In this raw business talk, Elliott Botterill, co‑owner and CMO of Entrepreneur’s Circle, introduces the concept of “head trash”—the unexamined narratives and assumptions that owners internalize and that become the primary constraint on business growth. He explains how the brain creates comforting stories that often diverge from reality, using an employee‑late‑arrival anecdote to illustrate the gap between perception and fact. Botterill then details his company’s long‑standing value‑ladder model: free content → 30‑day free trial → £99/month core membership → £249/month software → £999/month Master Plan coaching, with the belief that prospects must experience the low‑ticket offering before buying high‑ticket services. After years of spending over £120k/month on ads to acquire free trials, the leadership team questioned this assumption during a quarterly meeting. They tested a cold‑sell approach by launching a live webinar to sell the £999 Master Plan directly. The experiment yielded ~30 new high‑ticket clients in one month, recouping ad spend and adding significant MRR, compressing a six‑month nurture cycle into a single day. This breakthrough demonstrated that the effort to sell low‑ticket versus high‑ticket products is comparable, making the higher‑priced offer more efficient. Botterill argues that similar hidden assumptions exist in every business—about customers, teams, industry norms—and that owners must habitually ask, “Is there a better way?” He cites Elon Musk’s accelerated SpaceX timeline and Steve Jobs’s reality‑distortion field as historic examples of leaders challenging entrenched beliefs to achieve breakthrough results. The video concludes with practical prompts for owners to audit assumptions around pricing, offers, customer segments, and delivery methods, encouraging reflective discussion and journaling to surface hidden constraints.
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It is a brutal reality that in business, you, the owner, the person in charge, are most likely the constraint, the thing that is preventing the business from growing. And maybe you don't even know it. Well, in this video, I'm gonna explain what head trash is, how it can turn you into the constraint nearly every time, and importantly, what you can do about it. So if you're a business owner and your business has not been growing, it's not been delivering you the cash, the lifestyle, the wealth, everything that you desired from it, then the breakthrough might be on the other end of what I share. Hello, welcome back to the YouTube channel. My name is Elliott, and all we do here is raw talk on business growth. I'm the co-owner and chief marketing officer of a company called Entrepreneur's Circle, where we do around £1 million every single month. And here's my little ad tracking software. Let's just go back to last 7 days, 298K. Last 30 days, 1,351. Just so you know, I'm not full of crap. So plan for this video, uh, what the heck is head trash and why is it most likely the thing holding you back? Head trash is a very nefarious thing. As head trash occurs in all of us, and it's tied to how we believe the world is. Now, our brains are very clever little things. They've evolved us through millions of years and made us the prime species on this planet. But if there's one thing our brains are very good at doing, it's constructing narratives. You see, our brains process so much stimuli from the world around us, from all of our senses, uh, it would be very overwhelming. And so our brain, in an effort to save us, creates narratives. It creates stories so we can understand the world around us. Now, that's all well and good, but our brain is inherently biased and will go out of its way to construct narratives that serve our ego and make us feel comfortable, rather than telling us sometimes what we truly need to know. So the narratives our brain creates versus what actually happens are often 2 different things. As an example, let's have an employee called John, and John arrives late to the office. I instinctively could construct the narrative in my head that John is lazy, that he's a bastard, that he doesn't care, when in reality, John, his wife might have fallen down the stairs. He might have had to rush her to hospital this morning and make sure she was okay. Before then, just managing to get to work 5 minutes late because he's actually a trooper and he does care a lot. So the initial narrative my brain constructs and the raw reality of what happens can be very different things. And the person who has got the most clear and accurate view of reality will typically be the person that is able to do the best. Because when you truly understand how things work in the world and how, as a business owner, how the actions you take affect the results that you gather, that is a place of control. And that is the place of a person who Who can truly maximize what they want out of life. And so head trash is effectively all of the narratives in our brains that we have stopped questioning. And this is where the danger is, because when we have stopped questioning these narratives, they become our fundamental truths. They become how we see the world and therefore how we make decisions. And this can become a very deadly thing, and it can turn you into the constraint. Here's a story of exactly how it affected us in our business. So in our business Entrepreneur Circle, we do a few different things, but if I was to draw our typical value ladder, we post a bunch of content for free at the very bottom. We then have our core EC membership, which is £99 a month, gets you access to our community, online resources, events, and so on. Incredible value. We then have a software that's like £249 a month. Genie AI, also super epic. And then we have Master Plan, our coaching program, which is effectively £999 a month. And then we have a few higher level masterminds, secret vaults, and so on and so forth. But this has always been the journey. Now Entrepreneur Circle, our business, we always believed that in order for anybody to stand a chance of actually buying it and coming in, they needed to experience it first. So what does that mean? It means that all of our marketing efforts for many years were based around driving as many people into the £99 a month membership as possible. And to get people in, we actually gave it away for free. So you'd get a free 30-day trial because our working assumption was if we get you in, we deliver you value, you join the community, you experience it, you You will love it, you'll have a great time, and you will be with us forever. And that was relatively true. Like, this did happen. And for many years, we would spend upwards of £120,000 a month on advertising, driving all of these free trials. And we spent quite a lot. We spent over £200 to get someone to take out a free trial because we knew that enough of them would come in and love it and pay us and then stay for such a long period of time That it would all be worth it. And this was the model that we ran. And so where head trash and these narratives get really, really dangerous and really, really embedded is when you begin to gather some evidence that they are true. And for us, that is what happened here. And we went all in on this methodology for literally— I'm talking like 5 or 6 years of doing this. Now, did it work? Yes. To an extent it did. The business grew, the model worked. There was sufficient evidence to keep telling us that this was working out. However, was it the best way for us to market this business? In hindsight, probably not. And I'll explain why. You see, one day we were sat in our massive boardroom having our quarterly leadership team meeting. This is the shape of the table. It's very cool. And we were discussing this year's numbers. We were discussing the plans for next year and how many new members we're gonna bring in was top of that list. And during this meeting, for the first time, we began to question this underlying assumption that this was the best way to grow our business. 'Cause the belief was if we bring all these people in, then we'll have a chance to ascend them and upsell them to other stuff. And again, there was evidence this was true, but we began to question it. And we raised the question, well, what if we skipped out? the journey here, and we just tried to sell Master Plan cold, our high-ticket thing. Because one of our other embedded beliefs was that it was too difficult to sell this type of thing cold. And so we thought, you know what, let's test it out. And so we did. And so we set out to launch a live webinar funnel, because if you're going to sell a high-ticket coaching program to a cold audience, very difficult to do that without a live webinar, in my opinion. And that was what we did. And in August last year, we launched the first round of this And lo and behold, boom, we nailed it. And we brought on something like 30 brand new Master Plan clients, high-ticket clients, in the first month from this one webinar. And just like that, our paradigm was shattered because all of our marketing had been pointing towards bringing in people for free and waiting many, many months before we even attempted to sell them this program. And instead we took a fraction of the same spend, put it into a webinar, and all of a sudden generated 30 new master plan clients, high ticket clients, which not only regenerated all of the marketing spend, but added on a lot of MRR, which is a key metric for us in that same month without all of the wait. So we compressed what had taken us, would normally take us 6 months of bringing them in and waiting and nurturing. Boom, into like a day. And this was really eye-opening. And so for the following 18 months, we just went all in on advertising the big stuff to cold. 'Cause it made me realize, you know, actually whether you're selling something for £99 or £999, the fricking effort is pretty similar. There's not that much difference in the effort. In which case you might as well sell the higher price thing. And that was what we did. We had had this head trash, this narrative that had kept us following this model with just enough evidence to telling us that it was the right thing to do. But until we actually sat down and questioned it and looked at the numbers big time, did we have this realization that there was a better way? And so I tell you this story because somewhere in your business right now is a sentence, is an assumption, is a belief that everybody, including yourself, has probably stopped questioning. And that could be the single most expensive thing in your business right now. Whether it's our customers won't do this, they would never buy that. Whether it's our team can't possibly fulfill in that timeline, or they don't have the skills to do this. Our industry doesn't work that way. Oh, you have to do it like this because that's how I've always done it. And my goodness me, the most painful flipping sentence in any business, that's just how it works. That's just how we've always done it. These assumptions are deadly. And the reality is The vast majority of business constraints are downstream of somebody's assumptions, and very often that somebody is you. You, my sweet business owner friend. So what does this mean? It means that as the business owner, your job is to challenge and question all of the current assumptions you are working on. Why do you do things the way you do, and when was the last time you questioned if this was truly the right way? We have a huge graphic on our walls in the office That says your job is to always ask, "Is there a better way?" Is there a better way? One of the most powerful questions as a business owner you can possibly ask: Is there a better way? It's like when Elon was building out SpaceX and they needed to build this rocket. in 6 months. All of his best engineers said, Elon, we can do this. It's gonna take 18 months at least. Elon said, I don't care. We haven't got the time. We haven't got the cash. You've got 6 months. Now, to much distress of the engineers, they got away in a huff and in a puff. But you know what they did? They built the fucker in 5 and a half months. They did the impossible. Because Elon, albeit through external stress and forces, challenged the core assumption by which they were operating on, and it led them to extraordinary results. Steve Jobs, if you've read his biography, was a legend at doing this. His reality distortion field, as it was known, his ability to take what everybody said was too difficult, was impossible, unachievable in this timeframe, and say, nope, you can do it, and effectively forced them to do it. And yes, in some ways very aggressively, led to some of the greatest innovation in technological history. And it's what put Apple on the map. And it's why a lot of the engineers that worked with Steve during the time say it was incredibly stressful, but upon reflection say it was the greatest period of work of their life. 'Cause he created this reality distortion field that challenged everybody's assumptions around what was normal. And as a result, it was able to create and birth some truly breathtaking innovation. And so look at how you operate. How do you deliver your service? Why do you deliver it that way? Is that really the best way you can be doing it? Why do you sell this thing? Is this what people actually want? Is this what people are still going to want in a few years' time? How have you been selling this? Do we have scope to increase the prices? Do we have scope to change the offer? Who are the customers that pay us the most? Can we lean into them? Who are the customers that cause us the most headache? Can we just get rid of them? Why are we doing things this way, and is there a better way? And what fundamental beliefs do we have around our space and industry that are leading us to act in this way? These are very deep questions, but the answers to them can cause the breakthroughs that can truly change a life. And it's where actually thinking, reflecting, journaling, and having good discussions with other people is where this stuff gets drawn out. Because ours came out in a leadership meeting when we have all of our brightest brains sat around a table for a whole day and we just discuss and we interrogate things. And we have people in there who are very smart and they are not afraid to ask the challenging, critical questions that ultimately get us thinking. And accurate thinking is a precursor for a fantastic life. So I hope you found this video useful. We talked about head trash, the narratives in your head that we have stopped questioning. I shared a real example of how it affected our business in the direction for a very, very long time. And hopefully now you feel empowered to question and continually ask yourself and your team, is there a better way? And what assumptions are we currently working off that could actually be holding us back. If you like videos like this, don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. My name is Elliott. This has been some Raw Business Talk, and I'll see you on the next episode. Peace.
