look both credible and approachable through their appearance in ways that, as we all know, men never have to do the calculation on when they get dressed.

That one piece of content alone got me hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking opportunities, in new clients, in doing advising for some startups right after the pandemic, just talking about in nuanced detail this conversation around navigating credibility with approachability, and what the hell it even means in my marketing as a stylist, completely redefined things that were available to me.

But guess what I had to do to do that? I had to get off autopilot and think about for a few days, what is the trade-off?

What are people actually asking me for as a stylist underneath that question? Or how your client's biggest problem isn't that they don't know what to wear. It's that they've been getting dressed for the room that they're in already instead of the rooms that they want to go to. That misalignment is costing them confidence in themselves. It's costing them opportunities. It's costing them the same thing I've been talking to you guys about in this series—a vision for their future that's bigger than what they're doing today.

Do you see the difference? These are not tactics. These are perspectives. These come from you actually being with clients hours and hours at a time. If you can't answer these questions, and if you can't think of things that you feel passionate about—they don't have to be these, they can be whatever version of it works for you and your particular niche—then you're either not going deep enough in your client appointments, or you are just so burnt out you don't even know where to start with this, or you've outsourced your content to somebody else and expected that they should be doing the heavy lifting that only you can do.

That's fine. Most of us don't know that this is even available to us because, quite frankly, like I said in other episodes, this field is so young and so few people have brought thought leadership to it that you might not know what it looks like if you've been head down in your business all the time. But I assure you, it is possible. If I could do it, you can do it.

When you show up with that level of clarity on a podcast, in an interview, on social media, people don't think, "Oh, she's a stylist. Let me save her post." They think, "I need to work with her." Having that foundation in place means that your team and the people that support you can help you with your messaging.

I know this because I am onboarding a team now. I know that when I'm having conversations with people to potentially work with me and come into my business, the fact that I am so convicted in what I am doing and who I am talking to not only makes their life easier, but gives me the greatest chance at being able to actually get more of my time back as someone that spends so much time on this part of my business. Because I am working with a framework that includes my values.

So when I give it to them, they don't have to guess. I have a spreadsheet: here are the things that I say that convert clients. This is why I say to stylists who are below $50,000 or haven't hit six figures yet—get these things dialed in now. Because by the time you hit multiple six figures, as the stylists I'm talking to in this series have, you are usually working with a client load that's quite big. You're on a hamster wheel. It's even harder to train yourself to think this way.

So get in the reps when you have the time and don't be so quick to think that it's not important. Training yourself to think critically about what you care about as a stylist after every sales call, after every client interaction, is going to pay you back in dividends later on.

Let's talk about why this matters beyond just getting better paying clients. When you position yourself as a thought leader, when you are known for a specific methodology or point of view, you start getting opportunities that don't require you to trade time for money.

This is a hard thing about personal styling. I've been talking to a lot of people in Income Accelerator about it that are really bright, really advanced, and really just ready to scale. You need to know exactly what lights you up. If you don't have enough life experiences with clients one-on-one, your scaling abilities are going to be limited, and you're just not going to be as valued in the marketplace for your perspective.

So you really need to be thinking a lot about how you are delivering a styling service that is more than just you saying, "I edit your closet, I shop, and I put together a lookbook." What questions do you ask clients? I said this to a stylist the other day and I found out she had a whole meditation and journaling practice no one had ever heard of. It was a critical part. I said, "Well, why do you even have that?" She was like, "Well, I just think that everything starts with intentionality." I'm like, "Okay, where is that in all the messaging?"

Of course, we think we're saying something all the time, even if we've said it once or twice. But if that's part of your process, and she was very convicted in being there—which I agree with, it was wonderful—then I want to know about that. But stylists tend to be like, "This is how it works. First, I edit your closet. Then I shop. Then I make outfits. Then your life is different."

That's not going to cut it if you want to get to the next level. So you want to also be thinking about, if you're in this phase or you're thinking that you want to be in this phase of your business, "Why am I doing what I'm doing?" Another reason why you need to slow it down—you might need fewer services.

This is why we often don't get rid of everything at once, but we tighten things up in order for you to even have a different perspective. Because if you're doing too many lower services and things that are not upselling, you don't have enough touchpoints with the client to really see the impact of your work. That's why I want to teach stylists how to get out of that hourly model and into packages that actually work for transformation, which is very different than just being a good stylist. Those are two different things.

Because you won't have access to the conversations with clients that are actually about transformation to know how to talk about your services in a way that positions you as a thought leader.

You say you get asked to speak at a conference or you get invited on a podcast that has your ideal client. You need to be able to very easily articulate what the philosophical sort of thought process is that you have about how you get people results. What are they stepping into? What are you a stand for? How does this doing work of an edit, a shop, a style actually connect with the being work?

What in your process actually gets people that result that they don't just step away being like, "I have some great outfits that get me compliments," but this—this is what transformational styling is. What in your process has them walking away saying, "The person that I want to be in the next three to five years is who I see when I put clothes on and look in the mirror every day."

That's what we are up to as transformational stylists. You need to have the space to actually be able to articulate that. The truth is, it is worth it. It is worth thinking this way, because the opportunities that come to you as a result of being able to speak this way are not as exhausting as one-to-one client work.

I'm going to tell you the truth. I love one-to-one client work. It has been so hard to pry off my schedule, even as I see that the business requires that of me to a degree. It is so painful that it hurts my heart. But the truth is that when you want to be known for something more, as many of you do, one-to-one work is not always the best plan, especially if you're charging under $5,000 for that work.

Speaking does not drain you the way that back-to-back styling clients do because you're having a one-to-many impact. A consulting retainer gives you leverage. You're getting paid well without being hands-on in the execution of your ideas.

Yes, you will probably still have one-to-one clients, but you'll be able to siphon out the ones and be much more choosy when you have other opportunities on the table. That's why, at this stage, your marketing and stepping into thought leadership is one of the key principles of the scaling process that so few people understand.

They want to scale before they are ready, before they have done the identity work, before their business is even running at a minimum $10,000 a month. They're still trying to scale, to write the course, to do all things, but they don't know how to get themselves to basic-level consistent income. That's a problem, because consistent income comes from understanding how to consistently message.

So what happens is you get stuck in the world of executing tasks. That is a long road for you as you go into many, many years as a stylist. It will burn anyone out, even if you are super extroverted and love this job. Sometimes people need to get new stylists. Sometimes they need to do other things to scale the way they want to.

I have tons of stylists who are at six figures that are still doing the one-to-one themselves. They just do less of it because of other opportunities. Thought leaders get paid to think, advise, and shape strategy. Even if you don't want to do those exact things, being able to communicate in that way means that clients who look at you as a trusted expert, not just someone who does their shopping for them, pay you differently and look at you differently, and interact with your process differently.

Service providers get paid to execute. Thought leaders get paid to shape thinking. That shaping of thinking impacts people's behavior. The difference between having loyal clients and having clients who look at you as an advisor is that they will want more ongoing access to you. They will want you in their corner as they navigate transitions in their life, public appearances, media opportunities. As they grow, they view you as a part of that growth.

They want a relationship that requires your insight, perspective, and opinion, not just the time you give them to edit their closet or put together some outfits. You can't charge for that kind of ongoing relationship and that kind of way of being in a client's life if you are positioned as the person who color codes closets and folds things.

If you're listening to this and you're like, "But I love doing that," then that is wonderful. This is about you being at a place where this doesn't feel good to you anymore, and that's a lot of the stylists that I work with who are at six figures or approaching six figures. These are the conversations I'm having. This is what they're craving, and that doesn't mean everyone's craving it. But there are a lot of stylists who see as their career evolves, and that's why I want you to listen to this even if this is not you yet, that you can only see what you have access to now.

Depending on where you are in your career, some of this might seem really far away and unimaginable—that you don't want to be in people's closets all the time and every day. Or maybe you can see that there would be a day where you would feel like, I'm good. I'm all set. Either way, you won't know and you can't project if this is for you until the day comes. So this isn't necessarily something you need to be thinking about.

But if you're there, I'm talking to the person who feels like, "I have no idea where to turn, and I feel like I put in my due, and I'm kind of sick of being busy at my level of expertise. I want more margin. I want to use my brain in new ways. I want to think different thoughts and be in relationship with my business in a different way."

There are so few people telling stylists that this is possible, and that's why I wanted to do this series for you. I wanted you to understand that it's nervous system work, it's leadership work, it's identity work. It's a new way of looking at marketing, and it's a new way of looking at yourself as the decider, as the standard holder. Because when you're busy all the time and you're incredibly booked, yeah, it can feel good, but this is what you don't have space for.

This is the thing that always gets pushed to the back of the to-do list. So how do you actually do this? How do you move from being a stylist who executes tasks to a thought leader who shapes thinking? You need to get brutally clear on three things.

One, what do you believe about style that most people don't understand or aren't talking about after all of the client experience you have under your belt? Not everyone “deserves to feel confident.” That's not what we're talking about here. Because not everyone is ready to feel confident. So if that was your go-to, go a little deeper.

What have you learned from working with clients that challenges conventional thinking? What are you seeing that you feel like other stylists miss when you see their content? If you don't look at other stylists’ content, congratulations—I love that about you. Go look just so you can see for the purposes of this conversation.

Two, what is your methodology? This doesn't have to be complicated, but it does have to be yours. It has to be more than “I edit, I shop, I style.” What touches do you do that are original? What conversations? What questions? What is your process that goes deeper than just edit, shop, style?

What can you tell me about the way that those experiences are organized that get results? What makes the way that you work different? If you can talk about your process as a methodology, even if it's simple, you are an expert with a system, and that will drastically increase your demand.

Number three, what future are you building towards, and who is coming with you? This is about the vision piece. This is why I say you cannot be busy all the time and get where you want to go. Where is your business going in the next three years? It doesn't have to be accurate. It just has to be a time for you to dream.

What kind of work do you want to be doing? And critically, who from your current client roster is aligned with that vision and who isn't? You don't have to do anything about it yet, but you do have to become aware of that. Because the truth is—and we talked in episode three about something that is critical—you cannot bring everyone with you. If you want to position yourself as a thought leader working with high-level clients at premium rates, you can't still be servicing clients who you're charging old prices to from years and years ago.

This is not just about money anymore. It's about energy. It's about the spaces that you want to show up in. It's about the conversations you want to be having. It's about creating the capacity to do that.

So once you have clarity on these three things, a lot will become easier for you. Your content will start to have more of a backbone. Your messaging will feel more convicted because you will know what you stand for, because you've given yourself some time to think about it.

Maybe the people that you work with or the team that you've built will have a better framework to work without you being there every two minutes and make decisions. Opportunities, when you start marketing this way, will start coming to you instead of you feeling like you have to chase them whenever there's a downturn in income.

Here's the final takeaway from this entire series. Scaling past six figures is not and never has been about doing more. It's about becoming more—more decisive, more grounded, more clear, and more convicted in who you are and what you are building in this next chapter.

Thought leadership is the culmination of all of the work and the time and the sweat that you've put into this business. It's what happens when you stop trying to be everything to everyone and start leading with perspective that is unique to you.

It is what makes you indispensable—not just to your clients, not just to the people that you lead in your team, but to the industry and to the opportunities that you are creating by the expertise that you have built. And when you get this right, you stop feeling like you're carrying your business on your back and that you cannot breathe because you're so busy.

Because you're not just in execution anymore. You're leading, and people want to follow leaders. This is what I work with people on inside the Creative CEO offer. This is exactly how I help stylists move into their next level.

If this sounds like something that you want to explore more of—if you want to articulate your methodology better, start building out your thought leadership, and think of yourself as a Creative CEO—head to the show notes, book a discovery call. Let's talk.

Thank you for being here for this entire series. Now go build something worth following. 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.