In this informal hot‑tub monologue, Elliott Botterill (co‑owner and CMO of Entrepreneur Circle) argues that the key differentiator between high‑achieving entrepreneurs and “plodders” is an insatiable obsession with increasing the probability of achieving desired outcomes. He illustrates the concept by recounting a recent onboarding of a new content creator, emphasizing the need to first research and forensically study people who already succeed at the target goal (e.g., generating high‑quality leads). Botterill stresses the importance of digging beneath tactics to uncover timeless underlying principles, a skill he honed early in his career as a biddable‑media analyst. He then outlines a leadership framework for embedding this mindset in teams: set clear, stretch goals with hard deadlines, hold people accountable, craft compelling narratives that tie actions to the business mission, and push teams to think bigger—citing Elon Musk’s pressure‑cooker approach at SpaceX as an extreme example. He warns that without such urgency, small businesses fall into a “plodder” culture where staff are comfortable, unambitious, and deter ambitious talent. The talk concludes with a call to create environments that positively pressure people to increase their odds of success.
Chapters
I don't know who needs to hear this today, but you need to start becoming obsessed with understanding how you can increase the probability of you getting the desired outcome that you want. Let me explain. And hello from a hot tub in the Lake District where I find myself today. I've come to celebrate my fiancée's 30th birthday, and then we've got a friend Friend's wedding tomorrow, so it's 2 p.m. I'm lounging in the hot tub, and I felt compelled to make this video because just the other day, and for anyone who doesn't know me, my name's Elliot, co-owner and CMO here at Entrepreneur Circle. And what we do on this channel is raw talk all about building businesses, the lessons, the ups, the downs, the failures. And on Wednesday, I was onboarding a new content creator to our team, a videographer to help us bring to life loads of videos for ads and. organic content and so on. And I spent a lot of time talking to him about his role, his purpose. And this particular topic then came up, which is the idea that as an individual, whether you work in a business or you are the business owner, one of the traits that I have seen separate those who are super successful versus the plodders, people that chug along and never really progress or grow too much in life, is an insatiable appetite to discover how they can increase the probabilities of them getting the desired outcome. What does this mean? Well, in this guy's case, the desired outcome, we want to post ads and organic content that is going to generate high-quality leads. So not views or followers or thousands of impressions, but actual quality leads. And so therefore, as a creative person that he is, his brain is instantly filled with so many ideas, concepts, angles, meshings, things he could create because he's a creative guy. And whilst that is useful, I said the first step you want to really focus on is researching, understanding who are the people that have achieved this goal that we want to achieve. Because once we can find those people, you need to forensically study them. We want to know what did they do that enabled them to get those results. And I mean forensically. People look at things very surface level, and there's a great art to actually thinking a layer deeper and trying to really understand why a particular strategy or tactic has worked. Because beneath every strategy and tactic, whether it's a particular type of organic content, a particular marketing funnel, there is a principle. The principle is the underlying reason this thing works. Tactics, strategies are fleeting. Principles are generally timeless. And so you want to get very good at analyzing this stuff. I think when I reflect, I was very lucky because my first career, when I left uni, I got a job as an entry-level biddable media executive— was the term at the time— on— at a big advertising agency. And my role was effectively spreadsheet monkey, pulling together these huge data sets to analyze the ad performance of our Facebook and Google And then as I, you know, began to progress and would be jumping on calls with these clients and having to explain the weekly performance, I was taught a very valuable lesson about how these clients are paying us tens of thousands of pounds every single month, some of them hundreds of thousands at this huge agency. And the thing they're paying for is not necessarily the spreadsheet, but it's the expertise, AKA it was our opinions, our thoughts as to why we think these things have done well. And so in order for us to do a good job of that, we had to spend a lot of time thinking about why our ads might be working well and coming up with hypotheses or ideas as to why this thing was so good. And so that was really trained into me from an early age. And I developed this forensic lens, which has served me very, very well. Because in a business, all of your team members, whether they are in finance, whether they are in marketing, whether they are in sales, whether they're customer success delivery, everybody is going to have a specific outcome they're going to achieve, whether that is nailed-on accounts, organic social media growth, leads, closes, sales, customer satisfaction, NPS, you name it. And people have an innate tendency to be busy, and they also have a stronger innate tendency To do the work that they like to do. And whilst this can be good and we don't want to completely quash this, you want to build a culture and train your people to focus on increasing the probability of them getting the desired result. And the number one way to do that is to find the people that already get these results and have them forensically study. And forensically study is a very important word there. Because truthfully, we live in a day and age where there is so much information out there. Whether it's through your AI, LLMs, or frankly just on freaking YouTube in any role. If you are able to spend time properly consuming it and understanding it and thinking about what the underlying principles are and then adapt that into your business, then you will be on to a winner. This is also where the gun to the head frame comes in, because if I were to say to you Right, you have got 30 days to launch a new Instagram account and get to 10,000 followers, because if you don't, then I'm going to shoot you. You're going to die. Then what would your very first next action be? What would it be? Because in most cases, it's almost certainly— I'm not going to just start posting all the stuff that's on my mind right now that I feel like posting. It's probably going to be I'm going to go and do some research and figure out the fastest possible ways to do this and then apply that to my situation and then drastically increase my probabilities of increasing the result. And as the leader within the business, your job is to set the urgency and raise the stakes because most people's default state will not be to think like that. It will not be to tap into that level of resourcefulness. Because it's demanding. It demands a lot from us. And it's just our atypical state. It's not how our brains like to be. And we need to construct an environment that healthily, in a positive way, taps into that and brings out the best in people. And so how do you do this? Well, number one, you have to set the very clear and specific goals. Okay, we need to set goals with these team members that do stretch, that do force them to look at things in a different lens. We do have to hold them accountable to these goals with a deadline so we can create real genuine stakes in the business. Thirdly, you have to control the narrative as the leader, the manager, the owner. You have to construct narratives around why this is so important and why this could not just be a random fluffy experiment where if it fails, okay, that's fine. No, this matters because of the future of our business, the growth we're trying to achieve, Our mission that we want to accomplish here. You know, we give a fuck. And your ability to construe and create these narratives that your team genuinely buy into is what creates a culture of people striving for more. And then it's also telling them your job as the leader is to question these people and question their approaches and guide them towards thinking bigger. And so when people present you back strategies or present you back Deadlines, you push them. I always think back to Elon Musk with SpaceX and how he pitched to the engineers they needed to build this new rocket, and the engineers came back and said, yes, it takes about 18 months to build this fantastic rocket. And Elon effectively said, no, you've got 5 months, because really any longer than that we're going to run out of cash. What happened? The engineers kicked up a fuss. It was very stressful, but lo and behold, they got the job done and they did the impossible. Took them 5 and a half months, I think. He created an albeit pressure cooker environment that pushed these people to go further. And so do we need to do that to that level of extent? No, probably not. But do we need to do it? Yes. Because having worked with a lot of businesses, I will say, especially small business owners that get stuck between kind of 5 and 15 members of staff, normally it's kind of placid leadership. It's being run by somebody who is now very comfortable and does not have any really meaningful or stretch goals. And they certainly do not create an environment of striving for bigger and greater things. And as a result, their business is largely constructed by a team of plodders, is what we would call them, who are just very happy there. They're the lifers. They're chugging away, having a good time, and they don't want to push themselves because they feel comfortable. They like the familiar environment. And that's the exact type of environment that warns off the ambitious people who come in with serious drive and start to really get things going. So those are my hot tub thoughts for you today.
