Why Your Business Isn't Growing as Fast as Others

I'm making this video today because I wish that I had watched this video six years ago when I began my entrepreneurial journey. You see, when I did, I did not understand the compound effect in business. And so in this video, I'm going to explain the four compounding engines of business so that you can take advantage of them. You see, compounding is a truly amazing thing. And these four areas, if you focus, you will generate exponential results as a result, not linear, but exponential. What do I mean by all of this? These are the areas that when we focus on them, we get a disproportionate or an asymmetrical amount of return. You see, why do people grow so fast? How does Stephen Bartlett get his new company, or his holding company valued at over 425 million euros after a few years? How does Alex Hormozy do a book launch and make $106 million in 72 hours? Because they leverage these compounding engines and you can too. So this video will show you where to focus your time to get the most out of it. You see, a cruel truth is that not all effort is equal. You see this guy, he is a illegal sulphur farmer over on the volcanoes in Indonesia and he works insanely hard under treacherous conditions, breathing in this suffocating toxic gas with nothing but a piece of cloth around his nose, which ultimately leads to all sorts of horrific health issues for $10 a day. And he works grueling 12 hour shifts in those conditions. He works hard but gets such a small result. And that's just a very extreme example. But the point here is hard work alone will not yield you the results that you want. It has to be hard work on the right things. And understanding this can be a massive unlock. It certainly was for me. So, before we dive in, my name is Elliot. I. About six years ago, I quit my job and started an advertising agency, which I grew to seven figures, exited it in 2025, where I joined Entrepreneur Circle, where we have a community business, a SaaS business, and a high ticket coaching business that currently does around £1 million a month. And a lot of our growth has been built on these four compounding engines, some of them more than others. And you will see them all. It was none other than Mr. Albert Einstein himself who said that compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. And all of the financial gurus, investors, love to talk about that, and rightfully so. It is a very powerful thing. The classic demonstration of if you invest 100 pounds per month into an index fund that grows at 9 to 10% a year, and over the next 25, 30, 40, 50 years, boom, that turns into, into a humongous sum of money. And so I always thought, wow, that's very cool, but how can we apply that to business? Because it's not just money that compounds, many different things compound over time. And when you understand this, you can focus on the right activities that are going to enable you and your business to benefit from the compounding effect. Because compounding works both positively and negatively. It can be working in your favour and it can be working against you. And we want it on our side. So let's dive into engine number one. It is your knowledge and your skills, okay? So your knowledge and your skills. We know that every business is constrained by the business owner. Think about it, if you knew how to build 100 million pound a year company, you would just do it, right? But the reason we don't is because we don't know. We have a knowledge and skill constraint. And in a business this all funnels down from the top. And so nearly every business is typically constrained by the business owner because you only know what you know, okay? And you don't know what you don't know. And so your speed and ability to learn and acquire the knowledge, the information and the skills that ultimately can grow the business that falls onto your lap. And so firstly, you're doing a great job by watching videos like these. So like and subscribe if you enjoy this type of content. But so we have a phrase here. In our master plan program, our high ticket coaching program, we work with tons of businesses. We say in order to grow the business, we have to grow the business owner. And then we set out equipping them with the knowledge and the skills to grow the business. Because if you understand that, then you are able to turn it into a reality. And so two visual examples here. The first thing to understand that in any business, in any marketplace, whatever industry you're in, there is a concept of market sophistication. And so this is the idea that over time, the market that is your customers, potential customers, they get more and more sophisticated. They have seen more ads, they have tried more competitors, they've tried different solutions and they are significantly more aware in your market over time. Now what this does is it creates a driving force in the market. So if we have market sophistication slowly goes up, which is just an inevitable force, we then have two routes that we can take. We can give ourselves a high rate of learning and learn faster than the market. And this leads us to beautiful profit and prosperity. Because whatever the gap is between our rate of learning and the market's level of sophistication, that is where all the gains are to be had and that is where we have profit and prosperity. But on the flip side, if we have a rate of learning that is slow and significantly below the natural rate of learning in the market, then guess what? This is the valley of doom and despair. Unprofitability. So the more and quicker we learn, the more profits we will make over time generally. Okay, not only this one frame that I like to use is that of this little guy. And so fundamentally, right now, between where you are and the place you want to be, your dreams, there are simply a series of problems. And these problems just exist, okay? And they all exist, and they exist in that order. The only thing preventing you from achieving your dreams is A, understanding how to solve these problems and then B, taking action to solve them. And so there's a reason why some people build very big businesses very quickly and some businesses build very small businesses and it takes them fucking ages. It's the difference at which they find the answers to the problems and in which they execute and act on them. So I like to think of business as a race. It is a race to just conquer all these problems. It is a race to acquire the knowledge and then, boom, execute and take it down. And so whether you choose to learn very quickly or choose to learn very slowly has a massive, massive impact on where your life ends up over the next 5, 10, 15, 20 plus years, which is kind of pretty crazy. So you want to prioritize your own learning, consumption of knowledge, acquisition of skills. And it's why paying for training, coaching mentors, is, in my opinion, one of the best ways you can spend your money. Because you're paying down this ignorance tax and you're bringing your ability to generate these results much sooner to you, which feels like a worthwhile way to spend some money. Okay, this brings us to engine number two. This is your reviews and reputation. So reputation is the main engine here, but I leave reviews in because that is the mechanic in which we can really look to develop this and actually action and implement it. So there's a confluence of three broad market things at the moment that I believe leads an urgent and immediate need to develop a stellar reputation. You see, trust is quite low in nearly every industry. The average level of consumer trust is pretty low right now for all sorts of reasons. Not only that, there are more businesses than there have ever been. And in the last year, more businesses were started than the year before and the year before and the year before that. A good thing in many ways. We love entrepreneurs, we love new businesses, but also that's a key market for us. That is more competition across the board for most industries. And again, reviews on their own head help increase trust. They give people the confidence to act and do business with us. And in a world where there's way more businesses, the person with the most reviews is going to get the most amount of business. So just those two reasons alone are reason enough for us to actually invest time in getting more reviews and developing our reputation. But then you have the third factor, which is AI search. And so the way people search has fundamentally changing. We saw ChatGPT launch, it now has over 900 million weekly active users and AI search is going to be the norm very, very soon. You even see Google now has AI search mode. So when you Google most things, you're getting the AI summary first. This is the new paradigm of how information is gathered and fed to us. And as a result, the businesses that are able to rank and appear well in the AI searches are going to disproportionately benefit. And this will all compound over time. And so how do you actually rank in AI search engines? Many ways, but the core way, the most powerful signal, is what other people are saying about you on third party review sites, like on your Google reviews and like on Trustpilot. You can see now, if you ask ChatGPT to look at a business, it's going to give you a bunch of citations and it will show you where it's pulled all the information from. And those sites rank disproportionately higher. So having an awesome reputation, not just as people murmur, but physically as per the level of reviews you have, is key to survive in this landscape and to benefit from all the AI search traffic, which by the way converts like 8 times higher than Google organic traffic, which is insane. So that alone is why we want to do this. But more reviews from, frankly, it's just the most simple flywheel of success ever. We call it the trust flywheel. And fundamentally the more reviews we get, the more clients we get, because people are more likely to choose us. And we start to rank higher in places like AI search and get more traffic and as a result we get more customers and if we're doing a good job, we get more reviews, which then bolsters the whole thing. And it's a nice little spinning flywheel. Now where most people go wrong with this is they do not have a systematic way to actually collect those reviews or they don't actually do a good job and therefore no one wants to actually leave them reviews. So a prerequisite, do an amazing job while your customers genuinely blow them away. And then number two, have a system for collecting reviews. We always know people are more likely to leave a review at the peak of their value extraction. What that means is at the moment in which they believe they are finally getting the value that, that they initially paid you for, that is the moment to ask. So for a florist, it's when we deliver the flowers and they've had the amazing wow experience. In an agency, it might be when you launch or the ads live, where you get a key result or you hit a major target or milestone. If you're in the kitchens, it's after you've done the big reveal, after you've installed the kitchen, right? And they're like, oh my God, I can't believe this. Whatever. That wow moment is the peak of their value extraction. That is when you ask. And so the whole of the video talk about reviews for ages. But you need a systematic way to collect them. And so at this point we have to say you gotta be careful and considerate of your word of mouth. This little sucker will either make or break many businesses because after every interaction with the customer, even from a lead perspective as well, how that person is left feeling will impact the word of mouth. What is the word of mouth? It's what people say to other people about your company. And if this is good, if this is positive, then your business will grow and flourish. So when I started my agency, we did a great job. Cause we tried really hard, we knew what we were doing and we got our clients amazing results. And as a result, they were shouting from the rooftops how good we were. And as a result, we had loads of other people want to come and work with us. And our business grew really, really quickly as a result. The thing about word of mouth is again, it's compounded exponential because one person can tell 2 and then 2 people could tell 4 and then 4 could tell 8 and 816 and so on and so forth. You get this virality almost. And so if it's positive, amazing. If it's negative, you're in for a hard time. Because if people are saying bad things about their experience with you, that is going to silently kill your business. You will start to see your advertising costs go up. You'll start to see your conversion rates dip. You'll start to see your overall number of customers Decrease because what is happening is negative word of mouth. People are seeing your advertising, they're hearing you, but they are choosing not to go with you because of what they've heard other people saying. And that is the silent killer of businesses. So you have to have to be mindful of that. And fundamentally, your product or service is the best marketing tool you can ever have. And so I'm a big believer in just make your thing so damn good, people fucking love it and actually want to tell their friends about it. And then you won't have to worry about thing in business. Okay, engine number three, your audience and brand. Now, truthfully, this is something that we have really slept on for far too long. And it's why I'm making these YouTube videos and why we're putting such a lot of effort into content and brand stuff. This year. You see, my downfall was I'm a performance marketing man. And so my whole career, starting when I was working at Embassy Sachi, I was in the performance marketing team. So we knew how to get customers with paid ads. And as a result, we dismissed brand. We dismissed brand because we could just create really compelling direct response ads, landing pages, follow up and get results. So I thought, I don't need this brand stuff. Screw that, let's just focus on the performance. What a rookie mistake that was. What a fool I am. Because what that led to is me putting loads of effort into building businesses with paid ads, which is great, but your audience and brand are significantly more powerful things. The challenge with advertising, it's very linear to get more customers, you just have to spend more. So you get kind of slow and steady growth, which is fine. But the power of audience and brand is. It's exponential. We've all heard it, where you post loads of videos over time and all of a sudden one day, boom, it blows up and you start to get disproportionate amounts of results. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about this and to some of you, this may be very obvious, but the flywheel of content. And so for me, when it comes to brand, now we're focusing very heavily on YouTube doing videos like this for a few reasons. One, YouTube is a very good search engine, right? It has a lot of traffic and people search for various things and it has good discoverability. If we post a video, people, you know, chances are it will be shown to a few people and if our thumbnail and title looks okay, they'll click on it and start to watch. Thirdly, it's video. And I like long form content like this, because, again, if you listen to me talking for 20 minutes or so about this stuff, it's very hard to fake that none of this is scripted, apart from my little notes on the board. And so I like to think that it increases the level of trust and proof in kind of what we're doing here. But also they just become long serving assets, because once someone clicks on a YouTube video and they like it, then they can go and click on other videos and so on and so forth, and we can build a really good relationship and compress what would otherwise take us lots of different individual assets and a very long period of time into, I'm not sure, a bit of time. That's why we like YouTube. And so the flywheel on YouTube is that you post new content, it gets discovered by some new people, they consume it and engage it, or at least a small percentage does some of them then go on and watch your other videos, which then increases the visibility of the other videos, which ultimately leads to it being discovered by new people. And then they consume and then they watch other videos, and then that increases the visibility and so on and so forth. Especially if we keep pumping out new content, this starts to get going quite nicely. Now, the caveat is your content has to be half decent, otherwise people aren't gonna watch it, and they aren't gonna watch your other videos, and it's not gonna work. But if you're posting good stuff, then this starts to kick into gear. And so this is the slow flywheel that we are really building into. And so Hormozi's book launch event earlier this year for his $100 million money model is really cemented in my mind the insane power of this, because to collect $106 million in cash in 72 hours is insane. And it wasn't just because his live webinar presentation offer was so irresistible, even though they were very good. It was because for the three, four, five years prior, he had invested in building this brand, and he'd waited and waited and waited and gave value and developed these relationships. And then in one foul swoop, he made the pitch, he made the offer, and he catalyzed on that year's worth of effort. And that was absolutely epic. And so, as a former performance marketing man, we're now all about the brand, or we're trying to be. We're learning. You know, Drop me a comment. Do you think we're doing a good job or not? Let us know. And so, and this is my vision, my plan is that we Just need to post loads and loads of consistent content, keep making it better and better, listening to the people, getting some constructive feedback, and over time, boom, the compounding will occur. Compounding of our skills and getting better, but also the compounding of having this asset of videos that people are now watching over and over again and going through. And as a result, we expect we'll see a bunch of leads and hopefully a bunch of sales as well. Who knows, who knows if this will come true, but this is the hypothesis. And so apply this to LinkedIn, to your email list, to whatever other aspects you used to build your audience, but it still applies. And so any time and effort spent on audience building and brand building for me is very high leverage. But it's the sort of leverage that you're only going to recoup in a long period of time if you are consistent with it. Boom. Finally we have your technology and your systems again. Something that in the start of my agency days, I absolutely sucked at this. You see, one of our biggest bottlenecks was our lack of systems, which I really felt when we began to hire people. And I could no longer physically be involved in the fulfillment, which I loved because I just, I'm an advertising man. And the lack of systems really held us back. It led to inconsistent results, it led to an inconsistent client experience and it definitely cost us a few clients for sure. And it was because I didn't understand the power of technology repeatable systems. You see, in a business, fundamentally, from a business owner perspective, if you want to grow your revenue, you have got to become obsessed with revenue generating actions. That is, you should spend the most amount of your time on the very specific actions that directly drive revenue. And one of the challenges as a business grows is there are all sorts of non revenue generating actions that come out and start to plague you and tempt you and fall on your desk and you get sucked into them. And as a result, revenue can flatline because your time is not being spent doing the very specific and necessary actions that will actually drive the revenue. And so you want to use technology and systems to buy back your time and enable you and indeed your team to spend way more time or as much time as possible on revenue generating actions. So let's just flesh that out a little bit. What actually are revenue generating actions? I have a whole little spreadsheet because my executive assistant, she has a target and her target every week is that 80% of my time is spent on revenue generation generating actions. And we color code everything in my calendar. And so you have Directly revenue generating stuff such as actually taking sales calls or doing anything to close deals, reaching out to high value clients, negotiating deals, delivering webinars, onboarding or doing the post sale implementation calls of new customers, revenue strategy sessions, even objection handling calls and even training the sales team. You know like I do a lot of that working with our sales team here to get them sharper, tackling new objections and creating sales assets and all that stuff. It's all the things that directly are going to lead to more revenue, they enable more revenue to be collected. Now we have indirect revenue generating tasks such as follow up writing emails, improving the lead nurture sequences, creating content like I'm doing today. This, I classify this as revenue generating action. It's not going to generate revenue for a very long time, but it falls into that bucket. Managing your pipeline, making sales assets, sales training and coaching ad campaign management. I'm all over our ads here because tweaking the ads, making the ads run better, scripting new ads is like one of the best revenue generating activities. Again, it doesn't generate revenue that second when you do it, but in the days and weeks that follow it has a massive impact. So I'm all over that. And we do a lot of webinars as well, so we're making sure they're all on game as well. Then you have my least favorite category of things which are non revenue generating tasks. These are your general admin, accounting finance, HR activities, general strategy, planning, meetings for non revenue based things, operational processes, customer support, all that kind of stuff. Now some of this stuff, not to say it's not important, many of this is very important, but it's just non revenue generating. So if your goals are to consistently drive more revenue, your calendar and how you spend your time has to be consistent with that. And that is why we have to identify, well, what is revenue generating and how can I make sure I'm prioritizing that first and then enabling my non revenue generating stuff to fall alongside that. And so to bring this all back to the technology and systems, this is where we can actually enable a significantly larger chunk of our time to be spent on revenue generating actions by using technology and using systems. So technology is always about having the right systems and automations in place to do bits of work. We live in this crazy age of AI where actually so much of the stuff that we do can be done quicker or better or entirely by an AI little workflow. So for me, I used to spend a lot of time watching sales calls manually. Now I have AI analyze all the transcripts and it feeds me reports and I can dive into specific bits. That's one way in which I take a task and compress how much time it takes me. Making sure you're set up with the right sales and marketing system. So actually you can create new landing pages, you can set up new lead nurture sequences, you can pull out segments of your audience to do specific campaigns. All of these things require the right technology in place in order to make it easy. And without that you're going to struggle. And if you're immobile because you don't have the technology in place to enable you to do certain things, then over time that compounds so negatively against you because you could have been doing all this stuff that was generating additional revenue, but you weren't because the technology was your bottleneck. So having the right system is in place. It's why we have our own SaaS that enables us because we realized working with business owners we could give them all the information in the world, but many of them would struggle to actually implement and execute on it. Especially when it came to marketing and sales activities. That's why we made GENIE AI and why it's so good. But then systems in place, this can be automations, but it can just be the way in which you do things. So we have, I have a massive mirror board which has a lot of my key processes specked out with exactly who's responsible for doing each step and exactly what each step should contain. I have a playbook on how to execute each step. You see, you want to remove the guesswork, you want to remove the time spent thinking if we know the right way to do something, then we must document it and that becomes someone's role and responsibility because then they do it repeatedly over time and they're not wasting time. And the compounding effect of people having focus and being able to execute over time is humongous. It's absolutely ginormous. And so making those investments into your processes, into your systems, and then automating it with the right technology as much as possible makes you light years apart from where you could have been after just a few years. So those are four. Compounding engines are business. Let me know what you think about this video. I'm interested in your thoughts and feedback. There are actually a total of nine compounding engines, but I thought nine would be way too many for one video. So maybe I'll do part two, but otherwise I hope you found this useful. I hope this gives you a clear steer of some of the areas you can begin to focus on because for me, I used to hate focusing on this stuff, but once I understand or understood the compound effect of it, the all of a sudden I was way more willing and I thought, you know what? Absolutely. This is the right, right move. So hopefully that little spark has gone off in some of your heads today. Otherwise, I've been. Elliot peace.