The Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast

When Your Marketing Still Works…But It Doesn’t Feel Like You Anymore

• Nicole Otchy - The Styling Consultancy • Episode 57

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As a successful stylist, you might hit a surprising (and rarely talked about) point in your business: everything looks like it’s working—you’re booking clients, hitting your income goals—but behind the scenes, you’re bored, disconnected, or even dreading your own marketing.

If that sounds familiar, you don’t need to start over. You’ve simply outgrown your positioning.

In the final episode of our Positioning Series on The Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast, we’re talking about what it means when your marketing works but no longer lights you up—and how to evolve your messaging without losing the momentum you’ve built. You’ll learn how to spot the signs of misalignment, why staying stuck costs more than you think, and how to recalibrate in a way that reignites your excitement and attracts the clients you actually want to serve.

1:54 – What your boredom with successful marketing really means about your business
10:16 – The hidden cost of sticking with outdated positioning
17:09 – Why evolving your positioning is a recalibration—not a full restart
19:37 – A real-world example of repositioning without burning your business down
26:03 – How to attract clients who align with who you are now—and fall in love with your business again


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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.

Hey there, welcome back to the podcast. I am so excited that you're joining me today as we wrap up our three-part positioning series.

If you haven't caught the first two episodes, I definitely recommend going back to listen to the previous two in the series, which will be linked in the show notes. Today we are tackling something that happens to successful stylists all of the time and something we kind of discuss more behind closed doors.

So I want to talk about it more openly today so that everybody's clear that this is normal and part of the process. I think that because most of us work siloed and we don't often talk to other people in our industry, it can be really easy to get in your head and not know what's you, what's normal.

Most things are normal that I hear from stylists. Very few things are specific to the stylists that are sharing them with me. So hopefully this will help bring you some comfort today.

Let's talk about this weird in-between place in your business that can happen after several years, which is like your marketing is working, you're getting clients, you're making a significant amount of income—even if it's not every single month, it's steady—you know that in the course of a year it tends to all shake out to about where you want to be, or close to it.

But you're feeling off, like you're not lit up anymore, maybe even a little dead inside when it comes to talking about your offers, if we're being honest. And that feeling, where on paper everything looks great, you've achieved so many of the things that you hoped to in your career, is there, but inside, you're kind of feeling like you're going through the motions.

Here's the thing. A lot of stylists, when they experience this, think that they have a burnout problem. For a while, I used to think that as well. But what I know now is that it is a positioning problem.

Positioning, as we've discussed throughout this series, is how you shape the way your business is seen, and that includes how it's seen by you. It needs to evolve as you do, just like your client’s style does.

So if you think about it, are you really the same person that you were when you first started your business, if you've gotten to this point where so many things that you couldn't even imagine or seemed wildly out of reach are just your norm? Do you have the same interests, the same priorities, and the same level of expertise as when you started your business? Probably not.

So why would your positioning—the essence of how you present your styling business to the world—stay exactly the same?

Today, we're going to unpack what to do when your marketing works but you are bored out of your mind. This is a real thing. It happens to all of us. Marketing that works but doesn't feel good is a sign you have outgrown your positioning.

Now, tiny little caveat. The caveat is this: when I say it doesn't feel good, I don't mean it doesn't feel good because you're new to the skill of marketing. The whole foundation of this conversation is you know what to say to convert people. Nine times out of ten. Eight times out of ten.

You have an idea and you've gotten feedback from your audience because you're at a certain level in your career as a business person, where people repeat back to you your marketing, your messaging. You get a sense of what to say that then leads to sales.

If you're not there, this conversation is not for you in the sense that when I say it doesn't feel good, it may not feel good because you're still learning the skill. So I just want to differentiate that at this point.

But when your marketing is getting you styling clients, but you're not excited about it anymore, about what you're saying to get them, that is really a clear sign that you've outgrown your positioning.

Because getting inquiries, booking clients, maybe even hitting your income goal and feeling like that energy and the excitement isn’t there means there is a disconnect. Maybe you even are becoming aware, even if you don’t want to admit it fully to yourself, that the clients you’re attracting aren’t the ones you’re excited to serve anymore.

I see this a lot with my clients because I’ve worked with my clients for so many years, many of whom I worked with before I started the styling consultancy, and I have seen the majority of my clients who are at six figures or starting to approach six figures have this realization one day.

I can often see it coming before they can, but I let them be the ones to articulate it. Because there are just some signs that come up right before somebody starts to be like, "I don’t really want to admit to myself that I am not in love with this niche," or, "I'm not in love with this client type anymore because I actually got it to finally work, and I don’t want to let go."

So the good news—and what we’re going to talk about today—is no one can ever take away the skill that you’ve developed in your marketing. It’s not a fluke. It’s not like you can just talk to one person. Once you learn the skill, the next most important thing is for you to stay plugged into the spark and for you to stay super into the client that you want to work with.

Because if you don’t care about the client, if you don’t care about the type of people that you really want to work with truly and deeply, I’m sure you don’t wish anybody harm, but you have to be obsessed with them. Like I am about you guys. You have to be.

I think a lot of stylists that are afraid to go all in on a niche before they get to the point that we’re talking about today, they don’t understand what they’re doing to themselves. They really don’t. It’s like dating someone you don’t really like, but they seem stable, so you’re going to marry them.

Don’t rob that person of the rest of their life. You know what I’m saying? Don’t rob your ideal clients of finding a stylist who loves them. There’s plenty of fish in the sea, friends. You don’t need to be doing charity work here while you’re styling.

So it’s really important that you feel permission and acceptance to move on from the type of client that you don’t want to work with, even if they’re paying your bills now. Because what comes up is a fear that then you’re never going to find someone else to pay your bills, and that is not how this works.

You are an expert. And if you can sell to one group, you can sell to another. I promise. I promise, this is all not a waste. Where you’ve gotten yourself to now, it’s not a waste.

But if that sort of passion and that lit-up feeling isn’t there for you, and you’re at consistent income months or you’re consistently marketing and you’re seeing that there is payoff for it, then we gotta get you back in alignment with the right people, or maybe the right messaging. Maybe one, maybe both. Hard to say. Everybody’s different.

But I just want you to understand that the faster you get plugged back into the people you really want to work with, the faster all of this feels great. And the faster you remember why you started this business.

What you need at this point in your career, if you are the stylist, is positioning that allows you to scale sustainably and feel aligned with the work you want to be doing, which might mean you have to let go of some things. Because here’s what happens when those two things aren’t in sync, you start to resent the very business that you built.

Think about how your interests and expertise have evolved since you started. Maybe you’ve developed new skills in certain areas of styling. Or you’ve discovered you really love working with a specific type of client. Or there’s a specific aspect of the styling process that you really feel like you have honed in on and made unique in the industry.

But also, maybe your values around style have shifted, and what used to motivate you just doesn’t light a fire under you anymore. I can say from 15 years in the industry that absolutely, that happened to me multiple times. And I had multiple niches.

This is the natural evolution of you growing as a stylist and as a business owner. Nothing has gone wrong. As a matter of fact, it means something has gone right. But if your positioning hasn't kept up and you were not aware that it was totally okay and totally within the realm of normal growth for you to feel this disconnect as you grow, then of course, every time we show up in your marketing, something is going to feel a little bit off. That's totally natural. It's like wearing clothes that don't fit you anymore. They may technically do the job of covering you up. It might be acceptable, but they're uncomfortable and they don't reflect your current style. They certainly don't help you feel confident when you wear them. Your positioning is just like that, and it needs to adapt and grow with you.

The good news is that recognizing it and giving yourself permission to admit it to yourself is really the first step to realigning and getting your business where you want it to be.

So now we're going to dive into something that I think we are so afraid sometimes to admit, that things are not feeling lit up inside us when we finally get to this point in our business, that we miss the cost of staying misaligned in our business. Hugely important. I think there's a part of us that feels like we should just be grateful. That's a real scarcity mindset. So we're going to talk about that.

What it's actually costing you to be in a misaligned state is more than just feeling a little bit uncomfortable when you go to market. On one level, the first level, there is low-level dread sometimes before you do a client session or you go to write your marketing. You know the feeling, that slight pit in your stomach, or maybe you start to see notifications from clients, and you feel a little bit of resentment. Like, “I don't want to be hearing from these people anymore.”

Now, of course, we all have a client here and there that's annoying. But I'm saying this is your norm. More often than not, you're like, “I don't care anymore about that, about your issues with ruffles. I'm good.” You feel like you're seeing more and more clients for whom you care less and less about the things that they care about.

Then there's this sort of meh feeling around showing up consistently, and that's really complex because you almost feel like you've outgrown certain style and content, and that the services you're offering, you're not excited about, you're not lit up to talk about them. You don't feel excited, but you know that they sell, you know that people will buy them. Maybe you know that the price point's fine.

Slowly but surely, you're procrastinating more and more, or you're kind of phoning it in when you post online, just so you're checking the box rather than having to take the time to create something meaningful, because you are subconsciously maybe not wanting to call in the types of clients who you're currently working with.

And here's a really big one that I think is the really hidden but very, very costly side effect of being misaligned in your business when you're at this level. It's that you're censoring your real voice in order to fit in with what's been working, even if it doesn't work for you. And so your styling brand isn't reflecting where you are now.

This is ironic because so many of us speak, or have spoken in my case, in the past, about something like your wardrobe not fitting who you are today. It's probably one of the most overused phrases. You need to think of better ways to say it because we're just all saying the same thing. I know it's because it really does fit with what we're trying to say.

But when that's the case, we know what the cost is for our clients. But we don't always see what the cost is in our business to ourselves because we have convinced ourselves that this is how we’ve made money to date so we need to keep making money exactly the same way because we can’t afford to slide backwards.

But because you’re not fully engaged and you’re not really bringing your best ideas forward, if you do this long enough and you're not pushing your own boundaries or innovating in how you approach personal style, how you approach marketing, and you're just maintaining, you will slide backwards. That may be slower than if you change things and there's a little blip in the radar, but it's going to happen.

So that's why it's like often watching my clients come to terms with this is sort of like a delicate balance because I want to say to them, “Hey, I think you're outgrowing this.” But they are so convinced that they have gotten to this point and it's working that they're clutching and white-knuckling what has gotten them here.

Everything in them is saying, "Not safe, not safe to change." But maintaining might keep the lights on for a little while, but it is never going to fuel your next chapter of your styling business journey. This is something I see with stylists who are already at six figures pretty often.

This misalignment also affects how clients experience working with you. Again, like I said earlier in the episode, it's really important that we're not acting like we're saving people. We have to keep this niche around. People will live without us. We are not food, water, and shelter to people's lives.

Not saying what we do isn't important. Not saying it's not transformative. But in order for it to be truly transformative, we have to be lit up by the group of people that we want to work with. We have to have passion for that group, or else it’s going to be real hard to deal with some of the annoyances that come along in this career, and I think you know what I’m talking about.

So often, you can hear people being upset about things that don’t make sense to us because they have a view of themselves that’s so wonky sometimes, you have to have a greater universal love for the people you work with to withstand some of the craziness that happens in this industry.

So even if you're delivering great styling work, sometimes clients can sense that you're not fully present or passionate about what you're doing. This subtle disconnect can prevent them from being enthusiastic referrals or repeat clients.

And I see this a lot with clients, and sometimes I have to say, "I think it could be that they're sensing that you're not super into them," right? It makes sense, especially when people are making thousands, multi-thousand-dollar investments in what you're doing.

We have a responsibility to stay lit up or to move on to a different group of people if we can't, because of the prices that most stylists are charging. Like, it's not ethical. Of course, you can have a few clients, and of course, it can take some time to really figure out, "Did I just have a couple of bad clients or is this a pattern?"

But I want to have this episode out there in the world so you guys can be kind of paying attention, because the more onto yourself you can be, and the more we normalize this, the faster we can all just get back to what we got here to do and serve the correct people.

Because you should be growing, just like your clients should be wanting to evolve their style. So while it might seem easier to stick with what’s working, the hidden cost of staying misaligned is really something that adds up quickly and it compounds over time. They can get harder and harder to course correct the longer you wait. So my hope is this is going to help, save this episode, go back to it so that, again, you're going to be in the game for a while, this is going to happen to you. This is normal.

So now for the good news: Evolving your positioning does not mean—does not mean—burning everything to the ground and starting over. Because this is, I think, the thing that keeps people stuck, keeps people in denial, keeps people not wanting to express this next version of themselves in their business.

We're talking about recalibration, not revolution. We're talking about subtly beginning to move yourself closer. One of the reasons why stylists at all levels stay stuck is black or white thinking. Cannot tell you how many conversations I've had this week alone on this.

We tend to think, "Okay, it's been two weeks. Why isn't anybody buying?" "It's been five weeks. Why isn't anybody buying?" Well, maybe because for five years, you haven't talked in your marketing this way. Maybe because people don't see most of your content.

Or, "Oh, if I raise my prices, none of my established clients are going to come with me." Then I have to remind people, you're only raising your prices to your new clients, not your established clients.

We cut off opportunities left and right with black and white thinking. And this whole idea that we're going to burn down our business when we're not in love with our ideal client anymore, or we got to just suffer, is black and white thinking. It's what keeps people stuck, miserable, burnt out, and then thinking, "Maybe this was the wrong career choice."

It's not. You're just not acknowledging growth as a natural output of your success as a stylist. Or you're acting like you should feel grateful for what you've had. "You can be grateful and still want to move on." All of that is possible.

So you can absolutely keep what is working in your business and reconnect with what excites you now. This is about thoughtful evolution, not some dramatic pivot. We're not doing that, because we still do have bills to pay around here, okay?

This is not a toxic positivity environment that I'm creating. We need to be reasonable. As someone who had to pay my rent with styling, I did not have this huge safety net that some people have, I am going to always give you advice from that point of view. Whether you need to pay your rent or your mortgage with your styling services or not, that is where I am coming from, because that's how we run real businesses.

So you can absolutely keep what's working and go in the direction that is going to excite you, without having to have zero income coming in.

Here’s what this looks like. A stylist who built her business primarily marketing to busy professionals came to me, and her messaging was really all about efficiency, quick transformations, looking polished without much effort. And it was working. She had a client roster that was full. Her prices were too low, to be totally transparent, and she was busy beyond anything I have ever seen. This woman was out at the mall every day. I’ve never seen so many Instagram stories at a mall, it’s wild. Busy, busy, busy.

Also, we probably could have tripled her income at the prices she was charging, and she still would’ve been insanely busy. It was working. Her business was working. She was very proud of the success she had, as she should be.

But after a few years, she started to realize something. The clients she actually loved working with were not just any busy professionals. As a matter of fact, she was getting bored and annoyed by the people she was booking, but it was paying her bills.

She started to realize that once in a while, she was getting this other type of client that she loved. She didn’t realize that she could actually call more of this person in. So she thought she had to either give up the business or risk everything by trying to just call in this group.

Which was, specifically, what she realized is she liked creative professionals that were embarking on a second career. They were pretty well off. They were in architecture, interior design. A couple of them were artists, graphic designers. They were more creative, and they really wanted to work with her to find different types of brands than the more corporate busy professionals.

So she kind of felt guilty, like she shouldn't be leaving anybody out. These were really people that had taken a leap, and they had started to pursue something they were passionate about at this second chapter of their life. They really wanted their personal style to reflect that personal transition in the professional realm.

And so these clients—they were already on her roster. So we kind of knew what we needed to say to get more of them. She just wasn’t speaking to them specifically. And the work she did with them, for her, was deeper and more meaningful than just what she felt like were more efficiency-type styling offers with blanket professional busy folks.

For her, it became about realizing, “Wait a sec, wait a sec... Sure, I can get anybody to buy my services, or anybody in this niche. But when I’m working with this group of people within the niche specifically,” she was really helping them visually express their creative identity. Then she started to see, “Well, this is fulfilling.”

Before, she realized she was kind of just excited it was working so she was just delighted that people were hiring her, which we all have that point. No shame in that. But once she recognized this shift, she didn’t really want to work with other types of people, but she kind of felt locked in.

So we started to gradually shift her messaging. She didn’t completely abandon—at first, while we were getting her comfortable with this—the other folks, who she found a little bit boring but who paid the bills, just because percentage-wise she had more of them. But then we started to layer in speaking directly, every few posts, to the second-career sort of creative group.

There was part of her that was like, “I don’t think there are enough people in the world for this.” But she was wrong. She started to share more of the behind-the-scenes and stories from these sort of more creative professionals. Slowly but surely—not overnight, hear me here, not overnight—but within one quarter, one business quarter, so like three months, she started to make some small tweaks to her offers to address some of the interests that that group had.

She started to test them out on her sales calls. She started to update some of the client case studies that she shared, to speak to those types of folks. Lo and behold, it worked. She started getting these people on sales calls. We started talking about different places she could go and actively find these people.

Now, about like a year and a half in, more than half, I would say like 80% of her new clients are this type of person. Guess what? She didn’t lose her established clients that aren’t exactly in this demographic, but they have a relationship. She enjoys working with them. The ones she didn’t enjoy working with, we just kind of slid away, just quietly did the fade-out.

But the ones that were already there, they come back every season. She has a great relationship with them. They may not fit the bill of the people she’s most excited to sign now, but because the relationship is there, it’s fine. We didn’t blow up her whole business, we slowly aligned it.

Guess what? She still gets the occasional person that is not a great alignment, and if she feels like it and she has the time, she takes them. But it doesn’t make her resent her business anymore. So this is what I’m saying. This is possible.

But we have to get out of this idea that we’re going to burn the whole thing down, never talk to our old clients again, and that every third post or whatever being specifically targeted at someone is going to ruin our business. I hear people feeling this way, and they’re not booked out. So if you are booked out and you feel this way, I get why you have more fear.

But if you’re not booked out and you’re fearing this, you’ve got nothing to fear because you’re not booked out. So don’t worry about alienating anyone. It might be that the very thing you’re afraid of alienating is the thing that actually calls people in, because it’s specific.

So this is how we did it for her. This is how we did it in her case. Everyone’s a little different. The strategy that I use depends on how close or how far away the folks are that you want to work with.

I can’t think of many cases—I was going to say nine out of ten times just to be safe here—but I can’t think of a lot of cases where we can’t do this slow, sort of walk into a new niche and have to completely abandon whatever was there before that was paying the bills. I just can’t think of a lot of ways that that would be the case.

If I end up being wrong on that, I’m happy to publicly admit that I’m wrong, but I just don’t think so.

So a really key part of evolving your positioning is getting clear on what your unique strengths and perspectives are now, not just when you started. Because a huge part of what was happening with this particular stylist that I’m talking about is that she thought what made her valuable in the marketplace was what she started with, which was: “I’m quick, I’m efficient, and I’m pretty good at corporate wear,” or that idea.

But it turned out that she had evolved. The world had evolved. Things had changed. All she had to start doing was talking about those values more, and really shaping the way she was talking about what she cared about as a stylist, like we’ve talked about in the other episodes, to make this pivot easy and clean.

And it really just wasn’t that hard. She was just really excited, the more she started to notice that her excitement generated excitement in her audience from people that had never spoken up before.

And that’s what I’m saying. People are there. But your excitement is costing you them. And then you tell yourself, “Well, no, my audience isn’t buying.” Your audience isn’t buying from you, the people you want to, because you’re not showing them you’re excited about them.

It’s really that simple. Our behavior dictates the behavior of our audience, always. 100%. And so, the first way to look is at your actions. So when she started to not be so black and white in her thinking and started to share her thoughts, she started to notice that the right people showed up. As long as she could sit with herself long enough to show up and try this new positioning—even if nobody was clapping at first—lo and behold, the right people were there.

Being able to start thinking about: “How am I different? What do I appreciate now that I didn’t appreciate when I started out this business? What do I appreciate in my client interactions? What do I appreciate from the people that are the most delightful to work with?” And just sharing that.

Just sharing: “I love clients like this. I love that.” That is enough in the beginning. Not for the whole time—you’re going to need a bigger strategy—but that is gold for refreshing your positioning.

In the same way that we say to our clients that they do have a style—they just need someone to pull it out of them—you have your next level in you. It just needs to be pulled out. You have the wisdom about what your next move is. You just need someone to help you form those thoughts and think about how you can take what you’ve discovered about yourself in the process of building a business and shape it into your next level.

So if you’re in a place where your marketing is working, but it is not lighting you up, it’s a sign that something needs to change, and that nothing has gone wrong in your business. You are not a failure. This was not a mistake that you got into this career. It is a sign that you are evolving, like I would hope that you do as a professional.

If you’re nodding your head and you’re thinking, “Yes, yes, yes, this is exactly where I am,” and you’re feeling some relief that I’m telling you this is all normal and part of the game as you grow—especially as you’re getting towards or are in the six-figure mark—and you’re just like, “You know what? This doesn’t feel like me anymore,” I want to invite you to consider that this may be the perfect time for a strategic reset.

Especially since I’m recording this in the middle of spring, and we’re getting closer to summer—and for many stylists, there’s a little bit of a quieter period that goes on—so that would be a great, great time for you to consider that a Positioning Intensive, if you can get one of the spots that are left, is a good fit for you.

Because it’s not about throwing away what’s working in your business. It’s about updating your messaging to match who you are now and the stylist that you’ve become through experience and growth. I am so excited for you to be able to do that before you hit another big season in your business—fall, for many stylists.

In this intensive, we’re going to really take a deep dive into who you are as a stylist now, who you love to serve most, and how you communicate that value in a way that feels authentic and exciting, while keeping the strengths and the clients that are paying the bills around while you make the transition. Again, it’s not either/or, my dears. It is all of it. We can make it all happen.

So wherever you are in your business, thank you so much for listening to this episode in the Positioning Series. I hope that these episodes have given you permission to evolve as you evolve, just like we all encourage our clients and stylists to do, because your styling business should be growing with you, not holding you back. 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.