The Addiction that Ruins Business Owners

Ladies and gentlemen, the crippling addiction that I have seen ruin businesses and what you can do about it. You need to be aware of this. This is a somber, darker video because the pain of this addiction, I have seen it firsthand and it has destroyed lives. And I'm here to make sure you don't fall into that trap. Now, this addiction is worse than bad marketing. It's worse than bad hiring. It's worse than having a bad product or need a bad strategy. All of these things alone can be catastrophic, but this thing I'm about to share with you, honestly, it is the quiet plague that ruins people's lives. So what is it? Well, ladies and gentlemen, the addiction is the addiction to new. Yes, you heard that correctly. The entrepreneur's addiction to new. I'm Elliott Botterill. Welcome back to the YouTube channel where we talk about driving traffic, converting traffic, and closing deals so you can have an awesome business and an awesome life. And the addiction to new is brutal. And let me tell you a story so you understand this and how I have experienced this firsthand. But in this video, I'm going to share what it is, why it's important, and how you cannot fall victim to this. So to illustrate this, I want to tell you a story, and a story from my agency days. So I used to run an advertising agency called Botters. We were based out of East London. We had about, you know, 15 people on our payroll, nice little office. It was awesome. And so what we did in this business was a done-for-you service of running paid ads, Facebook and Google, designing and building landing pages, and then also building out follow-up systems to make sure we could convert the leads and stuff that were coming in. This was my first business that I started, and I worked in an advertising agency before, which means I had this skill set. I was a performance data-driven marketer. I loved it. And so I carried that into this business where I did the skill that I had for other businesses. But because I was a purist, it meant that I just loved our service. I loved the actual act of doing the marketing. And so my focus when I was the business owner was always just on delivering an amazing service because that's what I liked. That's where my passion was and I enjoyed it. And so as a result, our business grew incredibly steadily. And so if you looked at the stats of our business from, you know, 2020 to 2025, when I exited the business and joined Entrepreneur's Circle, It basically took us like, round, in round numbers, 5 years to go from like 25K a month to like 125K a month. And so that in 5 years is not exactly crazy growth, right? That is not bad, but it's not, not big growth. But if you look at our revenue for these 5 years, and if each one of these was a month, it was the single most consistent thing you've ever seen. And it was because we focused on our service. We never tried to grow quickly or grow big. We focus on doing a great job for our clients, and as a result, they stayed with us for a very long time. And then we slowly would bring in new people. We'd spend our time getting them up to speed so they could continue to deliver the quality, and it would grow and grow and grow. For me, my ambitions with this business when I started it was to make £24,000 in a year because that's what I was earning in this advertising agency beforehand. And lo and behold, we smashed that pretty quickly out the gate. And so I was, I was loving life. I was loving life. But of course, despite this beautifully consistent period, an opportunity arose. My first little sense of this addiction that was about to come and get me. And the opportunity was presented to me when a client asked if I could do some work with their client base and effectively run a series of workshops over 8 weeks to train their clients on how to build what we call a growth engine or a marketing system from literally ground zero to actually it now works and you've got customers. And so I did these workshops and I took the workshops and I turned it into a digital product because like anyone who's got a done-for-you agency, I saw these people selling info products, I saw these people selling kind of done-with-you coaching programs and thought, wow, that sounds really nice. I can charge people quite a lot of money, but then I can just give them this thing, and with relatively minimal effort, they can just use the thing and be happy, rather than having to have a team that does everything for them. That's quite complex and challenging, and you have scope creep and so on and so forth. So I had the allure of this new shiny sexy business model, and I had a bunch of content I could now purpose into it. So I thought, you know what, let's do it. Let's make the Hyper Growth Accelerator. And I'm not gonna lie, absolutely banging. It took you from, you know, understanding your numbers, your ideal customer profile, your irresistible offer, mapping your growth engine, building out your marketing system, so the landing pages or the emails or the backend, and then actually how to run Meta ads following our methodology, Google Ads, and then how to track everything with a scorecard. Now, I'm not going to lie, this sucker was a bit ahead of its time because we launched this around the time ChatGPT dropped its first ever reasoning model, O-1. And so every single step came with a sequence of mega prompts that we had created that enabled the reasoning model to effectively create all of this stuff for the client. So I thought, wow, this is, this is, this is genius. And so we built it and we set about selling it. And sent some emails out to my list. And lo and behold, this was actually pretty successful. And we sold 50 at around £9,000. And I was thinking, great, this is awesome, happy days, new business model, no fulfillment costs, less headache, brilliant. But, and a big but, the reality ain't always that fucking simple, you see. Whilst the launch of the Hypergrowth Accelerator had been met with a sea of sales and all of a sudden it felt like we were on for a winner, the cold hard reality was that whilst that was taking place, our agency, our core revenues were beginning to decline and drop. You see, what was happening was I was such a bottleneck in the Done For You Agency business. And when all of my focus was now shifted to this new product, creating it and selling it and keeping people happy as they were going through it, my eyes, my attention was not on the core business. The core business that had so steadily grown and fed us all for such a long period of time. And as a result, it started to decrease. And I'll never forget Black November. Black November was November 2023, I think it was, or 2024. And all of a sudden, I think 4 of our big clients all handed in their notice for various different reasons. One got a new marketing manager and she wanted to not have an agency. Another one, we actually just made a cock-up on a campaign, and that was the finishing straw. Another one was having a whole different business strategy and they left. And next thing you know, we went from like never losing a client, which is what we were notoriously good at because of our emphasis on the service, to all of a sudden losing fucking loads. And it was a big revenue hole, and that was very, very stressful. And it was because the addiction to new nearly got me. It nearly took me down because I was so focused on this bright shiny thing. But it wasn't just in the agency days. In fact, just yesterday We had our Q2 planning meeting here at Entrepreneur's Circle where our leadership team, we go into this room up here and we sit around this ginormous table and we look at what we said we were going to do so far this year, what we've actually done this year, and what the heck we're doing for the rest of the year. And so as it happens, this year in many ways have been very kind to us because Jan, Feb, March, it had been our most successful, highest revenue, highest profit quarter of all time, which is great. The downside is January was textbook execution. We crushed it. February was textbook execution. We crushed it. March was not textbook execution. We did not crush it that hard in March. And as a result, we were actually down a little bit on our numbers versus where we said we were going to be, even though we had grown as a business. And so our topic for the Q2 planning was, well, how are we going to recover that gap over the rest of the year? So we finished the year on target, doing what we said we were going to do. And now for us at Entrepreneur's Circle, our business, we have several different business units. You see, we have got what we call our EC membership, which is £99 a month. We've got our software company called Genie AI, which is £249 a month, a tool that helps people execute their marketing and sales. We have got a master plan This is our high-ticket coaching program that we sell for £1,000 a month that takes people through a 9-step process to fully systemize, automate, grow their business on their terms. Absolutely unreal. And then we have Boardroom as well, which is our £5K a month offer where myself, Nigel, Cameron, Maya, and Aubrey work with a very small number of businesses to take them to extreme heights and big exits. And so even though we were down slightly on our March numbers, we have all these opportunities in different business units at different price points that we can now look at to say, well, how are we going to make up this revenue? And what is a little bit of a curse of our team here at Entrepreneur Circle is that we have got so many smart people and we're in the business of growing businesses. That's what we do. And so like, we all think so much about growing businesses and our day-to-day life. We are helping other people grow their businesses. So we like are so in the trenches of growing businesses that when it comes to looking at our own business, we just have got so many ideas. We've got the highest concentration of good ideas probably in the country when it comes to growing businesses. Now, on one hand, this is great. We're never short of ideas of what we should do. But on the flip side, it's very hard because when you've got so many ideas, the challenge becomes executing them. And we have to be very, very choosy with what we decide on to execute, because what we say yes to means we say no to a bunch of other stuff. And when you're dealing with a big business, um, those decisions can be super, super significant. And so As usual in these Q2 planning meetings, we start to discuss all the different possibilities and we're all filled with ideas, but then we have to slap it back to reality and we have to have the really hard conversation, which is like, okay, this all sounds great, but there's no feasible way we can do all of it. So now we have to pick what are the one or two things we actually do and all these things that we're gonna say no to. And it's really, really tough. And as a leadership team, it's probably one of the hardest things that we have to do together. But we know it's necessary because we know that too much new is a death wish. I want to explain why. You see, when we start a business, we go through normally one of the most intense reward pathways ever. And what I mean by that is we are in this situation where our life sucks. We have this amazing idea. And so we quit our job and we start this business. We do a new thing. And lo and behold, for many of us on the first time, for others on the second, third, fourth, fifth. It works. And you spawn this business out of nowhere doing something you like and you're getting paid for it. And next thing you know, you've, like, uno-reversed your scenario and you are now getting paid probably more money than ever before to do this thing that you just created. And it's as a result of all of these just brand new actions that you took. But the challenge is, as a business grows, the cost of doing new stuff and the cost of ignoring the main thing really differ. Because on day 1 of starting a business, the cost of doing new is basically nothing. You have effectively got nothing to lose. You're starting at ground zero and the cost of ignoring the main thing is again, is like nothing because the main thing doesn't even exist yet. But on the flip side, when we're at day 1000 or even longer in our business, all of a sudden the cost of doing new starts to be huge. Because if we have got this main thing that is delivering results for us and we're going to take a ride and do something else, that is quite risky and the potential cost there is very huge. Similarly, the cost of ignoring the main thing is equally as fucking huge because the main thing is the main thing for a reason. And just because we get slightly bored with it doesn't mean it's not providing for us and our family and our team members and our staff. And so if we take our eye off the ball there, it is very, very huge. And so the challenge is our little brains, we love new stuff and we will be thinking about new stuff and we'll be ideating about new stuff. But we have to recognize the cost is actually potentially very significant. And this really comes to life in the world of marketing and sales. You see, when it comes to marketing and growing your business, Finding things that work are actually very rare. So if you think about it for a second, the number one problem most businesses have is getting customers. You're very lucky if you have a supply or a capacity side constraint. For most businesses, it's a demand constraint, meaning they just don't have the demand of people wanting to buy the thing. And so it's their marketing and sales that are the limiters of their business. And the reason that is the case for most businesses is marketing and selling is actually quite hard. And to find a marketing channel, a place where you can spend money or appear and actually get customers is just rare. If it was easy, guess what? All the small businesses would be absolutely crushing it and would be more big businesses and so on and so forth. So you got to recognise a piece of marketing that works is rare. So when you find one, and that is normally the big breakthrough that takes a business from, you know, £10,000 to £50,000 and £100,000 a month, is finding a consistent acquisition channel that works for them, you got to hold on to that sucker and resist the temptation to do too much new. So how do we do this in practice? Well, we want to think of our decisions in our business through the lens of 80/20. 80/20, the Pareto principle, the law of the vital few. And it says that in any realm, 20% of our Actions deliver 80% of our results. But the way we like to look at our business and our marketing and sales in particular is that 80% of our team's time should be spent on the stuff that we know works, doing more of the proven boring stuff that already exists. 20% of your time then, well, that can be allocated to the new stuff. That can be allocated to the tests. That can be allocated to your new ideas. To kind of scratch that realm and make sure that we are innovating, which is of course a useful thing in a business. But most businesses, they flip this and they end up spending 20% of the time on stuff that works and 80% of the time on new stuff. And that is why a business stagnates, 'cause all the new stuff generally has a low probability of actually working out. The other thing we need to do is actually think about our new stuff properly, because I'm not saying we should never do new stuff, okay? New is the driver of innovation. And sometimes, you know, we have got to just swing for the fences and back ourselves on our bold new idea. But the key is to think it through properly, because again, when you go back to the situation when you started your own business, no doubt you thought about that a lot before you actually did it. And therefore, one of the reasons you had success was because you had all of this background experience and knowledge and thinking that enabled you to take it, run with it, and execute on it properly. And so you want to think about your new ideas. The way I like to think about them is to use the trillion-dollar memo system, which is from Jeff Bezos and Amazon, where all their executive team, before they present any new idea in any meeting, they create a memo. And the memo is just a 6-page document that covers 6 things, and it clearly outlines the person's thinking around an idea. And this works well for several reasons, none more so than the act of writing a memo will make you realize if your idea is good or not. And so a lot of people, you start to flesh this out and do the thinking and immediately realize, actually, that's silly, that's not going to work. Boom, it's done, it's dead. But once you complete the memo, you now have got much more fleshed out thinking that's been stress tested, and therefore your idea is going to be much more likely to be, a, well received by your team, but also succeed if you decide to follow through with it. So how do they structure these memos? Very simple. Step number 1, you have the introduction. So this sets out what the memo is hoping to achieve and sets out a little bit of background. Number 2, what are the goals of this thing, this strategic proposal? What are we doing? What are the outcomes this hopes to achieve? So we specify the goal of this memo is to get the executive leadership team to approve a new offer, a new pricing tier rollout, or a new marketing channel. Then number 3 is the tenets. So the tenets are the core beliefs that we believe are true that underpin this strategic proposal. And so the way I think about tenets is a bit like how Elon Musk always checks with his team, are we breaking the law of physics? If not, then technically it's possible. But they have the laws of physics are their tenets because that is the things that we believe are true around the universe. And therefore our ideas must obey that in order to succeed. And so you set out the tenets for your memo. And again, these are the core principles, underlying beliefs that we believe are true, that underpin this strategic proposal and why we think it will be a success. Because again, if your beliefs are wrong, then the proposal will be wrong, and it's good to get them on the paper as well. Number 4 is the state of business. So this gives a factual look at where this business unit, this department is right now and draws on data. So we might give customer numbers or marketing performance, the like, core facts of this is where we are right now. And then number 5, the lessons learned. So this is to recap all of the insight and lessons that we may have had around this thing before that are leading us to making this decision. So what have we learned from past projects, past marketing tests, past strategic decisions? What actually happened? How did that unfold? What is the knowledge and insight that we're taking forward? And then number 6 is the actual strategic proposal. So based on all of that, this is what we should do. And by following that flow, the intro, the core goals, the objectives, the tenets of the underlying beliefs, the current data of where we are right now, the lessons we learned from previous initiatives. And so therefore, this is why I think we should do— this is a beautiful way to solidify your thinking. And so what I like to do is go into an AI tool like Manus, which I use at the moment, give it this as an outline, and then ask it to probe me and ask me questions to critique my decision-making and help me pull this together. Because actually sitting there using Whisper Flow to dictate and effectively chatting with the AI is a great way to use AI smartly to really pull on and test your thinking and refine it. But the output of this is you will then tackle new with great confidence, and your probability of new working will actually increase significantly because the right amount of effort has gone into it beforehand. And so that is the crippling addiction of new, how it exists, how it's manifested in my businesses multiple times, the reason it exists because of our journey with starting our business and the massive reward that we get when we have the initial success and how that rewires our brain. But then how you can tackle it, keeping 80% of your time on the core stuff that is working, keeping the main thing the main thing, allowing 20% of your time for new initiatives, but then using the trillion-dollar memo system that Amazon kind of pioneered to really stress test your thinking so that when you do do new stuff, it's thoroughly thought through and well executed. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope it was useful. Don't forget to like and subscribe if you like videos like this, and I will see you in the next one. Peace and love.