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.

I want to share a conversation that I had last week that I just keep thinking about. I was talking to a stylist who had been in business for going on a decade. She was telling me in our conversation that she had gotten really great client results, that she loves, loves, deeply loves and believes in the work that she does.

She had gotten testimonials recently that had made her tear up, and made her so grateful for the work she does just the week prior to this conversation. When she said to me, "I feel like I'm always starting over," it was very clearly an emotional moment for her. It was also a very brave one because saying that out loud when you are overwhelmed is super hard.

I knew exactly what she meant. It hit me in the gut. Because the starting over she's talking about is not starting over in this big, dramatic way. Not like she burned everything down. More like every time she gets a few good months in a row, a few regular clients on a clip, something interrupts it. Life. Family. An unexpected slow season. A lack of motivation to market.

When things pick back up, she's not building on what she is already doing. She feels like she has to rebuild from zero in terms of the lift. Not because she has to redo her packages or anything like that, but because now she has to get on Instagram. She has to market again. She has to think about what she's going to say to her newsletter list. It feels like she's always grasping for what the next thing is. It never feels like an intuitive next step.

The way she described it was so interesting because she's definitely not the only person who has talked about a version of this experience. But she said something about having this relationship to her business, and it really stood out to me. She said it was like being in a constant boom-and-bust cycle. Good months and then nothing, and "I just don't know how to make it consistent."

Here's what I want to talk about today because I think the explanation that a lot of stylists land on for why this is happening in their business is actually one of the most devastating and confidence-breaking of the things I see them dealing with. And I see a lot of different angles on things that can hurt someone's confidence.

But of all the things I've had clients deal with—getting a bad review on Yelp, getting people saying nasty things on their social media accounts, a client that fired them, them having to fire a client, having to refund a client—these boom-and-bust cycles are actually way more devastating to a stylist's self-concept, self-esteem, whichever you want to call it, than those isolated incidents.

So I think talking about this is really important because I think so many people go through it alone and think that they're the only one. So when things stop working in your business, or you are on a clip of a bunch of clients, things are going well, and then it just stops, most stylists do what makes sense to them. They look inward and they start to ask, "What is wrong with me? Why can't I figure this out? Other stylists seem to have it together. That person in the program seems to be making all this money. Why do I keep ending up back here?"

And I want to be super clear about this. You don't have a discipline problem. Most of the stylists I know think that it's their ADHD, they're lazy, they have a motivation problem, they were never good in school. You may have ADHD. You may never have been good in school. But as someone who had both of those things and years behind me of no money and then years behind me and in front of me of making money, I can tell you those are not the reasons why. People have the exact same circumstances, the exact same brain stuff, the exact same childhood, the exact same things, and they are capable of getting out of it. And so that means you are too.

And the stylists that I'm having these conversations with are literally the ones who care the most and are the least lazy. That doesn't mean they're in action, but not being in action doesn't mean you are lazy. That is a false equivalency. That is not true.

They're not bad stylists. Their issue isn't that their house isn't aesthetic enough. Their issue isn't that they don't have enough social media followers. I'm just thinking of all the different conversations I've had over the years. Literally, they're flashing through my mind, the reasons why stylists tell me, as if to say, "Look, I have reasons."

But ultimately, even after they give me that list, they usually go back to, "It's me, it's me, it's me. There's something flawed and wrong with me." There isn't.

I don't know how to tell you this because this was my favorite go-to for years. "What do I have to fix? What do I have to change? How do I become as good as everyone else? What clothes do I have to buy? Is it because of this? Is it because of that?" But actually it was none of those things.

The problem was absolutely structural. A structural problem cannot be fixed by fixing yourself. Meaning there's a structural problem in your business that is leading you to feel overwhelmed, which is then leading you to feel like you are paralyzed, which is then leading you to tell yourself a story, because you're not moving forward, that it is an internal flaw, that it is something wrong with you. It's not.

I wish I had realized that. If I had figured this out sooner, that it wasn't, that this wasn't me taking the ultimate responsibility for myself, I would have been able to get the structures I actually needed.

Here's what I want to say about that, because I was someone who was like, "I really can't follow routines. I really struggle with following step-by-step directions. I don't know if this is going to be for me. I don't believe in systems. I'm going to be bad at them."

But what I thought those things meant to me personally was, "I'm bad at these things. I don't want to keep being humiliated by them anymore." What I didn't understand was that when you are a business owner, you don't actually have to be publicly humiliated like maybe you were in school like I was because you maybe don't know how to do the step-by-step process.

You can just hire people to give them to you, and then you can benefit from it. You don't have to suffer out here on these streets for no reason.

But if you grew up thinking that you needed to struggle to be worthy, or maybe you didn't publicly struggle but you seemed like you were good at everything, right? I see this with stylists a lot who were the straight-A students, then you won't even realize that you don't have the structures you need because your automatic go-to isn't, "Is there something that can make my life easier?" Your automatic go-to is, "How do I prove myself?"

So you're blind to the actual things that will help you.

So there are two types of stylists that I talk to who feel stuck in their business. They look very different on the surface, but when you get to the bottom of it, it is the same.

The first is the stylist who has done a lot of learning. This is a very popular type of client that I tend to attract. It takes them a long time to commit and to trust somebody.

The client I was talking about at the top of this episode, who hired me to work with this spring, has followed me for two and a half years before she reached out. This is a kind of a client who listens to podcasts. She has hundreds of Instagram posts saved with tips, with marketing tricks, with advice. She has bought lower-ticket courses. She has bought into networking events and groups that promised that you were going to leave with some tangible takeaway.

She has notebooks and Google Docs full of strategies. Honestly, a lot of what she's learned is good. It's solid. If you ask her what she is doing in her business, what she's up to, what her next move is, she's going to be able to tell you. But she's not executing it consistently.

It's like one big idea, one rush of excitement, slow period, constantly living on the next dopamine rush, the next high of an idea. The gap between knowing these tips and information, and even maybe what the next step is, and doing is becoming its own source of pressure and anxiety.

Because every time that you learn something new and you don't act on it, it doesn't disappear. I did not realize this as someone who very much sees myself in this.

Nicole Otchy: It sticks around in the background of your mind. After a while, you're dealing with like 10 different voices in your head telling you a million different things that you should be doing, and then you become paralyzed.

This also happens if you are scrolling and consuming on social media more than you are creating. This would be the first thing I would say: if you feel like you are in this cycle, stop it with the social media. Take it off your phone. Start reading books. Start challenging yourself to think about how you can make your content more exciting to you and more exciting to the people that watch, more relevant by pulling in things you read in other places and making connections that are interesting.

A, it will make your content better, but B, you will start to at least focus your attention on the consistency, because a lot of times consuming information helps us feel like we're doing something. But all that it does is keep us safe and protected, because if we're consuming, we can't be in action. If we're trying to understand, we don't have to do anything.

I thought that this was me being so responsible and intelligent. It wasn't. It was me keeping myself safe. Because information alone never solves a real issue. A real ongoing issue that is in motion can only be stopped by another action that involves motion and forward moving. It cannot be fixed with standing still.

Because information doesn't always give you a structure to move forward, you're just taking in all this information. It just ends up being all these different things you're carrying. Like I think of it as like you're just holding all these books and they're like falling down as you try to pick them up, right?

That is one type of stylist that often finds herself in this boom-or-bust cycle. It just feels like every high is followed by either a low or just like a sense of just "meh." Like dysthymia, I think, is the right word for your business.

The second stylist that I work with can look completely opposite. They're the ones that are always investing, always hiring coaches, always joining a program, always in a mastermind, always looking for an answer. They show up, they take their notes, they raise their hand, they do the work. Still, they don't get the results they expect.

It's not that this stylist is cynical. She's just very careful now. Because when you spend real money and real time and real effort on something that doesn't move your business forward, it's not just a little bit of a sting because you lost some money. I would argue nine times out of ten, if you really got the reality of it, you would be much less worried about money and much more worried about something that I think a lot of the stylists that I talk to who listen to this podcast are, which is, "I don't want to do another thing wrong."

But a lot of times people say, "Oh, it's just money," which also, by the way, is one of the reasons why some of your styling clients don't sign up with you, but we'll talk about that later. And so it really can shake something to your core when you keep making investments, and then you really think you have evidence. As a stylist said in my DMs last week, "I feel like I'm getting a lot of evidence that as much as I care about this, as much as I love this, as much as I think I was born to do this, I'm not cut out for it because I'm just not getting the results and I'm doing literally everything. I am doing everything."

And so when you start to wonder, "Is it me? Is it the program?" because you're in action—"Am I the only one in the room who's not getting it?"—that starts to really eat at you, and you become really, really self-protective. Understandably, right? Because it feels like no matter what way you move, if you make the investment and it doesn't work out, you're disappointed, or you find out that it didn't work for you, or you didn't get the result you expected in a certain amount of time.

Or if you don't make the investment, you'll wonder, "Should I have done it? Was this the right thing? Is it worth saving the money? Could I have made the money back by now?" But the reality is that it's neither of those things.

When you analyze and look at and have the tools to do this—why the container that you were in was or wasn't working outside of you just deciding it's you—it might be you. Maybe you weren't ready. But if you weren't ready, then the question becomes, "Ready for what?" And then the answer is actually, "Was it built for where you are?"

So instead of you thinking the problem is you, like you're supposed to swim and rise to any level, to any course, maybe you didn't know the questions to ask. Totally fair. But did you know what level, what types of problems this was going to appease, right? This investment, whatever that was, big or small—when you made it, were you sure that that was the root issue?

Because, like, for example, I used to think for years the problem was just my marketing because I didn't love being visible. But actually, sure, that was like 30% of it. But when I realized that I didn't really know how to say why my offers made a big difference in people's lives—besides, "Shelly seems thrilled and gets compliments. Anna over here told me that she's never felt younger"—I didn't know how to say how I could get it to work for anyone. I knew why it worked for them because they told me, but I had to rely on them.

So when you are in the place of not knowing why things work in your business or don't, of course you're going to reach for something you think is the answer, and it might not be the right solution.

Again, there was a systematic problem that you were trying to meet with maybe mindset coaching, maybe a mastermind that was loosey-goosey. Maybe, right? You didn't know what the right thing was going to be. Was it the marketing? Is it the pricing? Is it my visibility? Do I have a positioning? Right? You don't know.

The reality is that most online programs aren't clear about what level. This is something that the coaching industry really doesn't talk about because coaching is about you overcoming your blocks. It's not necessarily about strategy.

I am trained as a coach, and I mostly do strategy because I don't think that you can actually have effective coaching going on if the person is just thinking more about their mindset than they are doing the task.

So some containers are designed to help you think differently, some are built for accountability, some are built for execution, and some are built to actually diagnose what is happening in your specific business. Usually, those are consulting containers. I talk about this in an earlier episode of the podcast on how to guarantee a return on your investment. So if you're interested in that topic of how to figure out and pinpoint what might be going on, I'm going to link it in the show notes.

But I want you to get that if someone needs to diagnose something in their business because they genuinely don't know—like I said earlier, I didn't know how I was getting results—to move their business forward because they're repeatedly taking just random and wrong actions, or they're waiting for motivation to actually do something, of course, you can leave one of these containers, like say a six-month mastermind, feeling inspired but still be completely stuck. Not because it wasn't great, but because you weren't aware until after that that it wasn't going to address the problem in your business.

When that happens, the story, again, is typically that stylists tell themselves afterwards that they were the problem, but they weren't. They weren't. They didn't know what questions to ask. It's not an internal flaw. It's not like now there's a honing device on you and every investment you make is going to be a mark on your character or your judgment. That's not how this works.

Where you are in your business determines what you actually need. The stylist trying to get her first real paying client is not dealing with the same problems and structural issues as the stylist who has clients that they love but can't hold her prices steady, can't stop overgiving. That is two separate problems. You don't even know you have the problem of overgiving when you don't have real paying clients, right?

So how could you be in rooms having the same conversations with people at all different levels and expect that it's going to give you what you're hoping to get?

And so giving the same problem to stylists or to people in their business in general and calling it comprehensive isn't, right? It's just not, because like we just talked about, somebody over here in this stage of business is dealing with a whole different perception of themselves and of their clients, who your business should be built around, than people who have a lot of refs with the right people.

Doesn't mean that you're not under-earning. You can be advanced as a stylist. I need you guys to hear this because I'm having it all the time as the foundation programs start to open. You can be an advanced stylist and not be making a lot of money. Those two things are not connected. They should be if you had a business plan, but most stylists don't.

So before you think that there is a problem with you or with your abilities as a stylist, let's stop and think, "Is it that I have a set of problems in my business because of my level of expertise that I can't fully see?" Because again, you're too expert, but you don't even realize you're an expert because you have made the mark of your success—how much you're earning or not earning. Yes, I want you to make money, but that doesn't mean you're a good stylist. I know people that make a lot of money that aren't great stylists. That's true of everybody—doctors, lawyers. You're not unique here.

So what I'm trying to get you to see is that you can't jump to the fact that it's you because nine times out of ten, it's not. It's really not you just being responsible for yourself, because the story is actually one that you end up internalizing and hurting your own feelings with.

So what's interesting is that even though these two stylists—the ones who consume a lot of information and the ones who are constantly in action—look nothing alike, they are all dealing with the same underlying issue, because the boom-and-bust cycle isn't random, and it doesn't belong to just one group of stylists. It is what happens when your business only functions under ideal conditions.

This is what I see a lot: when life cooperates, you can keep your business going. You can keep up your amazing marketing schedule. You can get with the program. But the moment something interrupts, everything stops. A kid is sick. You have to travel. You have a difficult client situation. A slow month gets into your head. You tell yourself you're going to start marketing. No one is liking it—only five people. You don't know why the algorithm isn't pushing it out. You decide you're going to stop. You're going to try this all again.

When the business has no structural support underneath it, it interrupts everything, and it resets the clock when you get into these periods. You have a great month, and then something happens, and you have to rebuild because you had your head down, and now you have no clients on the books. Then something happens again—all over in a cycle—and eventually you decide it's you.

It's really hard. I think super painful for stylists at the level that I'm talking about because you know you can get results. You know you can do it. The evidence is there. But when you think about where you want to be and how you would think that if you had the evidence, then the evidence in your life—the way you're living your life, the way your business feels—would be different.

But what's really missing is the bridge between the results you get and how you are talking about them in public and who you are saying them to, and what you have in your business to support you. Because when that bridge is missing, you will keep misdiagnosing the problem. You cannot see all the parts to make a whole picture. You're just looking at one tiny little square.

So even though you have the results over here, you have your bank account over here, right? And here's what I notice about the stylists who eventually break out of it—because I want you to hear this part, because I just remember the day where someone said this to me, and it literally gave me that last little bit of just holding on until the breakthrough eventually came.

It's not that the stylists who break out of these boom-and-bust cycles never struggled. They're not the ones who necessarily have the easiest path either. They're the ones who, even after years of stopping and starting, even after the burnout and the slow seasons and all those sales calls that ghosted or didn't convert, something in them never fully lets go. They'll describe it in different ways. Some of them say they can't exactly explain it, or they'll say, "I keep thinking about walking away from this and then I don't." Or just when I was about to leave, I felt that spark of excitement again. Or they'll talk about a little client moment that came back to them, or a client reached out from the past and emailed them a session where they hear about something had clicked, and someone sends them a message and is like, "You changed my life," and then that little flicker appears again, and that little pull—it really matters because it's telling you something, but on its own it's not enough.

And you know that because if it was enough, it wouldn't keep burning out, right? You need the other pieces, bigger wood, to start to keep that flame going and growing, because the spark that you feel—which is that passion for styling and that feeling you get when your clients come back to you and tell you that it completely changed how they view the world and themselves—that is what feeds it.

But if you're in a boom-and-bust cycle, it's hard to fan that flame on your own, and it's easy to forget all the wins you have behind you. And then you're going to try to grow your dream and grow the business from sheer willpower—you're just white-knuckling it when you feel that. But eventually you're going to burn out, because everybody needs to be able to rest. Everybody needs to be able to put their head down. But we know that if you put your head down for too long, the business doesn't live on its own.

So you need to stop going between those high highs and those low lows. That's the part that's so hard. Because we forget that in order to keep the flame going and keep it steady, you have to constantly feed it the wood, right? You have to be constantly reminded. But when you're in these cycles, you can't do that, because your energy is either so high or so low that the consistency—there's nothing left over for day to day.

At some point, what stylists at this point in business need isn't to put out more content. It's not necessarily more mindset work. It's usually not the thing that most people think it is—a social media manager or another marketing strategy. It's someone who knows what they are talking about, who can look at what you are actually building and tell you, "Here's what is happening. Here's what needs to change first. Here's what matters right now. This is the stuff that can wait."

When you're at this point, look at that. Otherwise, you are going to look at all the problems in your business out of order. You're going to try to fix everything at once—your pricing, your marketing, your messaging, your clients, visibility. Then everything is going to feel urgent. Then nothing's going to get finished. You're going to be in your room, in your house, walking around in circles thinking, "Is this crazy? Is this what I'm supposed to do? Should I up my prices? I haven't had a client in months. Is this the right thing? I don't know what to say. Do I know how to talk to this person?"

You're alone with your thoughts, and that's why I'm so familiar with this very specific type of overwhelm for the stylist who's already been in business for a while, who's had their ideal client—so they've had that taste of how good it feels. I've lived it for years. I never thought, honestly, there would be a day where I'd be sitting here recording this from a place of getting out of that sense of overwhelm and being behind it. I truly thought overwhelm was my middle eight.

But today I can tell you that on the other side of it, it is a completely different experience, and I can see, "Oh, that was optional," but I couldn't see it when I was in it. And this familiarity with that stuck feeling is what had me come in after years of having a successful styling business and starting this one at mid-tier stylist range. People thought I was crazy. "Why would you do that? There are people that have businesses and don't have money, and they're stuck. Why would you go in?" Go in for the new stylist first is what everyone told me, right?

They're excited. You know, they want to do it. They don't know how hard it is yet. Are you kidding me? You have everything you need at that point. You just need someone to put it together in the right order.

I genuinely have felt over the years like I am the right person to help you put it together in the right order because I've looked at all the orders, and I paid all the money, and I put it together in every conceivable way. And then I've helped hundreds of stylists, not just in the styling consultancy but outside of it, do the same. I have always approached it from a strategy standpoint because I, like many of you, was always looking to invest in the next thing or read about the next thing, so I was always like, "Well, which next thing do I pick, right?" I wasn't just like, "Oh, this is stuck, someone tell me what happens." I was like, "Let me fix this." I was absolutely insatiable. It really took its toll.

It was because I know this feeling of being in the thick of it that I wrote Income Accelerator within a year of starting this business, because I know that it is a special feeling of stuck, and it requires specific things and specific insights to get you to at least see the problem, right? You have to continue to maintain the behavior. It doesn't fix it forever, right? But at least it gives you the point of like, "Okay, I have done this checkup of my business. I know the order of operations for my business. I know I like these services. I know that these prices, if I stick with my marketing, will get me there." Not, "I don't know. I hope this is the thing that makes it click."

That's a big difference in the way you operate because there's less time second-guessing, which is, by the way, eating up a ton of time, in case no one told you, and a lot of energy, and is mostly what's responsible for burnout—not clean working hours. That's not what makes you burnt out. It's all of the mental crap that you sludge through to get one task done.

So that's why when I created Accelerator, I was like, "We need to look at the services, the pricing, the client relationships that each stylist has, the type of marketing they like to do. What kind of marketing are you going to go towards more than others that might be costing you sales?" A huge conversation I'm having with the alumni of my programs right now.

So these are the things that you've got to look at over time. We look at them together. We order them. We work on the most important ones. You leave with new positioning, a new offer structure, pricing that you can hold on to. If you're not ready for the level of pricing you need, guess what? We make a plan together for when you're going to get there in stages. How many clients? How many months? That's how individual it is, right? Because you can't push people too far in the deep end and expect that they're not going to drown. That's what a lot of programs do for stylists. Or they get bored, and they're like in the kiddie pool. Then they just go home, right?

And so this program is small deliberately. Because this is the work that needs to happen in a container where you both get the one-on-one feedback. You're also in a room full of other people who have been vetted and safe, that know what this mental situation is like. Because everybody doesn't get it. You are unique and special in your business, but you are not unique and special in the things that hold you back, which means there's a seat at the table for you too.

So if you're a stylist who tends to consume a lot or you're stuck between that gap of knowing things and doing things, you're not lazy. If you've been in a lot of programs and you feel as though they haven't paid off, it's probably because the structure did not work for the level of business you were in, not because you are fundamentally flawed.

I hope that this took a weight off you. I hope that you heard yourself and my client's story about having a boom-and-bust relationship with her business, and you hear what's possible for you on the other side, as someone who also lived this for so long and still some days hit in the gut when a client describes it the way that I experienced it for all those years, because it is isolating. It is hard, but it is not. It will end up being the thing that you look back on and you're so proud of yourself for moving towards. You just don't know what all of those challenges were set up to bring you.

That's what I look at now when I look at those years. I never thought I'd be able to talk about it publicly because I thought I would be embarrassed. But instead, I think, "Oh my gosh, those really were setting me up for some of the best years of my life." I loved being a stylist, but now I am blown away every day by the work I get to do, and I just wasn't the person that was ready for it then. I needed to go through all of those challenges, and your story will be a different one, and it may be further into styling, and it may be away from styling.

But instead of taking on all of the heaviness of "What am I doing wrong? What's wrong with me? Why can't I be like everyone else?" I want you to think about, "What could this story be preparing me for that's going to make me a hundred times better than I could ever imagine?" That doesn't mean it's not painful in the moment, but when things are easy, nobody wants them, right? Like a discount bag. Even if it's a really nice bag, you're not going to treat it the same way as you did the one that you had to save up multiple paychecks for, right? You're going to view it differently. Even the experience of going and getting the bag is different. Just stumbling upon it in a store is different than getting dressed up, going to lunch, going to the Chanel store, getting it, right? Having a glass of champagne. Different experience, okay?

That is completely, completely possible. But when you are in the place where it feels like, "I don't know," every day, you can't see it, you can't see what it could be like to not be digging through the bins trying to find a designer purse and literally getting to choose whatever one you want. But those two experiences can absolutely live together in your life. I promise you.

If that's what you're ready for and you're sick of boom-and-bust, applications are open. They actually close tomorrow for Accelerator. I want to talk to you. So get in my DMs, submit an application, and I will 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.