In this solo presentation, Elliott Botterill—co‑owner and CMO of Entrepreneur’s Circle—explains how e‑commerce businesses can treat their advertising budget as effectively unlimited. He begins by establishing credibility with his company’s £1 million‑per‑month revenue and recent £66 k daily ad spend. Using a client case (a meat‑selling e‑commerce store), he walks through two critical questions: the average order value (AOV) and the gross margin. With an AOV of £100 and a 55 % margin, the break‑even customer acquisition cost (CAC) is £45. The client’s actual cost per sale (£40) is already below this threshold, meaning each ad‑driven customer pays for itself—a self‑liquidating acquisition. Botterill argues that once a business can acquire customers at or below break‑even CAC, it can scale spend without risking cash flow, effectively achieving an “unlimited” budget. He critiques the common early‑stage focus on high ROAS (e.g., 4 ×) before scaling, noting that higher spend naturally lowers ROAS but increases total sales volume. He introduces the “calculated risk principle”: the larger the daily ad spend, the more mental and operational resources a team dedicates to optimizing campaigns, leading to faster learning, more creative testing, and higher profitability. Small budgets (e.g., £25/day) keep the problem low priority, limiting creative volume and growth. By deliberately increasing spend to a level that feels uncomfortable, businesses create a forcing function that drives better execution. Botterill concludes that understanding break‑even CAC, embracing self‑liquidating acquisition, and applying calculated risk are the levers to unlock unlimited advertising potential.
Chapters
What if I told you you could have unlimited marketing budget? What would you say? Would you think that was possible? I'm going to show you exactly how to make that a reality. And so before you click off, my name is Elliot. I'm the co-owner and chief marketing officer at a company called Entrepreneur's Circle, and we're back. YouTube channel, raw talk about growing businesses, about marketing, sharing the wins and losses from our journey within our business that currently does around £1 million a month. Quick little display of our ad tracking software. So you know that I'm not full of crap. £66,000 yesterday. In the last 30 days though, we have done £1.35 million in top line revenue. So that is the lens at which this information I'm about to share is going to come from. And so my impetus for this video was a call that I had with a client. In the last week or so. And this client, they got a really great business, um, and they're in the process of actually taking over their Meta ads from an agency, which as a business I thoroughly encourage. It's a smart move. You want the people responsible for generating eyeballs and sales and advertising in-house. I used to run an advertising agency. They can be amazing. Many of them are shit, but that's a story for another day. But over time, you want to use an agency, understand what's going on, Embed those skills then within your business. That's certainly what we did. And so anyway, they're looking after the Meta ads. Particular company is an e-commerce business. They actually sell beautiful meat and steak, which is something I'm deeply passionate about as well. And anyway, this guy was super stressed because he was running these ads and he really wants them to be super profitable. And so he says, Elliott, I'm currently at a 2 ROAS. And I'm spending £25 a day. He says, I want it to be 4 ROAS before I actually, you know, increase the budget. That is the big goal. Because in his eyes, and this is actually logic to be fair to him, you wanna be more profitable at the beginning when you're spending less, because as you spend more, it actually becomes harder to have a higher ROAS. So typically the more you spend, the lower the ROAS, but the larger overall volume of sales that are taking place. This is just because of natural market dynamics because in any given market, there's broadly like 3% of people that are ready to buy now. As you advertise and spend and scale, you sweep up those people and you're forced to go into the 17% of the market that are just thinking about it, aren't quite ready yet, and they're harder to convert. Then you have a big chunk of 60% that are not even aware this thing exists. And then you have like 20% that are never going to buy your freaking thing anyway. So screw those guys. And so his logic was kind of right. Oh, let's get these ads to 4 and then I'll scale. But this was exactly the kind of thinking that was actually keeping this guy small. And so I ran through 2 questions to him, and this is how you're able to understand the point at which you have unlimited advertising, which is a truly magnificent thing. And so the first question was, what was your average order value in the first transaction? And that's really key because we want to know when you get a customer from these ads, how much are they spending on day 1? Because that's how much cash comes into the business. And so in his case, they were spending £100— nice round number. So this isn't lifetime value, this doesn't factor in any repeat purchases, it is cash collected day 1. So my second question was, what is your gross margin on this? How much did it cost us to deliver, fulfill these goods/service? That's a critical number. And in their case, they have a 55% gross margin. And so if we have a £100 sale and it's at 55%, guess what? There's £45 left over, okay? Because literally they cost them £55 to fulfill. And this £45 is one of the most important numbers in business because this is what is known as your break-even customer acquisition cost, or CAC. And when you can, on any channel, spend money and acquire customers at or below your break-even customer acquisition cost, then you have got unlimited advertising because the cash is coming straight back into the business. As fast as you are spending it, the cash is being regenerated. And this is a magical place to be. In this particular scenario, this guy's cost per sale was like £40, so he was already actually beneath his breakeven customer acquisition cost. And this completely changed the way he thought, and this is what gave a fantastic breakthrough that hopefully I can deliver to some of you guys watching this video. Because what did this mean? This is known in the space as self-liquidating acquisition. And of course, it's not where we want to necessarily be all the time. We want to make profit on our first purchases for sure, especially in businesses that don't have repeat or recurring sales. But it's a tremendous place to be regardless, because in a scenario where you get a new customer and you have all the money back, it's cost you nothing. In most businesses, that's still useful, but it certainly gives us unlimited runway to reinvest that cash into more marketing so that we can test and learn quicker and ultimately make our ads more profitable. You see, the type of frigid thinking around keeping your customer acquisition cost or hitting a certain ROAS in the early days That is what fucks people up. Because this guy, like I said, he was spending £25 a day. Do you know? And it's a 7-figure-plus business. Okay, 7-figure-plus business. Do you know what happens when you have a 7-figure-plus business and you're spending £25 a day? I'll tell you what happens. You don't really give a fuck about it because it's so small in the grand scheme of things. It's really hard to get excited and allocate our most precious resource of our time, effort, and energy Onto this thing when it's only £25 a day. See, he's getting half a sale a day. This is so slow. This is so boring. And it taps into something I call the calculated risk principle. And this is also very important to understand. The calculated risk principle tells us that the more we are risking, which in marketing is what we do, it's calculated risks. So the more we're spending The more a bet we're taking, the more fucks we give. And this is actually really important because you need to give a fuck. At £25 a day when he's making half a sale, so one sale coming in every couple of days, how much mental capacity resource is that getting? Not a lot because it's so small. However, if he was spending £25,000 a day, to use an extreme example, how much effort and energy and resource would be going to making sure that was as efficient, as effective as possible? The answer is an awful lot. It suddenly becomes a massive priority. And this is what you've got to understand with your marketing. You need to increase the risk and create forcing functions for you and your team to actually give a fuck about it. Because if you don't give a fuck about it, guess what? You're not gonna do the hard work that is required to actually make it really profitable. And ultimately, your ad budget is simply a construct of time. It simply depends on how quickly you show your ads and gather results. So you can spend a very small budget and learn very, very slowly, or you can spend a large budget and just learn very, very fast. And again, we're not just committing and writing a blank check to Mr. Zuckerberg. No, we are spending chunks per day that give us time to monitor, make changes, make feedback. And so it should be relatively low risk. But if cracking Meta ads in any sense like this is a priority, you need to do it with a volume, an amount that makes you a bit uneasy. We almost wanna manufacture these back against the wall scenarios where we have got to crack this now, otherwise there's gonna be a big hole in the bank account. Because that is what draws out the best in us. And our brains, clever little things, they seek comfort, they desire complacency, and it's why the vast majority of businesses stay small, 'cause they don't take enough risk. And when you're not taking enough risk, you're almost certainly not giving enough of a fuck to do the hard work that actually will get you the breakthroughs to go to the other level. So that is how you can unlock unlimited advertising, because once you understand your breakeven customer acquisition cost and we can get people there, we can then increase the budget, frankly, as much as we possibly can whilst that remains true. And we use that to increase our level of risk and to give us the impetus to actually make more ads, make more creative, which in this case his constraint was just the volume of creative they were testing. And again, it was just so far down the priority list because at £25 a day Not enough creatives are even being tested. Anyway, you get the picture. So I hope this was useful to you. If you like videos like this, then you're in the right place. My name's Elliot. Thank you for tuning in. See you in the next one.
