Harsh Advice for Business Owners Who Feel Stuck
Elliott Botterill argues that many business owners become stagnant because they lack high‑stakes events that force them out of their comfort zone. Using a personal anecdote about a low‑key FA Cup semi‑final at Wembley, he illustrates how “cup‑final” moments can generate spikes of growth that raise a business’s performance baseline. He explains that the human brain, evolved for energy conservation and homeostasis, naturally avoids discomfort, making stress‑induced growth difficult. By reframing stress as a catalyst—comparable to muscle‑building or learning—he shows why uncomfortable challenges are essential. Botterill introduces the concept of “forcing functions”: deliberately scheduled, public, high‑risk events (live webinars, in‑person workshops, large conventions, product launches, price‑rise campaigns, public speaking, livestreams) that create pressure, deadlines, visibility, and preparation requirements. He outlines criteria for effective forcing functions—scariness, a firm deadline, public awareness, and the need for preparation—and provides a practical playbook for implementing them, recommending at least one quarterly “cup‑final” event (or more) and describing how to manipulate the environment to overcome weak willpower. The talk concludes with a call to action for viewers to design their own high‑stakes moments to accelerate business growth.
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I've worked with hundreds of business owners. I noticed that the ones that are stuck often have the same thing in common. They are stuck because they have nothing in their calendar that is pushing them to do more. It's certainly not they're lazy. It's not because they're clueless. They are caught in the trap of comfort and playing it safe. I was lucky enough to head down to Wembley where Leeds United were taking on Chelsea in the FA Cup semi-final. And let me just tell you, we lost 1-0. We didn't turn up, we didn't play very well. And so this was a monumental occasion. And it occurred to me was that most business owners will never experience their version of this cup final. They will never set a stage for themselves that allows them huge moments of glory or indeed possible moments of failure. Either way, the result is not the defining thing. The defining thing is having the spectacle that brings truly the best out of you. And why is this? Why, as business owners, will many just chug along and not really get to experience this? Because of the day-to-day. Most business owners, they chug along, they get into a rhythm, they find the things that they like doing. And as a result, days begin to go by, then weeks, then months, and then years. And next thing you know, a decade has gone by and the business has relatively stayed the same because we get caught in the trap of comfort. A normal business owner's trajectory honestly looks really, really flat. If you look at the average of a business owner statistically in the UK, most of them do not experience much growth. They stay flat and then reach a point where they can't be bothered to do it anymore, or it no longer becomes financially feasible, and they go and do something else. Whereas on the flip side, you have the trajectory of businesses that architect their own cup-final-esque experiences. But you see what happens when you have your own cup finals, these monumental specific occasions that force you to elevate, that force you to work hard. They give you tremendous spikes of growth. And those little spikes of growth, they're not just fleeting. No, they raise the baseline. And then you have another one and the baseline goes up and the baseline goes up and the baseline goes up. And all of a sudden you start to experience significantly stronger trajectory in the business, which translates to higher sales, better profits, more freedom, opportunity, and so on and so forth. But these moments, these cup finals, are the key distinguishing factor. Now, the reason this is actually very hard to achieve is because of this little thing here. The brain is a funny old thing. You see, as humans, we are fighting a 2-million-year-old operating system because our brain has been there alongside our species for such a long time. It has slowly evolved and due to how fast technological advancements have been in the last couple hundred thousand years, we're now rocking a brain that really hasn't had a chance to evolve yet for the society that we truly live in. What this means is the brain is designed for comfort and it leans into comfort, and all of our default behaviour is about leaning into comfort. And the fact of our reality is that growth that we strive for as individuals and within our businesses is uncomfortable. You know, I had a one-on-one with one of my team yesterday. He was referencing how times have been pretty stressful recently, and that had worried him. And he didn't lie that it had been stressful. And so I offered him a simple reframe, and I said that all growth is on the other side of stress. Think about it. When you go to the gym, you cannot simply go in and do things that feel good. That will not provide enough stress or stimuli to the muscle to develop it. If you want to grow muscles, you have to go in, you have to lift the heavy weights, feel the stress, break down the muscle, and then the body will rebuild it. And that's the same with our learning. I always think back to when I was at school doing my psychology A-level, and we had to learn all of these psychological principles and all of these studies and then essay structures. At the time, I found it so difficult, okay? And my brain, it would stress me out, but that stress was directly forming new neurons in my brain, okay? New neurological connections. and it was increasing my ability to write, to recall, and to ultimately succeed in that endeavor. So stress is actually good to an extent. Okay, you can have too much, but the obstacle is the way, as Ryan Holiday in his book says, and we shouldn't shy away from it. But there are two key principles when it comes to our brains that you should understand, because as humans trying to operate at high levels, we have a responsibility to understand the biological parameters in which we have to operate in. And the first one is the energy conservation principle, which is you've got to understand that this brain, which accounts for 1-2% of our body weight, consumes 20% of our body's energy. But what this means is it's using so much energy, it will forever try and conserve energy where possible, which means if there is an easy route to keep you safe, to keep you happy, to keep you warm, to keep you alive, that is what the brain will default to. Now, you and I know that often in life the greatest things that we are striving towards are on the other side of quite long and arduous things that we have to do. So our brain's default is to not want to do that because of the high level of energy spend involved. So we have to be aware of this and we have to fight it and know that our natural inclination will be to chill out. The second thing is homeostasis. Now, homeostasis is our body's way of giving us stability. So we have this inbuilt mechanism that both affects us physiologically and neurologically, which is whatever state we're in, homeostasis is always pulling us back to equilibrium or a state of stability. Because, you know, take our physiological side, we operate at a baseline internal temperature generally of 37.5 degrees, I think. I'm not a doctor, don't quote me on that. And so when we hit the gym, we start pumping iron, 'cause we want to get absolutely jacked. Then we start to get a bit hot and sweaty, and our baseline temperature goes up. So this is where homeostasis kicks in, and it triggers a response. We start to sweat, and the sweat cools us down, and it brings our body temperature down, okay? This is homeostasis in action. Same thing happens when we get a bit cold. If our body temperature drops, homeostasis will kick in, Ooh, we start to shiver, we'll start to, you know, do things. Blood will start to flow away from our extremities. And this is homeostasis pulling us back to this equilibrium. So at every single point, our body is pulling us back to this equilibrium. That is a natural force. Now the same thing happens with our mind. When our mind starts to expend too much energy on strenuous activities, homeostasis will try and pull us back. We'll get the urge to open up Instagram. We'll get the urge to start doom scrolling. We'll get the urge to go to the cupboard and have a snack because we just want to do anything but conquer this difficult problem, which is forcing our brain to create effectively new neural connections, which is using all sorts of energy. I get this when I have been relaxing too much. After a while, my homeostasis kicks in and I like desperately need to do some work. I desperately need to do something productive because my body has gone too long without it and homeostasis pulls me back. And you've got to be aware of this, because these are natural forces that are at play that we need to understand. And so the key message is growth is very uncomfortable, and therefore we have to fight our biology if we want to do the right things, put on these cup final events that are going to be stressful and going to give us the high levels of growth. We have to know that we're fighting our biology, because there are too many business owners that play way too small. They play way too small. They're so risk-averse. The thought of even picking up the phone and ringing their leads just is so stressful to them that they don't do it. And my God, what a waste of life and potential that is. Okay? And this is why you have to understand why you sometimes feel this way, why you sometimes feel uncomfortable, and why there is so much gold on the other end of it. So how do we actually do this? Because fighting your biology, let me tell you, that is going to be pretty tough. You can do it, but generally in short periods of time because of the extreme amount of energy and willpower, like, involved. The example here is me. You know, I, I try and keep myself in shape. You know, I try and eat pretty healthy. But the truth is, I have such bad willpower. And so I have to manipulate my environment in order to stick to my goals and not scoff my face with endless chocolate because I fucking love chocolate. And so I have to make sure it's not there. It's the only way I can do it. So I'm fighting my biology, but not directly. I'm manipulating the environment to do the hard work for me. I'm making my default option the right option. And that is where this comes in, because in the context of creating these events, we want to create forcing functions. And you as a business owner, if you aspire to doing great things, to building an above average business, then you need to start deploying forcing functions into your business. And so a forcing function is a specific date, deadline, publicly committed to that we are gonna do a thing. And it's deliberate pressure that draws the performance out of us. It is us creating our own cup final experience. So here's what we need to do. This is what we do in our business all the time. Because left to our own devices, we will just naturally chug along because that is our brain's default state and homeostasis is always pulling at us. So we purposely add forcing functions into our calendar to bring out the best. And we do this in 3 main ways. Number 1, we do a lot of live webinars. We do between 2 and 4 live webinars a month and we spend a lot on them. You know, we might spend 50K on one webinar driving people to it. And plus there's a lot of people involved in the execution of them. So if you factored in all the cumulative salaries as well, there's a lot of money going on in these, so which means there's a lot of risk. Secondly, we do in-person workshops. We're blessed, we have a beautiful HQ here with a training room that can seat 72 people, and so we invite people in. We love doing in-person stuff. We do that for our members, and we do it as a sales tactic where we invite people in for a day of value and then obviously offer them a chance for some more hands-on help at the end. And that works great. And then finally, we do the biggest of all the forcing functions, which is a convention. So we have 1,500 business owners come down to the International Convention Centre in Birmingham for a massive 2-day event with tons of celebrity speakers. It's awesome. But again, very high stress, a supreme forcing function. And these forcing functions in our office, this is the top floor in our office. You'll see these calendars on the wall everywhere. And so this calendar, there's like 5 of these calendars on different walls, and this is our marketing team one. And you can see we cross off the days. We are reminded how finite the year is when you have it all on the wall, all in one place here. But then in any given month, you can see all of the big forcing functions that we've got. So in May, this is a webinar, this is a live event, this is another live webinar, and this is a huge live event as well. So we have some serious forcing functions, because what this means is we are forced as a team to execute a whole bunch of stuff to make these moments matter. And all of these moments involve large volumes of other people experience something that we're putting on. We're performing in a way, and therefore there is high levels of risk that mean we must execute well, otherwise it's a financial loss and a reputational loss. And we use these all throughout the year to focus our efforts because these forcing functions, you know, we don't just do these because we need something to do. We do these because we recognize these are the highest impact sales and brand activities that we can do as a business. And in almost any business, I would say the same. To explain these in a little bit more detail, the live webinars are fantastic. Biggest challenge in marketing today is getting people to consume enough content that they actually feel like they know you, like you, and trust you enough to buy. And a live webinar, the magic of it being live, means that people consume, they stay, they watch, and we get lots of minutes on brand, which equals strong relationships. And we can take someone completely cold and turn them into a customer in the span of 2 hours. So we love doing those, they are awesome. We then love doing a lot of in-person workshops as well. Like, as I said, this is a snap from our training room downstairs, and we have got the capacity for it. We're bullish on in-person events, and we do this for our members as a retention tool, but also as a sales tool, because, you know, a lot of people don't show up to our webinars, or they're not quite ready to buy at the end of the webinar. So we'll invite them to an in-person workshop and then spend the whole day with them, show them our HQ, give them a ton of value, demonstrate that we are capable of helping them, and then extend an invitation. Where if they want more of our help, here's what we have on offer. And so that works tremendously well for getting additional sales and getting more out of our live webinar funnels. But then we have the pièce de résistance, okay? The convention. So the convention is our, you know, this is our Champions League final because this is a huge event. Thousands of people at this huge convention center. Takes many, many weeks to prepare. We have all sorts of celebrity, famous, big-name speakers come along. And it is really cool. Now, this is a really defining brand moment for us as a business because as a company at Entrepreneur's Circle, our mission is to educate, inspire, and motivate as many entrepreneurs in the UK and around the world as possible to achieve more than they could ever possibly conceive. And bringing people together, this annual pilgrimage, and blowing their minds with amazing content, having the best keynotes from the best speakers and creating a social environment as well to bind everyone together is second to none. So that's incredibly time-consuming, incredibly expensive, and so worth it for the human connection and goodwill and experiences and memories that it builds. The key thing with the forcing function, the reason these forcing functions work, there's a hard deadline. Which means it forces you to execute with speed and precision. It gives you that clarity of what you should be doing now, but also it's high stakes. And the high stakes comes in two forms. Number one, financial. So if you're doing a live webinar and you're spending a lot of money on the ads and cumulatively a lot of wages in the production of it, you need it to go well. Otherwise you're going to blow all that cash and be left empty. That's not good. Same with the convention. We invest so much into that. It's critical. That it must go well, and as a result, we execute it to the highest standard. But also reputational risk. All of our forcing functions involve other people on the other end, okay? And as a result, if we fucked up 'cause we didn't prioritize it, that has huge reputational consequences. People are not gonna wanna do business with us, they're not gonna be happy, and that will spread, and that's not good. So these forcing functions, they force the best out of us. And that is why this is so powerful, because it gives us the impetus to fight against our brain. So that's all well and good. How do we actually do this in practice? So here's what you need to do. You want to make sure you have one cut vinyl every quarter as a bare minimum. I think you should have more, at least one a month personally, but it depends on your ability to execute. And so at least one every quarter. Now there are criteria for a cup final or a good forcing function. And the first one, it should be scary. The good kind of scary, where the fact that this is in your diary, your stomach starts to flutter a little bit because you know it's, it's a big deal and it's pushing you outside of your comfort zone, which is exactly what it should be doing because these are all about growth. These are not about doing something that you love doing 'cause it's really easy and comfortable. This is about doing the uncomfortable stuff that is going to lead to better growth as a human, better growth in our business. It needs a deadline because it has to happen on a specific date and it needs to be visible, i.e., people need to know about it because if only you know about it, then you— it's going to be easy to move around and it's not going to hold as much weight when you can just do that. So we tell everyone about it. Ideally involves other people being there. So therefore canceling it or moving it has genuine repercussions. And finally, it forces preparation. This is not about doing things that are run-of-the-mill activities you could just go one day and do. It has to be of such a level it requires you to prepare and get yourself ready because again, it should be forcing you to do things that are outside of your normal scope of work and outside your zone of comfort. So here's a few examples. Number one, obviously live webinars. These are fantastic. You can do them every week if you wanted to, certainly every single month. Tremendous opportunity to bring a bunch of people together, give them a fantastic presentation, and then sell them some of your stuff. So very financial ROI-driven activity. In-person workshops. Most people, when I talk about in-person workshops, the first thing they say is, well, we don't have a room of 72 people. Well, there are so many rooms you can hire. And then they go, oh, well, I don't want to hire a room. And I'm like, well, do the flipping maths. Because if you are going to either do this in-person workshop as a retention tool Or B, as I would suggest, as a sales tool where you invite a bunch of your prospects, get them to pay some kind of nominal refundable deposit to turn up, deliver a day of value in the room with you where their level of consumption is like so high because they're literally there, and then offer them some additional help at the end through your paid services. If you just model the numbers, you will quickly see it is so worthwhile. And in fact, I even made a little calculator for some of my private clients that shows or enables you to model this and see whether it's a good decision or not. And pretty much in most cases it is because it doesn't cost that much to hire a nice room for one day and you also get lots of great content and so on and so forth. You could hold a summit. A lot of people do these virtually where you bring together thought leaders, keynote speakers in your industry. 3-day challenges are fantastic, very intensive to build and execute, but bring together prospects and over the course of 3 days help them implement and get a specific result. And that always is a treat. Could just be a new product launch that you've been selling for a while and you're finally going to pull the trigger and get it live. A price rise campaign. We love price rise campaigns. Price is one of the most underutilized levers in growing a business's profitability, and we do these several times a year. So we do this just before Christmas, because our prices will always go up on the 1st of January typically for new customers. And we're just doing this literally right now. We've got one that expires in a couple of days where we go out to all of our prospects. We say, hey guys, just so you know, this is your fair warning. In 3 weeks our price is going up from X to Y. This is the reason. It's because we're investing in ABCD and it's going to be even awesome if you book a call or if you opt in before deadline, then we will honor the current price for you know, as long as you're a member. But if you choose to come in afterwards, then you'll be paying the new price. That message, that positioning drives a ton of action. And then you have increased your prices, which we always see. Typically your conversion rate goes up because the perceived value of your thing has gone up as well. Public speaking, getting out there and speaking at an event, at an exhibition, volunteering to speak at a school, whatever it might be, something good. And you're speaking out loud. but also even a livestream. Put on your own event. Just do a livestream. We did a livestream on this channel before Christmas, and it was our most viewed video ever. Took a lot of preparation, and I was a bit uncomfortable 'cause it was like 3 hours long, but the best, highest viewed, most watch hour, most commented video that we've done. So we're definitely gonna do some more. But whatever it is, pick something that makes sense, commit, and do it. 'Cause you see, Saturday at Wembley, we lost 1-0, but that's not the point. The point was the build-up to the occasion was palpable, and that is what we need to bring into our businesses if we want to have the opportunity to have these memorable occasions. And hey, your business deserves that same kind of energy, don't you think? I've been Elliott Botterill. You've been amazing. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Drop a comment. What's your cup final moment going to be? I'll see you in the next one. Peace.
