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.

Today, we're going to talk about what happens to so many stylists and my former self after a bad-fit client comes into your world. I'm talking about that emotional residue and self-doubt that just sticks—the second-guessing, the resentment, the “Was it me?” spiral at two in the morning when you're trying to understand exactly where everything went off course. Stylists often tell me that they don't feel like there are enough spaces where we can openly talk about these things. It feels like everybody's busy pretending that every client loves every single thing they've ever picked for them in their whole career.

But that is not realistic. If you do say that somebody didn't like something or there was a bad experience, you feel like you're saying your experience is less than or that other people will doubt you. I do think some of that is our own insecurities. But I also agree that there is a lot of avoidance of this topic. The reality is, when you work this closely with people and with their identity and self-image, a misaligned client can hit deeper than just thinking, “Oh, maybe we just didn't see eye to eye on what color of red they like.”

It can really mess with your sense of self when you take what you do so seriously and you've maybe historically always really gotten good results for your clients. I still vividly remember my worst fit client. I would say it was 2017 or 2018. I still think about it sometimes, honestly. I had other clients who I don't think were perfect fits, but this one haunts me. She came in hot. She had listened to every podcast I had ever recorded back when I was a stylist and I had that podcast. She told me that she really saw eye to eye with so many of the things that I shared on the podcast—about how you don't have to love your body in order to work with me as a stylist, but you do have to be in a place of basic acceptance.

I felt like being a personal brand was something that was a vulnerable act, and you needed to be able to really own the characteristics you wanted to show in order to help people trust you. There was a lot of lip service to that in the first sales call. I think I really did think, “This is going to be a dream client.” The other day, I was minding my business and I had my personal Pinterest account open, which still has some of my former clients’ boards in there. This is a very good reminder that I need to go and handle that.

I got a notification that really took me off guard. It was a notification from her, showing a note to what I believe is now the fifth "branding strategist" that she was working with. This one appeared to be a copy strategist that criticized something that the person had shown her as a design asset or as a piece of copy. It was a pin. It just brought me all the way back to the constant and never-ending Pinterest pins and the inability to own an adjective that she wanted to be seen as. It just went on and on. Then after she hired me, she ended up hiring all these different "brand strategists" to try to figure it out.

Really, the issue was she didn't want to own who she was. She didn't want to own what she was actually going to need to in order to solidify her presence online. There’s nothing that me or any other expert could do to get her to be in that place. This woman was a very well-known artist. I should have known the minute I walked in and she had the blandest wardrobe I'd ever seen. Everything we talked about was filtered through, “What kind of compliments would she get from people? How would other people see her?” She was completely unable to tell me what she liked or didn't like. It was just like something in her brain would not allow her to have that conversation.

The truth is, I saw the red flags. I did. I just didn't listen because it was summer. When I got on that sales call, I was starting to get anxious that I would have a similar experience that I'd had in other slower summers. I didn't hold my boundaries, and I paid for it—not just in the energy that I ended up leaking everywhere with that particular client, because I think it was maybe a six-week offer that should have lasted at most seven weeks, but ended up being twelve weeks.

It really gave me a lot of anxiety in my marketing because I thought from the sales call and from the fact that she was repeating a lot of my marketing back to me that we were a good fit. But the reality was, when I got into her closet, she didn't even have a basic sense of herself enough to be a partner in the process. When I look back at that, I think to myself, “Wow, if I had stood up for my process and for myself earlier, it wouldn't have gone on that long.”

If I had put it on her that she had to be a partner with me and literally used those words and just been brave and not been afraid, of, I don’t know. I guess I was afraid she was going to say bad things about me or something, I could have gotten myself out of that situation and probably done her more justice, honestly, than I did by going along with it for three months.

Today, I want to talk about how you get over this when it happens. How do you get over an emotional hangover that happens after a bad-fit client? Why does it linger? What’s it telling you? How do you turn it into your biggest diagnostic tool for the kind of brand clarity and business boundaries that will actually turn into real confidence in your abilities in your business?

Every stylist who evolves and takes on a new target market or tries new messaging will have this experience. You're going to get a client who makes you question everything—your offers, your prices, your talent, and then eventually your sanity. While it can feel like a massive failure or a sign from the universe that maybe it's time to close up shop and not be a stylist anymore, I promise you that it is not. It is actually usually your most valuable—painful, but valuable—growth moment.

That is because what's really happening in these kinds of situations isn't just, “Oh, I took a bad client.” It's that I didn't yet have the clarity or the boundaries or the belief in myself to filter out what wasn't a right fit. That is incredibly disorienting because if you don't have the language for why your process works, for why you have your business set up the way that you do, if you haven't codified your process, if you're not confident in your offers, if you just think, “Oh, I have a good eye and my clients usually love everything I pick out,” then when things go sideways with a client, your brain cannot separate out what the client issue is and what is your failure to act in a way that is an expert who's leading them through a process and holding boundaries as necessary to get them the best possible result.

Not having a clear sense of your own confidence in your business when you have experienced a difficult client like that will begin to shake you in a way that's very different than the stylists I work with who tell me often that one of their biggest wins is that they told a potential client no because they were able to vet them and they knew they were a bad fit.

While this feeling of “What did I do wrong? How could I have made it better?” isn't a sign that you should leave the industry, it is a sign that you probably haven't built a foundation of understanding about yourself—what makes the process work, why things work the way they work, how they usually get people results, besides “You have good taste” or “You have a good eye.”

That means you will automatically have to doubt yourself when things don't go right because you haven't really zoomed out in your business and made it something that's systemized in a way that you can say, “Ninety percent of the time gets this result.” That's also why we often tend to go on forever and ever like I did with this past client I had that was terrible, because I just kept overgiving. I just kept giving her more and more. We just kept shopping more and more. I just kept giving her more lookbooks.

I never sat her down and said, “Hey, when I looked at this Pinterest board, I almost had a heart attack because it was literally the most confusing thing I've ever seen in my career. Let's talk through why there is every style of clothing in the world on one Pinterest board. Why can't we curate this down? What's happening?” If I had stopped her there and had a style discovery process that was part of the process, I could have figured out that she was someone who was incredibly indecisive and then made better decisions on how to move forward and maybe serve her better. That’s what is difficult here.

If you don't have these things in place, you can't say, "Oh, this is where it went wrong. Oh, this would have been a checkpoint." Because you are basically running your business like a mind reader. Then you take on too much of the ownership for when things go wrong, or you take on none of it, and then you continue to repeat the pattern.

So yeah, this is a very disorienting experience, and it can feel very embarrassing and very uncomfortable, but it is also a chance to take a look at what you need to change to prevent this from happening or at least spot things before they get out of control in the future. Because if we are honest, the red flags are usually flying high before the sale.

The client who just wants to do this to look a little bit more put together and feels like she's all in but then sends 10 emails before she actually books the service. The one who says, "I worked with other stylists, but none of them have ever worked for me." Like how many stylists have you worked with, and why didn't they work for you? Red flag. The one who's already started negotiating your boundaries with scope requests before you have even gotten off the sales call.

When you're in scarcity, or you're tired, or you have a business model that isn't set up to support you, you're just craving validation sometimes and a break. That's when it's easy to tell yourself, "They seem nice. I'm sure it will be fine. I can handle it." But what actually is happening in those moments is that we are often overriding our intuition to meet a need, usually for control or safety or significance, because so-and-so over here has a bigger follower count than us. You want to win. You want the client. You want to work. I get it. You want proof that your business is working.

But every time we do that, we trade more than just money for that temporary relief of a need that is not our business's job to be met. We usually trade money now or validation now for a longer period of self-doubt and energy drain that we could then be using to put towards marketing and getting better-fit clients.

The pattern tends to look like this when I talk to clients and in my own past experience with this. You get a weird feeling. You rationalize it because of the time of year or other things that are happening in the business, not the actual conversation you just had. You sign the client anyways, and then you spend the next eight weeks regretting that optimism and likely not marketing at the level you could be to get new clients to then boost you again, because this person has drained so much of you that your marketing efforts go down.

Then comes the real hangover, right? The emotional hangover that comes with this that then makes it harder to show up online and get more clients and believe that this is worth it. You doubt your offer. You doubt your price. You wonder why this happened. What was it on the sales call?

The thing that we tend to forget when we are lost in that analyzing and "Why is this happening? When she said this, it was this. Maybe I should have given her more shirts. Maybe I should have made it an in-person pull instead of an online pull." What you really are doing is distracting yourself from this—that you saw it coming, you knew it was a bad client, and you said yes anyways.

You basically jeopardized your well-being emotionally in your business for a sale because you're not sure when your next sale is coming. That's the part that hurts the most. But the overthinking in the room and analyzing their behavior keeps you from having to look at that, which is the hard part.

When this happens to you—or if it's happened to you, because it's pretty likely the longer you're in business, once in a while you're going to have a bad big client—the worst thing you can do is what most of us go to do, and that is to rush to immediately fix it. You do not need a new offer. You do not need to burn your whole business down. You do not need an assistant. You do not need more space between you and the client. These are all things I've had clients ask me if maybe that's why it happened.

It's not because your Instagram followers are not the right people. It's not because of the marketing channel. You need to stop and give yourself the space to debrief what just happened before you get into action. Because if you don't learn to metabolize the emotional lesson that this client came to you with and was trying to show you, unbeknownst to them, you're going to keep repeating this pattern in your business.

So here's what it looks like to reset yourself after a really hard personal styling client experience. First, you want to reflect on your role in the dynamic. Not because we're blaming ourselves—this is the opposite of what most people do—but to understand what needs of yours were getting met when you said yes, even though your gut was telling you no.

Were you trying to prove something? Were you trying to avoid feeling like your business was a failure? Were you trying to fill your calendar instead of market the way that you know you need to get the right type of clients? This is not self-criticism. This is honesty so that you can actually stop ruminating about what happened with the client.

The second step in this is to audit your filters. What aspects of your process do you have in place that allow you to sift through a client's answers on a sales call? Do you have a screening process for clients before they get on a call with you? Do you know how to run a sales call properly?

Do you have checkpoints built into your service where the client has to partner with you and share their thoughts about things before you move to the next part of the process so that they are actually acting like a partner with you? Do you say that you can work with anyone at any budget and often message to really serious confidence problems that are actually, in likelihood, not something you could even address in the styling process?

That's what you have to look at. Where could you put in touch points, or where did the touch points you have in place fail, and how can you make sure that that doesn't happen again? Because the more honesty you have in your marketing, the more structure you have in your processes, the higher the likelihood that you are going to filter out a client who's like a grown woman and believes that she cannot find a single top in the entire United States that looks good or feels good on her.

If that's the kind of client you're saying yes to on sales calls, that person has body image stuff or self-esteem stuff so big, it is immoral for you to take them. It is not right for you to take them. So where are you overriding your values, quite honestly, in order to take some money?

How can you ensure that you have the processes, the questions, and even the marketing copy in place for people to understand if this is what you're dealing with, you're probably not a good fit for me. Really good boundaries actually start in your marketing as a stylist, not on your calendar.

That is important. That's why marketing in a way that is actually relationship-driven is so critical to learn because you're going to see these people in their underwear. You're going to have relationships with them. You need to start it off on an honest foot.

Then the third thing you want to do is reclaim your authority. The emotional hangover ends when you stop outsourcing your confidence to your social media, to your clients, to your bank account. You are not good or bad as a stylist or as a person based on who you attract in your business. You're growing based on what you refuse to tolerate again, or you're staying still because you keep allowing yourself to betray yourself.

That's it. There's only one way forward and one way backwards. You get to choose which of those paths you take. But nothing that you are getting in terms of feedback is "You're a bad stylist and you should never do this again," I assure you. But you'll stay there if you don't know how to assess things in a way that then puts you in the driver's seat and responsible like you should be.

I mean it when I say that I have seen in my programs and in my one-to-one over and over that stylists go through a period where they say yes to everybody.

They learn how to actually build a strong and thriving business, and they understand why their business is the way it is. They finally get to a place where they're literally celebrating turning away bad-fit potential clients because they have had a massive leadership shift internally when they start to actually focus on the business, not just focus on how the business looks on social media.

But look at what is the foundation that's going to make this business feel really solid, really legit, really professional, and as a result, allow me to feel that way. And that's the confidence that all stylists want and they keep grasping at—by, you know, a new marketing program or hoping they can get more followers—but they just need to sit down and know their process and believe in their process and create something that they're not copying from someone else.

That right there allows you to shift back to being the expert and the authority when something happens in your business, with a client or otherwise, that rattles you because you've done the work to create the foundation to believe in yourself and to believe in what you offer. Use the experience of a bad-fit client to clarify your values and strengthen your system so that you're attracting people who respect you, and that in turn will make you feel more confident in your process.

Situations like this, where you have a bad-fit client or maybe someone doesn't pay you or something that really stings—it sucks. I wish I could shield everybody from it. But one of the things I've seen is that stylists that don't have this experience often never feel the push to actually upgrade their business, to actually make the changes they need because they never feel enough of that pain.

They never feel enough of that friction that they need to actually do the thing that's not that fun—the foundational work that they probably skipped over because they didn't even know to do it. But it is a necessary type of discomfort that really is the thing that puts most stylists I work with, and I can say my former self, into a different category when you address it.

When you do this, you stop taking rejection or frustration or people's lack of communication personally, because nothing about how people behave in the styling container is personal. They come with decades of experiences and beliefs that you cannot fix in a season or even a year. So when you get that, you get that they are just reflecting back to you what they think of themselves or what their limitations are.

Then you're reflecting back to them whatever your discomforts are or wherever the places are that you're people-pleasing so that you can feel good about yourself. These are things that happen outside of our business all the time that we bring into it. When you stop taking everything personally—whether it be a client that doesn't like anything or somebody ghosting you after a sales call—you actually start building a business that supports you emotionally and financially because you know what not to linger on.

You know how to look at everything, see what you need to change, and keep it moving. Everything doesn't feel like a reflection of whether or not you're good or you're bad as a stylist, because it's not. It's far more complicated than that. If you are feeling a sting from a bad-fit client, please slow down.

Ask yourself, "What did this teach me about who I don't want to work with? What do I have to say more of in my content to push this away? What do I have to put in, in terms of structures, so that people are communicating better with me? What kind of clarity can I gain from this? Not what did I do wrong? How can I fix it? How can I never have an uncomfortable situation again?"

I want you to know if you've been in this situation that it is just part of the job. It is part of growing pains. It doesn't mean anything in the scheme of your business if you look at it the way we're talking about it. In five years, when you look back at this, you probably will not remember it.

The only reason why I remember my really bad client is because I need to get off her Pinterest board. So I'm going to wrap up here and do that and get off of her shared Pinterest board so I never have to think about her again. I strongly suggest you do the same if there's anything tying you to a bad-fit client so that we can just all move on with our lives. 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.