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.

If you feel like you are stuck in an endless quest to fix your marketing, I want you to listen to today’s episode because I think it’s going to point you to a solution that you’re not seeing and help you step out of the frustration you’re feeling with your marketing if it’s not going the way you hope.

The number one thing I hear from my clients when business is slow is that they are trying to or need to fix their marketing, or they need to be inspired to market more. It is the topic that drives the most downloads of this podcast and the one that I talk about the most from the most angles. When you are not booking new clients, it is very natural, normal, reasonable to feel like and suspect that marketing is the obvious problem. I’ve been there many times myself.

But here’s what I’ve learned over 18 years building two six-figure businesses and coaching and strategizing with hundreds of stylists to do the same. Most of you do not have a marketing problem yet. You have a business design problem that is showing up in your marketing.

Unfortunately, no amount of better content, or different tactics or strategies is going to fix it because marketing, not what Instagram tells you marketing is, not people that are trying to sell you something, but just thinking about what marketing has always been since the beginning of time, is just translating your work and your results with clients into language, stories, posts, captions, images that make other people want to buy. That’s it.

So if your work, meaning the actual output that you are doing with your styling clients, is not built specifically to create a reliable outcome that you’re promising, you’re going to find it hard to clearly translate that outcome into your marketing. That doesn’t mean that you are not a good stylist or that your individual clients aren’t getting incredible results or are not delighted with their work with you. It means that most stylists, most people, don’t know how their process, the way that they edit a closet, shop for a client, give them a lookbook that actually changes their life, reliably produces results in order to call in more of other clients that are a dream and also get reliable results.

It means that there’s a breakdown in the way that you are delivering, literally like going through the actions within the closet edit, for example, that you can say, “Okay, it is at this point in a client consult that I notice the shift happens 75% of the time.” So that you can take that shift and that insight and put it into your marketing in a way that has people say, “Okay, I can trust that person. She can tell me where the change is going to happen, so I’m going to sign up.”

When you can’t do that, it is not a huge surprise that people aren’t booking from a book-a-discovery-call link that you’re doing on your Instagram story. Because when you think about the things that are attracting you to what you buy or who you follow or what you save or what you interact with, it’s probably incredibly specific. But what happens is when you have this mismatch that we’re going to talk about today, but you don’t realize it, so you keep reaching for marketing tactics, you tend to go towards language that keeps you in action but keeps you continually missing your ideal client.

It’s like when you have a GPS that’s like, “Take a turn, take a turn, take a turn,” and it’s getting you nowhere closer to the place you know you need to be in like 10 minutes. So you’re going to use concepts that sound good in theory, right? Here’s a really common one that I’m hearing all the time. I’m hearing it so much that I’m wondering if AI hasn’t picked it up and put it in everyone’s marketing: “Dress like the person you’re becoming.” Okay? There’s nothing wrong with that if you were the first person to come up with it, but everybody’s saying it. So it doesn’t actually really mean anything.

But on top of that, let me give you the flip side of this, like how I would take that idea and make it super tangible so somebody bought it. You’re talking to, say, a woman who’s scrolling through Instagram at like 11 o’clock at night. She’s just put her kids to bed. She just poured herself a glass of white wine on a Wednesday, even though she told herself she wasn’t going to do that. She goes into her room and sees the pile of clothes in the corner of her bedroom on that random chair we all have for some reason. Like, I don’t know why, but we all have it, that she spent thousands and thousands of dollars on.

That morning when she left at 7:30, she felt like she looked absolutely frumpy and horrible. And she felt worse because she knew that she was about to go into one of the biggest presentations of the quarter that she was hoping she would nail in all ways in order to get the promotion she wants next quarter. When she put on an outfit that she bought, that she thought she was going to look amazing in, all it showed her were the things she doesn’t like about herself. She was like, “You know what? I don’t have time for this. I’m just going to put on my black pants and the okay off-white silk shirt that I’ve been wearing to everything and my favorite necklace and earrings and keep it moving.”

Maybe she threw on some red lipstick, but it didn’t erase the fact that the thousands and thousands of dollars of clothes piled up are there when she walks in that night to her bedroom with a glass of white wine and thinks, “When am I going to get this together?”

Now, you could say “dress like the person you’re becoming,” but that woman who probably has the income and the need to buy from you isn’t going to see herself in that post. So today I’m going to give you a framework that’s going to help you see where the real gap is and the issue you need to fix before you start digging into your marketing. Because sometimes you do have a marketing problem, but I’m pretty good at diagnosing when you actually have a marketing problem and when you have a not-marketing problem. That’s what we’re going to get into, because this is sometimes the harder work to do, or the work that honestly most stylists never do, but it is what is keeping you from feeling really, really confident as a business person.

So here’s the framework we’re going to get into. Your business model is a promise to your ideal client. Your client sessions and the results they reliably produce are the proof of that promise. The proof of your promise is where your marketing starts. So you have to have the business model clear and who it’s for. You have to have the results that you can reliably produce because you have a system. You’re not just freestyling it every time you go into a closet edit or a shop or a style. Then you take the proof from the system in your client results and you put it into your marketing so you don’t have to guess or feel inspired.

When those two things don’t line up, your promise and your proof, your marketing will always feel harder because you feel like you’re trying to convince people of something that your work isn’t set up to reliably deliver. Again, it doesn’t mean that you don’t get results, but you’re not sure exactly how or why. So you’re thinking like, “Well, it was just that that client wasn’t difficult. That client actually knew how to follow directions.” Yes, people need to follow a basic amount of directions, but do you have systems that show them how to do that? Do you make sure that there is nothing left to guessing or chance when you’re leading a client virtually or in person through your process?

Do you have to rely on the chemistry between you and a client in order to get results? If the answer is yes, A, you are like 99% of people in online business or in-person business, business generally. That’s also why it’s feeling a little wonky when you go to market. Obviously, there are also going to be other things involved in that, like you have PMS, your kids being annoying, you woke up on the wrong side of the bed. But when you have this stuff in there, you can override those feelings and do what you’ve got to do to run the business because you know exactly where you’re pulling your results from and how to talk to people.

So let’s break down what I mean by this because I want to make this super tangible and not just like a neat little framework that I put into a podcast. So stick with me here as we unpack it. This conversation could be the thing that really gets you unstuck right now and helps you focus on what will make the difference in your marketing.

So when I say your business model, I am not talking about whether you’re an LLC or a sole proprietor or anything like that. I’m talking about how you package what you do, what you call it, what you charge, how long it takes, what’s included, who it’s for, what the next step is after that offer for an ideal client. All of this creates an expectation. That expectation is your promise to your clients.

Most of us, most people in general, don’t have an explicit promise that they make because they’re afraid of letting people down. But the opposite happens. Without an explicit promise, what happens is that you do let more people down, and then you find it harder to market. So if your website says something like, “I help women feel confident and dress like themselves,” that is a promise. It’s not the best promise, but it’s a promise.

If your consult call, like a sales call script, is something that you use, or you have talking points that you often talk about, and you’re saying things like, “I’m going to help you transform your identity and show up as the woman you’re becoming,” it’s a little vague, but it’s a promise, right? If you put that in your carousel posts, it’s a promise. If it’s in your Instagram bio, it’s a promise.

The problem with the types of promises I see regularly from stylists is that the prospect, the potential client, cannot picture what that’s actually going to look like in his or her real life. So you’re thinking, “Okay, like, what does that mean for me? What changes? How do I know this is different than just hiring someone to tell me what to buy? Because you are going to tell me what to buy, right? Yeah. So how am I going to know if the clothes you tell me to buy are going to make me feel different?”

And so if a client, no matter how polite or well-meaning or well-aligned they seem with you, is not able to answer that in their head, they’re going to think about it and never book. Not because they don’t want it, not even because they don’t have the money, because people spend money on things they can’t afford literally every second, but because that person can’t clearly see it enough to justify spending the money.

There’s this saying in marketing and sales that people buy emotionally and justify rationally. They buy it, and then they tell themselves a story about it. The problem is most marketing doesn’t allow people to see themselves in it enough to feel the feelings and then go back and justify it logically. The truth is you can have both.

The more vivid you are and the more you can explain where the points are in each of your sessions that people tend to have the shift, not everybody, but the people that are actually acting as a partner with you, the more they can comfortably buy regardless of the price because now they feel safe. That is the emotion that most people who are hiring a stylist need to feel: emotional safety.

Because if you think about it, especially if you work with women, the world has told them it is not safe to show up as they are. So here you are trying to tell them that it’s safe for them to dress as the person they really want to be when there’s no societal evidence that that’s the case based on the programming they’ve had. You’re out here just saying, “It’s safe, it’s safe,” but you’re not giving them any proof of why it’s safe or how you’re going to get them there.

So they have to take too many chances on you in order to buy, and they have to give up thousands of dollars. Yeah, that’s a big ask. That’s why it’s obvious to say vague marketing doesn’t convert, but that’s literally why. Because if your prospect can’t figure out what it is you do in a way that makes her life better and makes this experience feel safer, then she’s going to keep scrolling, or she’s going to tell you that it’s too expensive.

So your promise needs to be specific enough that someone can say, “Yes, that’s my problem. That’s what I want. I can picture my life being different on the other side of this.” Not “elevate your style.” Nobody has any idea what that means. Not “step into your next level,” because that could be a haircut, if we’re all being honest with each other, or a manicure.

I’m talking about outcomes like, “I can get dressed without spiraling. I know what to buy, and I stop wasting money by buying things that look good on other people. I have a wardrobe that actually makes me feel cool when I go out with my new friends because I just moved into a new city.” Or, “I actually feel hot on a day and night with my partner who I feel disconnected from, and I’m having doubts about their feelings for me.”

That is what people pay for: clear outcomes that they can picture.

Now, before we get into this, I know some of you are thinking, “But I can’t promise that because I don’t know what space they’re in.” Uh-huh. That’s why your marketing has to call out what space they need to be in to get the result. I don’t call in clients who can’t think a thought by themselves because of how I market. So how you market will call in and qualify the right people.

But before you can do that, you have to get your side of the street clean in terms of the specificity and the touch points and the turn points that people experience that get them results. Not 100% of the people, the people that are aligned. So that then you can go to your marketing and call in more of the aligned people, and then your success rate goes up.

Stylists out here think that they have to have 100 out of 100 in terms of their transformation rate in order to claim anything. That’s not true. That’s why I talk a lot about partnership. Because if you are qualifying people and you’re getting people that are mostly happy with themselves in your marketing, then this promise lands on the ears of reasonable people.

I can’t promise you you’re going to hit six figures because I can’t do the work for you. But I can tell you that the other people that have done the work and kept their mindset clean and done their internal work have gotten results with my frameworks. I can’t promise the whole world, nor do I want to, that you’re going to get there. I assume that smart people listen to this podcast and understand that if you do a group program or you do even a one-to-one container, that you know you’re responsible for getting the results, and I’m here to support you through it.

Same thing with styling, but stylists miss that. So I want you to not have this black-or-white ideal that you have to be able to promise 100% of the time or nothing. No. You are responsible for creating the business plan and the model that gets results and for being very focused on the right people and being an observer and noticing what gets them results. Then you put it into your marketing so you get more of those people. But you don’t have to promise you can get anyone anywhere with any self-esteem problem a result in your marketing. You shouldn’t.

Now that we’ve gotten clear on what people pay for, and we’ve gotten clear that it’s clear outcomes they can picture that they’re willing to pay for and that they don’t hedge on, we’re going to talk about how you create sessions, styling sessions, that are proof of your promise.

What’s so interesting to me is how many stylists I work with that don’t see the through line between their clients’ results and their business strategy. But we’re going to make it super clear right now. So if you’re someone that thinks that passion is enough, I promise you that you are just delaying getting what you came here for as a stylist in terms of what you came to the game of having a business for.

This is a lot of what I see because stylists are afraid to step up. They’re afraid to be seen. They’re afraid to go all in because they don’t want to be rejected. But what they miss is that they are actually out of integrity because they are making promises and marketing sporadically or consistently or whatever without the thing that’s going to make the people they want to feel confident feel safe enough to actually feel confident.

You have to do the foundational work because you’ve probably never been a business owner so that the people that experience your talent through your business model can get a result. This is not osmosis. People are not stylists. They don’t get it. They maybe don’t even view themselves as creatives. So if you think that your creativity and your vibe are going to pull them through and get them results, that’s wild to me.

Quite frankly, I think it’s unethical in the online space because I see it with coaches too.

Here’s what I want you to hear. You’ve got a promise that sounds transformational as a stylist. You’re talking about confidence, identity, and becoming. But if I asked you what actually happens in your sessions that produces that promise, confidence, identity shifting, becoming, and your response to me is, “Well, first I edit their closet, then I shop for the gaps, then I create an outfit, then I put it in a lookbook, and then I deliver it,” we have a problem.

The problem is your marketing is selling an identity shift, and your sessions are delivering a service. So when someone lands on a sales call with you and they’re sitting there trying to figure out, “How does this closet edit give me confidence? How does shopping make me feel like myself again when I can’t seem to go out shopping for myself and come home with things that actually look good on me the next day?” If you can’t articulate that clearly, because your sessions are not built to create that shift, meaning you don’t have a step-by-step protocol that you’ve internalized, questions you ask, focus points that you keep the client returning back to, to guide the client through the session, the value that you offer, despite your talent, is going to feel vague and like it is too much of a risk.

The prospect cannot picture that promise being possible for them. So they don’t book, or they don’t rebook, which is what I see a lot. What happens is that even stylists who get people to book tend to have very low repeat rates. They have very few referrals. They have very little word-of-mouth momentum in their business because you may be polite, you may have even made them feel good about themselves during the session, but they don’t feel changed.

They might have outfits, but they’re not sure why those outfits are supposed to represent the next level of themselves, because they didn’t get the transformation that your marketing promised. That is because most stylist sessions are not built to prove the promises that the stylist is making. They’re built to deliver a service. They’re built to delight the client through over-giving and over-doing.

So, of course, marketing has the same energy. So what it would look like is if you’ve ever done a closet edit with someone and they wanted to talk you through every single piece in their closet, which I think has happened to most of us, and you sit there and listen, but you don’t ever show them, “Okay, does that have a through line to the person you’re becoming?”

And you don’t keep creating that momentum in the closet edit toward, “Okay, I got it.” What you’re going to have to say at some point to the client is, we can’t go through every single piece here and learn its deep, dark history in your life. But what we can do is evaluate whether those pieces in your closet for this season are bringing us closer to what we discussed in style discovery, to you being the person you want to be.

Most stylists don’t even have style discovery. They have a Pinterest board situation that they look over, and then they go, and it’s just supposed to be like osmosis. Then they get into the closet edit, and they let the client go on as long as they want and talk them through every piece, and they make very light suggestions about what they should keep or what they shouldn't, they don’t have any reasoning behind why they say what they do except for, “Oh, you like this,” or “You don’t like this? Great.”

Even if you end up taking the clothes and donating them at the end and there’s a gap, the person that you just talked with in the closet edit has more time, history, and sunk cost with the clothes you’re taking away than they do with you. So you haven’t given them enough in their experience with you to actually be able to take on board internally what they’re shifting toward. You just took a bunch of clothes out of their closet.

That’s what I mean when I say stylists don’t have any way of actually creating the shift and the internal change that their marketing promises. If your sessions with clients aren’t built to prove your promise, then there’s no content strategy, no content pillars that are going to fix your conversion rate. You can have the best captions in the world, but if someone gets on a call with you and you can’t tell them how you create change through these different sessions, then it’s just going to feel like a gamble.

I know that this part is hard to hear, but it is the truth. When your promise and your proof don’t match, a lot of stylists find, and have reported, and I completely agree, though this wouldn’t necessarily have been the way I would describe it, that their marketing is starting to feel like a performance, especially with the rise of video and all of the pressure people feel with that. And you get exhausted even when you’re not producing consistent or regular content, or if you are, you’re not producing content that’s actually converting people.

You’re constantly trying to convince people of something that your work isn’t clearly demonstrating as repeatable. So you’re borrowing language from other people, from AI. You don’t know how to make it your own because you don’t have your own language yet from your experiences with clients.

What I’m trying to say here is that what is happening with clients during sessions isn’t going deep enough for most stylists to get the kind of marketing they need in order to do well. So you can’t clearly explain what makes your work different, even though you care so much about this work. I know. I have felt this before.

I promise you, as someone who took six years to hit seven figures as a personal stylist, I know that frantic energy. I know that feeling. I know how crappy it feels. I know that the solution is in a step before the marketing that you are putting out that most of us are missing. That’s why marketing feels impossible, but it’s also why marketing ends up being the thing that everybody runs to to fix their problems.

Because so many stylists are either allergic to, avoidant of, or it never even occurs to them to look at the actual business they are creating, which is a promise they are making to their clients.

So let’s talk about what shifts when you fix this.

Number one, your content gets sharper because you’re not guessing what you sell. Number two, you can talk about your work easily and more creatively, even on bad days, because you know exactly what changes for your clients and why it changes. Because it is backed by a proven and repeatable system that you use that doesn’t actually kill your creativity. You’d be shocked. It actually opens up more space for you to have creative conversations with your clients because it focuses the client’s mind on what will work in the future, not what didn’t work in the past.

Your sales calls are going to get way more fun and easier because you can walk someone through a process without over-delivering or hoping that you just have good chemistry with them in order for them to be a good client. You can say, “Here’s the problem that you’re having based on what you told me. Here’s why I believe it’s happening based on what you told me. Here’s how we’re going to fix it. Here’s what will be different on the other side of it. Here’s how my process shows you exactly how to get there.”

Then they’re going to book because it makes sense, not because you had to make some promise or over-deliver or do something weird in order to get them there. Also not because your content is perfect in your marketing. Because this type of clarity in the way that you see with your work just gets out there. It doesn’t have to be super polished because there’s a sense of internal conviction that you have that people can sense.

So the process creates the transformation. When a client is done working with you, they can accurately describe what changed and when it changed. So it’s not just about you having great taste or them liking you or them liking your outfits, which is often what a lot of stylists realize at the time that they’re finished with a client. It’s like, “Oh, they were hoping they were going to look like me and that they were going to get the same result, but they’re not me,” right?

And so you’ll know this is working because you’ll hear clients say things like, “I don’t second-guess myself anymore when I get dressed. I know what works for me. I stopped buying things that I liked on other people that didn’t feel right on me. I enjoy getting dressed again. But before, I used to feel like this.” That is the proof.

It’s also not just proof because someone says it in their testimonial. It’s proof because you’re like, “Yeah, I know you started to stop second-guessing yourself because during the closet edit we focused on the reality of your life and where you were going. I made you focus on the positive stories that you could have in the future, not the 900 black shirts you have in your closet you wanted to talk me through the emotional life of.”

That’s when you start to get more organic and better referrals. That’s when your marketing starts to call in people.

Listen, I’m not going to tell you that you’re going to put out an Instagram post when you learn this and thousands of people are going to show up, right? I can do this in a given week. Like last week, I put out a post that did this. I had five sales calls, right? Most of you should have higher-ticket businesses. You’d be delighted to get five sales calls in a week, never mind in a month.

So that’s what I’m talking about. I’m not promising you these crazy, over-the-top results. I’m talking about very, very precise results that you know are going to call in the right people, but you’ve got to do this foundational work.

This foundational work is exactly why I built Income Accelerator the way I did for established stylists, because I know how overwhelming it feels to be like, “Oh, great. Now I’ve got to go back and do everything.” The truth is, most stylists that I work with inside Accelerator have way more data that’s going to prove this point that they just haven’t slowed down to integrate into their business yet.

So the number one piece of feedback I get from people that do this program over the last two and a half years is that they can’t believe how specific it is. This is not a vague strategy. This is not mindset for the sake of it. You guys have been here. You know how I roll. It’s actual step-by-step processes for what to change in their business right now and a framework they can use in the future because I expect that as human beings, they’re going to change again.

We’re not fixing your Instagram captions before we fix your offer. We’re rebuilding the promise and the proof so they match. That doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong in the first iteration of your business. It means you evolved. The people you actually want to work with have likely evolved. So you want to make sure that the promise and the proof you’re creating match.

That is why, from this round forward, I’m integrating the identity-led styling method into the business model I’ve been teaching for years. These are the session structures that create the kind of change that your clients can actually describe. So instead of, “She has great taste,” “I loved her outfits,” “I liked her vibe, so I hired her,” they’re going to say, “I literally stopped second-guessing every outfit because her process showed me what actually works for me.”

That is the language that creates referrals because now it’s not about trusting the vibe. It’s about trusting the process. Once you have that, the work sells for you. You’re not borrowing other people’s words because you don’t have a language. This is going to give you your own language.

Accelerator opens March 23rd. It’s an eight-week program for established stylists who are ready to stop tweaking random parts of their business in order to get results and start rebuilding in a way that actually works, where your promises match your proof and your marketing feels natural as a result of that proof.

This is for you if you’ve been doing this for a while, you know you’re good at what you do, you know who your ideal client is, even if you’re not attracting enough of them yet, but your business isn’t growing the way it should for your level of experience.

We’re going to get you unstuck. It is a small program, so you’re going to get all of my feedback, my attention. You’re going to learn ten times the amount because you’re going to hear other stylists at the same level, what they’re experiencing, from all walks of life, from all over the world.

Applications are officially open. So head to the show notes, apply, and I will reach out with next steps when I get your application. 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.