Hello and welcome to Sniffing Out the Bullshit, a podcast for ambitious entrepreneurs who want help wading their way through the bullshit jungle of entrepreneurship and learn the tools, skills, and mindsets that are actually required for success.

I’m your host, Sabrina Chevannes, the No Bullshit Entrepreneur.

We are obsessed with doing things fast.

With the advancement of technology, things are naturally getting faster, and a lot of the time it’s a great thing. We’re able to achieve a lot more in a shorter space of time.

But there are some serious downsides to this too.

See, as a result, we’ve all become a lot more impatient. We get annoyed when a video has to buffer for like three seconds or someone takes ages to reply to an email. Or maybe we get put on hold with a customer service team and we’re like, “Oh my God, this damn waiting music,” and two minutes feels like an hour.

I guess this is why AI is so popular. You can stick an automated chat box on your site and it’ll be able to answer many customer questions instantly, saving both parties a lot of time.

I know that I prefer to talk to a chat box than pick up a phone, and as a brand, I prefer to have a chat box than have to manually speak to someone.

So, win-win.

So speed can be great. And naturally, as an entrepreneur, I’m always looking for ways to save time.

However, this incessant quest for speed can also be severely detrimental to your business.

So when I speak to founders these days, they’re all concentrating on this growth. And of course, you need goals and you need ambitions.

We all want to grow our businesses. Let’s face it, right? We all do.

But there’s a pace of growth that’s healthy, and then there’s one that’s not.

And my issue is with these supposed business experts who are just churning out consistent content on how to scale fast and all the cheat codes of business success.

And they haven’t even achieved anything themselves, but yet they are claiming to know how to scale fast.

It’s the reason that buying social media followers has now come back with an absolute bang. Like, it used to be a thing ten years ago or something, but people caught on to it, and now it’s back again.

And due to the rise of this obsession with the personal brand, so many people are spending their time trying to look popular and influential, all so they can just sell a course at the end of it.

Now I’m seeing more and more of these supposed business influencers, or whatever you want to call them, jumping onto new social platforms, buying a ton of followers, and then showing us how quickly they scaled their accounts before charging thousands of dollars to help you do the same.

Like, it’s the biggest scam, and it should be obvious. But due to this insane need for speed, people are falling for it.

So let’s first look at why this rapid growth is so attractive to entrepreneurs.

Well, yes, let’s think about it. Which headline is actually going to be more attractive?

Maybe, “Business reaches $5 million in revenue in just the first year of trading,” or, “Business makes a slow and consistent profit of 12% each year for the last 10 years.”

I mean, the latter one sounds boring and, in a way, actually sounds bad, like it’s not even a good business.

Which is stupid, because there’s nothing wrong with that.

Like, for example, that first business just named a big revenue figure but doesn’t even talk about profits. So they could easily be hitting $5 million in revenue and be bleeding money every day and be millions in debt, but $5 million still sounds like such a juicy figure.

And we live in a world where people think bigger is better most of the time anyway, so people fudge numbers to make themselves look bigger than they actually are.

It’s the whole “fake it till you make it” phenomenon, and now it’s back bigger than ever.

And all these success stories that you hear are people who have sold their businesses for these whopping great figures. But the reality is that the numbers are nowhere near what they say they are. Plus, the owners don’t even get this money right away.

And so it misleads people who are reading these articles and think that they’re going to be mega rich all of a sudden overnight.

Then you see articles about all these companies that land major investments. And this is all because of their scalability and their signs of growth.

So this is what makes the world obsessed with growth, and people all think that this is the only way to go. But it doesn’t have to be.

I want to talk about how this need for speed—I’d love to keep saying it because of the movie Need for Speed with Jesse Pinkman. I forgot his actual name now. Aaron something… whatever. Jesse Pinkman, that’s all you need to know.

He was in that film Need for Speed. So I’m going to keep saying it. Yeah, I want to talk about need for speed for a little while.

I want to talk about this need for speed, and I want to talk about how, I guess, it affects other areas of business for a minute. Because I feel like we’ve talked about business now and the need for speed in business in general, but what about other areas?

And I think the most prominent area where this is really obvious is the world of digital marketing, because people just expect instant results.

I mean, we all expect instant everything these days with social media.

And, you know, I’ve been running an agency for over a decade now, which makes me feel insanely old.

But yeah, I’ve been running an agency for that long, and we offer a ton of digital marketing services, from social media and SEO to email marketing, all that nonsense.

I say “nonsense,” which is really offensive to my own agency, but it’s become nonsense because of how other people treat it.

But I think the most common question that we get when we’re talking about digital marketing is, “How quickly will we see the results?”

Like, everything is urgent, and everyone needs to see these results straight away.

But in reality, there’s rarely a time when things are actually urgent.

Like, we have clients begging us to meet some arbitrary deadline, and then we slave away all night, all week, working overtime and just ruining our weekends in order to meet this deadline.

And then when we do, they take weeks to get back to us because they’re super busy.

And, you know, it’s just really offensive because it means the work wasn’t even urgent in the first place.

It’s so infuriating.

But I guess when it comes to digital marketing, this need for speed, as I say, has led to some really unscrupulous practices.

So let’s discuss social media, as that’s where I guess the shadiest stuff happens.

Because after all, social media is a forward-facing thing, and everyone can see these supposed results with their own eyes. So that’s why there’s this obsession with it.

And why do you think, like I said earlier, that buying followers was such a big trend years ago and, sadly, is back again?

You know, it’s even gotten worse now because before I think we were just buying followers. And now you can buy engagement too. You can literally buy views for your Reels and your TikToks.

You can buy likes on your posts, comments, shares, everything. You can literally fake your entire social media presence and make yourself look popular.

And people actually do this, even though it takes so much time and costs a hell of a lot of money.

People do it because the sad thing is, it works. And they always have a plan to get their money back because every single one of these people just so happens to be selling a digital product.

Whether it’s a course, a PDF, templates, or whatever, they’re selling some low-ticket offer, and they just need to look like they have a big following.

So people believe the product is good because, imagine this, you’re scrolling through Instagram and someone claims that this £39 PDF will change your life as it will generate a ton of passive income for you.

And you can see 500-plus people in the comments saying, “I want to buy it,” or, “I’ve already bought it and it’s amazing. It changed my life.”

Oh my God. You’ll get a bunch of these fake comments to make it look like it’s popular, and you’ll be going, “Oh my God, this must actually be good. There’s like 500 comments here. They can’t all be lying.”

But all of these comments are fake. They’re there to make it look popular, just like those webinars you record where all the people saying stuff are not real, and it’s not even live, even though they pretend it is. Classic.

And all it takes is like 10 random real people to hand over their hard-earned cash, and then you’ve got, what, £390 per post?

You do this every day, or even several times a day, and you’re laughing all the way to the bank.

And the idea is that if they keep the ticket price low enough, it’s not really worth people’s time to complain if the product’s crap. Then you’re safe, right?

And this is what people are doing now, more than ever.

And do you know what? It gets worse because there are people then going further and teaching you how to do this, and that’s how they make their money.

So they teach you how to make these digital products and sell them online because they advertise that they’re making thousands in their sleep with their Photoshopped bank accounts. Then they sell you their course for just £997 on how to do this because apparently you’ll make this back in your first week.

It’s like some weird Ponzi scheme, I swear. It’s such a weird thing.

And I know this used to be a thing like 10 years ago, where people didn’t really understand digital marketing and weren’t aware that you could actually fake all these things.

But somehow it’s back, and it’s worse, I think.

I don’t know. I think it’s AI. You know, UI, I guess, matters, but people still don’t really understand what UI is. But AI is changing everything, I think.

Now that you can automate basically all your engagement, you can churn out digital products in minutes. You can literally fake anything to make yourself look successful.

And once again, people are just not aware that all of this stuff happens.

Some of them are even supposed top creators on each platform and are now heading to other platforms to exploit people who don’t really know.

For example, I’ve seen a massive trend of people creating X accounts, like Twitter accounts. I still feel weird calling it X.

Basically, these people create these accounts, buy followers and engagement until they get to a decent number on Twitter, and then claim that they know a surefire way to grow. Then they sell a course on this surefire way to grow.

It’s like, “How to grow X followers in Y amount of time.”

And people just lap it up because they’re obsessed with speed and growth.

So my question is, how on earth do we protect ourselves from all this?

Because I like to think of myself as a little tortoise. You know, slow and steady wins the race. I want to do things right rather than just fast.

And you know, I was watching a video from a creator the other day who had created this course. I actually paid money for it as research.

I wasn’t thinking he was amazing. I just wanted to do it as research to see what is actually in these courses.

And he was bragging and saying those awful things. The way he was saying them… oh my God.

He was saying reading books is stupid. Getting higher education is stupid.

Instead, all you need is to buy my course because speed is all that matters. These methods are too slow.

And, you know, I will help you succeed in weeks rather than months or years.

This is literally what I’m seeing. It’s so insanely toxic and just wrong.

Now, I know I can see why this is so attractive to so many people.

But, you know, why wait for success when you can become a millionaire now? Like, what’s the point of doing things right when there’s a cheat code for it?

The problem is, it’s all bullshit.

And I want to give you some examples of some famous business figures who were obsessed with growing at all costs. And, you know, it all kind of blew up in their faces.

I mean, there’s loads of them out there, I think.

Let’s start with Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos.

They’ve done a whole documentary on this, you know, so you can watch that.

But she claimed she could revolutionize blood testing with a device that could run multiple tests with a single drop of blood.

Like, it’s no wonder she got significant investments from all over the place because this would be absolutely revolutionary.

But the problem is she tried to rush, and she tried to scale super quickly without even doing enough testing or working on the technology properly.

So instead, she just lied about it all.

She pretended the tech actually worked when it didn’t and lied about how much money the company was making and how quickly they were scaling.

So it looked impressive to investors, and she took all this money. She ended up having to dissolve the company, and she’s now in jail for fraud.

So, you know, that worked out well.

And, you know, there are loads like this, I guess.

Who else?

I know the WeWork guy because that’s also a documentary. I’m yet to watch either of these, but I hear they’re both really good, so I might have to add them to my watch list.

But Adam Neumann co-founded WeWork and had this insane vision of transforming office spaces into community-driven environments.

I loved it.

I also had this vision when I was in my early twenties, and I wished I had enough money to do that.

But he went ahead and did it all, and these guys expanded so fast, all over the world, and raised billions in investment.

I swear they were opening a new office what felt like every single week.

But they were an amazing space to work in, though. We gave away six figures of our own money to them because we were in a WeWork office, and the team absolutely loved it.

So I totally got it.

The problem is he was scaling so fast that it just wasn’t practical.

And even his ambitious expansion plans led to this crazy overvaluation of the company’s worth.

There were some mad figures going around, but they weren’t even profitable.

And they ended up losing all their investors’ money.

People had to bail them out millions of times.

And, you know, their IPO failed visibly in 2019, and this then exposed WeWork’s financial instability.

And then it was awful.

They even filed for bankruptcy not so long ago, a few years after all that scandal.

And it was only about a month ago when, again, I don’t know how they managed to do it, but they somehow managed to get everything sorted.

They had their debt slashed by $4 billion, and now they’re hoping to downsize to get out of bankruptcy.

So they’re going, “We’re going to have fewer offices, and we’re going to scale slower.”

Oh, what a great strategy.

Maybe you should have done that from the start.

And I mean, your debt being slashed by $4 billion—imagine that being your debt.

It’s crazy numbers, and all because they were obsessed with growing and becoming the fastest-growing company in their category.

And it’s similar with Uber, right?

Travis Kalanick, whatever his name was, was obsessed with growing as fast as possible.

He was making sure that he outdid any competitor at any cost.

Sorry, when I go on these rants, I need a glass of water because my throat goes off.

But yeah, Travis, well, he was a character.

He created this toxic culture on his team and ended up with so many allegations of harassment and discrimination within the company.

They were known for mistreating their drivers, and they had a ton of legal cases against them in the end.

And he resigned back in 2017.

Jeez, all that negative PR, and people who had faith in him as a leader.

He did it as well.

You know, they’re all the same.

They’re all obsessed with growth, and they considered that the same as success.

Growth equals success.

And so they did everything they could to achieve this by taking shortcuts, cheating, and doing things unethically and, in some cases, illegally. And this is what happens when you obsess with scaling, like essentially…

When you become obsessed with speeding growth, three things are bound to happen.

First, you’re going to compromise on quality because, you know, the best products or services don’t come from rushing, do they?

Speed usually ends up meaning mistakes are being made, shortcuts are being taken, and then you end up with an inferior product or service.

The second thing that’s going to happen while you’re scaling is financial instability because most companies can’t handle that much growth.

Unless you have absolutely airtight processes from the get-go, something’s bound to go wrong when you scale that quickly.

Now, if you listen to my other podcast, No Bullshit Talks, where I get amazing guests on each week, most of the business owners who talk about growing all say they grew too quickly. They all say it was an absolute nightmare and things fell apart because they were not prepared for growth.

But if you do it slowly and have things in place, then it’ll be a different story because cash flow problems are absolutely inevitable with fast growth.

And the last one that’s inevitable is employee burnout and culture strain.

Like I already mentioned with the others, it’s usually the employees who suffer the most, as CEOs get them to work long hours and put them under pressure to meet these insane deadlines.

And the competitiveness of growing quickly causes this toxic culture and the mistreatment of others.

These three factors are seen in pretty much all the cases where companies were obsessed with growing too fast.

So what can we actually do?

Humans are naturally attracted to speed and growth. It’s that dopamine release we get, and so we love quick rewards.

This is known as the principle of instant gratification.

This anticipation of a quick payoff activates the brain’s reward centers, makes us feel good, and reinforces the desire for rapid results.

And you may want to check out my previous episode on the Happiness Bullshit for more information on this.

We also have a natural tendency to compare ourselves to others, so rapid success is often seen as a status symbol, providing social validation and a sense of superiority.

Classic peer pressure.

And you may want to check out the episode on the Paranoia Bullshit for more information on this as well.

So you can see how this all ties together, right?

So what can we do to avoid this speed and growth trap?

Well, slow the hell down for a start.

It’s easier said than done, of course. You’re listening to someone who does more than like 12 average people do.

And I’m telling you to slow down. Pot, kettle, much?

But I guess the difference is that I’m not obsessed with speed. I love doing lots of different things, but I’m not looking for shortcuts or ways to scale quickly.

Instead, I want to always do things the right way.

So if you don’t want to inevitably burn out and constantly feel inferior when comparing yourself to others, then I have three tips for you that may help.

First, focus on the long-term goal.

So go back to your why.

Why are you doing this in the first place? Is it to make a quick buck and get on the front cover of Forbes magazine?

Well, if that is what you’re doing it for, then you’re probably listening to the wrong podcast.

But my guess is that you actually want to run a successful business that will provide nicely for you and your family and give you a better lifestyle as a result.

So each time you’re working on something, think about this goal and your ideal future.

What actions will actually help you get closer to this in the long run?

Sure, something may work as a quick fix or a hack, but is it going to help you with your long-term goal?

For example, you could spend a month buying followers on social media and look super popular, and maybe some of your posts go viral.

But all you’ve done is dilute your reach to your actual target audience.

You’ve wasted a lot of time and probably lots of money, and you’ve not actually made any progress toward building a real client base.

So it’s a pretty dumb strategy, yet people do it.

So always focus on the long term.

I’d say number two is learn how to be patient and resilient.

And yes, I’m aware that this one’s definitely easier said than done.

But, you know, entrepreneurship is tough.

No matter what people say, it’s really tough.

There are no easy ways to do things, and there are no good shortcuts.

People keep promising you that there are, but they’re not.

Look at the most successful businesses in the world.

How long did it take Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and, say, Mark Zuckerberg to be where they are today?

Now, whether you’re a fan of these guys or not, there’s no doubt that they have led successful businesses.

They were not quick wins. They were failing over and over again.

But yes, they’re still here now, and they’re still running some of the top companies in the world.

So you need to learn to be patient and do things consistently in the right way.

Things will eventually pay off.

There are going to be tough times and lots of rejection, but this will help build up your resilience.

Eventually, you’ll be able to take on anything, and this resilience will help you build confidence in yourself and ignore the others who are cheating their way through business because that’s not for you.

And the last thing I’d say is that you need to redefine success because success does not mean money.

It doesn’t mean growth either.

So stop using these rapid metrics to define success.

Perhaps switch to quality indicators like customer satisfaction and product excellence—things that will keep you in business and keep you going much longer.

Personal success doesn’t have to mean selling your business or meeting a revenue target.

It may mean getting to work only a certain number of hours each week and spending the rest of the time with your family.

Or it could mean creating a happy environment for people to work in and helping others achieve their dreams.

Success is personal to you, and I think if you learn how to redefine it, then it will do wonders for your self-esteem and your mental health.

And now I’m talking about it, I’ve been inspired to do an episode on success, so I think I will.

So watch this space. I’ll probably bring one out in a couple of weeks or so on this topic,

But I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode, and maybe it will help put you at ease.

Sometimes, less is actually more.

Now go away, leave a few things off your to-do list, and take a break this weekend because I’m certainly going to do that.

Until next time, keep sniffing out that bullshit.