The Real Cost of ADHD Novelty Seeking in Your Business

You have a client who changes direction every few months. New name for the project, new audience. Oh, and everything you built last quarter, scrap it, we're changing direction. You know exactly what you would do with that client. You'd write it up. Here's what gets tossed, here's what gets redone, and here's what it's gonna cost, and then you'd have them approve it before you touch a single thing. Either that or you'd fire them, so here's my question: Who writes it up when the client is you? Well, nobody, and today I'm going to show you how. We're gonna put together real numbers on what your love of the new is actually costing your business, and then I'm gonna show you how to count the cost before you change anything

So today we are talking about ADHD novelty seeking, and I wanna be crystal clear right up front, 'cause I know how this usually goes. This is not going to be me wagging my finger at you for 30 minutes and talking about shiny object syndrome. You have heard that speech enough already. Your appetite for novelty and change is a big part of why you're so good at what you do. It's why you spot the thing no one else has spotted. It's why your clients say, "I've never heard anyone put it that way before." I am not here to talk you out of it, but to invite you to do something you probably haven't done before, which is count the cost. And I'm doing it now, in October, for a reason.

Because right now, somewhere on a walk, in the shower, at 11 o'clock at night when they should be sleeping, somebody is listening to this and mapping out their January relaunch. New year, new name, new niche, new everything. Right now, it's a delicious little idea. By December, it'll be all over your project management system and sending your team into a frenzy. Picture this, a consultant in Silicon Valley starts out writing resumes for people in tech. She's really good at it, booked solid, in fact. Two years in, she's calling herself a career strategist, a year after that, she's a reinvention coach. New name, new website, new everything and every one of those is a better description of how she's thinking about her work at the time.

Then one afternoon, she gets an email from a client, someone she worked with back in the beginning, and it says, "Hey, my sister just got laid off. Are you still doing the thing that you did for me 'Cause I looked at your website, and honestly, I couldn't tell." A super satisfied client wanting to send her business and didn't know what to call her. Now, I bet money you know her or someone like her. Hell, you might be her and I want you to notice something about that email, 'cause most of the time no one's gonna send it. They don't text, call, or DM either, they simply don't refer. Now, I want you to keep that in your back pocket, 'cause we're gonna come back to it later.

Where I wanna start is where this habit is actually most expensive, and that is how you describe what you do and who it's for, your positioning. It's actually the very first thing I work on with clients inside the ADHD-ish method, and it comes first for a reason. It is the foundation for absolutely everything else you build, which is why changing it costs more than changing anything else. So who needs to hear this? Well, if in the last three years you have changed your business name, your niche, your main offer, your prices, your platform that the whole thing is built on, or any of these more than once, pull up a chair, this one's for you. If you've been doing client work for any length of time, maybe you call this something else.

Maybe you call it a scope change or a revision fee or per my last email, but here's how it goes. You and the client agree on the job, you get started, and somewhere along the way the client has a brilliant idea, or at least they think so, a different direction. They are so excited. They truly cannot see why this would be a big deal because from where they sit, it's just a better idea.

It's the same project, except it's completely different. So you write up the cost of the changes that you are now going to have to make, not to punish them, not to shit on their parade or to let air out of their emotional tires. You write it up because change isn't free, but it always feels free to the person asking for it.

They're feeling the excitement. You're the one who can see the extra hours and the extra energy, the extra work but when it's your business, you're both those people. You're the client with the exciting new idea, and you're the contractor who has to do the extra work. And because you're both, nobody's writing it up, no one's counting the cost. So this is the change that I am encouraging you to make, write it up. There are five things to consider, and I'm gonna show you how it looks on one example, the rebrand. Here are the five things: what you have to throw out, what you have to redo, who you have to reteach, what you never find out, and what it does to you.

Let me break them down quickly, but one at a time. Line one, what you throw out. Everything you built under the old version that is still in use. I'm talking sales pages, the freebies that people are signing up for, 40-some odd posts written with the old messaging, and my personal favorite, testimonials. Lovely, glowing testimonials praising you for an offer you no longer sell from a business that no longer goes by that name. None of it's broken, that's the part I need you to hear. None of it has actually stopped working, it simply got abandoned, and you don't count it because it's already been paid for. And because in a burst of dopamine-filled enthusiasm, looking backward is something that just doesn't occur to you.

I mean, really, you did that work two years ago, so walking away from it now feels like that's not costing me anything. But the idea you ditched was still out there doing its job until you gave it the pink slip. Line two, what you redo, the rebuild, all unpaid by the way, and at your hourly rate, which I remind you is not nothing. Now, everybody estimates the obvious part, the obvious part, the, the website, the logo, fine. What nobody estimates is the less obvious, but equally important stuff. Your bio on other people's websites, the podcast interviews you did where the host introduced you as the old thing, the directory listings, your contract templates, your intake forms, the footer on your fricking invoices, the welcome email that still has the name from two names ago.

Somewhere on the internet right now, a version of you from two rebrands back is still out there happily introducing you to strangers and getting it all wrong, not to mention confusing the hell out of the search engines and AI. They read everything you've ever published and try to figure out who the hell you are. Hand them four different answers, and they're gonna recommend somebody who gave them one instead. Line three, who you have to reteach. Your audience, obviously, but let's get specific about who else. Your referral partners, and here's what I really need you to understand about anyone who refers you. They're lending you their credibility.

Every time they say your name, it is their reputation on the line. So when your description about who you are, what you do, who it's for, what it's called changes, they're not gonna call you and complain. They're not gonna argue, they're just gonna go quiet, and not because they stopped liking you, don't be ridiculous. I mean, hey, they might even envy you a little for having the audacity to change things up. But nobody wants to feel stupid or ignorant or just get it wrong even a little when they talk about you to someone else, so they just don't. And how about the best referral sources any business could ever have? Satisfied clients. But if the thing they bought doesn't exist anymore, they've got nothing to talk about.

By the way, that was the woman I described earlier with the resume writing. And then there are the ones that you're most likely to overlook, the people who work for you and with you, your virtual assistant, your graphic designer, whoever edits your podcast or newsletter or your YouTube videos. And the second or third time anything changes, they start learning something important about working with you. What they learn is that nothing lasts, and people who believe nothing lasts will absolutely stop busting their asses to build things that last, can you blame them? Now, we should also add AI search engines to this category as well, because even though they're not human, you should think of yourself as having a relationship with them because they are absolutely entities that tell people who you are and what you do.

So you need to spend time and money re-training them right along with the actual humans in your life. Line four, what you're never gonna find out, and this is absolutely the most expensive line on the page because when you are changing things up every year or so, nothing ever runs long enough to give you real data. Let's say you launch an offer, five months in, it's performing okay. I mean, fine, not great, but okay so what do you do? You change it, and now you're never gonna know whether the problem was the offer, or the pricing, or how you described it, or the time of year that you launched, or that it simply wasn't seen by enough of the people who would actually buy it.

You have no idea. You pulled the experiment before the results came in, and then you probably did it again. You've been in business for years, but you have almost no data because every test got called off before it was finished. Now, listen, don't hate me, friend, but if this is you, you do not have a six-year-old business. You have a two-year-old business three times over, and the market treats you accordingly. You're pitching like a newcomer, pricing like a rookie, getting referred like a rookie, because at this version of your business, that's what you are. Okay, I want you to take a breath and count to five because you're probably about ready to cuss me out or pull your hair out by the roots. I am not saying this to piss you off or to hurt your feelings.

The whole reason I record episodes like this one is not to be a know-it-all, but to help more entrepreneurs with ADHD get further and faster by avoiding the very mistakes that we are so prone to make because of our novelty-seeking brains Line five: what it does to you. Hey, I was a therapist for a long time before I came to this work, so forgive me, but I'm going there. Sorry, not sorry. Every version of your business that you walk away from is data, and it's also your own brain keeping track, even if you don't recognize it. After enough of them, things in you start to subtly shift. You start getting a little sloppy, a little messy. You start to care a little bit less. You lower the bar, and then you lower it some more. I mean, why bother finishing the sales page?

You're gonna change it anyway. Why write a five to seven email sequence? Maybe two's enough. Why pay for the kickass headshots? Over time, and with a lot of changes, you start running your entire business in draft mode. I call it being permanently provisional. It's like that friend that moves all the time, or changes jobs constantly, or relationships or hobbies. A- actually, all of this is very common with ADHD. Eventually, our natural perfectionism gives way to half-assing it because we no longer trust ourselves to stick with anything long enough to bother doing our best work. And the cruelest part, you start downplaying your announcements before anyone else even gets a chance to respond to them.

When you start to tell someone about the new direction you're taking, the one that you were so excited about just a minute ago, there's a little voice in the back of your mind going, "Well, we'll see." That voice is not your audience, it is not your future customers. It's you, and that's the cost of five restarts and how they sound from the inside, even if you don't recognize it. So here is what I want you to do right now, wherever you are, unless, of course, you are operating a motor vehicle or heavy machinery. In that case, please wait, take the last three years, count your business names, your niches, your signature offers, your pricing structures, the platforms you moved everything onto because it felt so important at the time. Count the changes, and say the number out loud. Now, if you're alone in your car, even better. Nobody's judging, you can scream it if you want. You got the number? Now I want you to hold onto it.

Okay, quick pause. While that number is still hot in your head, if there's a change that you've been itching to make, and there probably is, I want you to take it to DiAI before you do anything else. DiAI is my digital clone trained on how I think and how I work with my clients, and she will absolutely walk you through counting the cost of making the change you're itching to make before you do. DiAI is still free in beta, but only through October 31st, which is coming up fast. There's a link in the show notes, okay? All right, let's get back to that number.

Listen, if that number was bigger than you expected, I do not want you sliding into a shame spiral, so let me tell you why you never saw it, 'cause I know that's where you're going right now. There are two reasons, and they're not because you're careless or suck at the details. Reason number one: the cost is a non-event. Let me tell you what I mean, think about what it actually looks like when a change costs you a referral. It looks like nothing because nothing happens. The referral that didn't come simply doesn't arrive. There's no notification, no one's gonna email you to say, "Oh, hey, I was gonna recommend you last week, but I'm not really sure what you do anymore, so, you know, I sent them to someone else.", that's not gonna happen.

Here's why this matters for brains like yours and mine. Every brain, including ours, learns from consequences. But in order for there to be consequences, something has to happen. And the research on ADHD suggests that our brains only seem to learn from feedback that is both immediate and powerful. Something happens right now, and you feel it, that we can learn from. A consequence that's delayed by six months and arrives in the form of an email you never got? Come on, that teaches us nothing, it can't. There's nothing there to learn from. If you have ever asked yourself, "Why do I always have to learn things the hard way?", this is the reason. So this habit of changing things without counting the cost, it hasn't stuck around because you ignore consequences, but because none were ever delivered.

You ready for the second reason? There's no running total either. With ADHD, time tends to sort itself into two buckets: now and not now. And the last time you changed everything, that's in the not now. So is the time before that, and they're back there in the ether with your high school locker combination. So every time a new idea shows up, it gets weighed all by itself, and by itself, it usually holds up. I mean, it looks like a good idea. It really is a better name, you know? You're not wrong about that. You're not thinking, "Oh, man, that's the fourth time I've changed this." You're imagining it as a one-off when it's actually part of a series. So that awareness that it actually is the fourth time, that's only going to happen if you write it down, which, spoiler, that's where we're headed.

Hey, I just realized there's actually a third reason, and I've covered this before, so I'm gonna be really quick. The fun of change shows up right away and all at once. I call it a dopamine download. The cost shows up later in little pieces kinda spread out over time, a year or more even. So your brain is always going to go for the immediate gratification and think a whole lot less about the long-term consequences, if at all. So here is how I want you to think about that number you just counted. Do you remember the one? You have not been reckless with your business. You have been making decisions with half the information you needed, and the half that was missing, it's never gonna show up by itself. That's why we have to write it down, so let's go get it, okay?

We're gonna use two tools. One looks back, one looks forward. Neither one requires you to download an app, buy a course, or get a new planner, I got you. The first tool is the change log, this is your looking back. One page that covers three years and will take you 20 minutes tops. If you're spending more time than that, you're going down a rabbit hole. Don't try to do this from memory either, because, hey, we've already established how that goes. Let your records do the remembering. You have the receipts, old invoices, old proposals, screenshots of old websites, the digital folder of abandoned logos. Scroll back through your own sent emails and watch how your email signature changed over time.

It's like reading tree rings and for each change, you're gonna write down five quick things. You already know what they are, right? What gets thrown out, what you have to redo, who had to be retaught, what you never found out, and how you felt about it afterwards. Rough numbers, I mean it. Nobody's checking your math, then you take the second column, and that's your redo hours, add 'em up and multiply by what you charge per hour. That number is what you would have charged a client for the same work, only you do it for free. Man, you're the worst client you could ever have. Anyway, there's more, what's the most important thing on the page?

What survived, and I want you to hear this loud and clear. Look at every change on the list, every new business name, every niche, every offer, and ask, "What came through untouched?" Maybe it's the kind of person you always end up working with or the problem you keep solving no matter what you call it. The way you work that shows up every single time, that is what you should be known for, not the names, that thing, and it has been sitting there all along, hiding in plain sight, buried under all the relabeling. That row is gonna be the most useful thing of all to come out of this entire exercise, because the restarts, they were never the real story. By the way, one guardrail as you do this, you are gathering information, you are not building a case against yourself.

So if you notice that you're giving yourself a hard time, put down the pen and go for a walk or play with the dog. Okay, remember I told you there's two tools? The second one is the change order, this is your look ahead. From now on, before you change your name, your niche, your offer, your price, or your platform, you're gonna write it up. One page, five questions on paper, and I mean real paper and pen, before you open a single design tool, before you touch the website, before you hire anyone, before you even tell your team. Question one, what will be thrown out that's still working, list it, all of it. Question two, what will we have to rebuild? And I mean estimate the hours, then double them. You know why, we both know why. Question three, who will have to be retaught by name? Not my audience, my network, not my clients or my team or my referral partners. I want names, actual humans who currently know how to describe you, 'cause they're gonna have to learn how to do it all over again.

Question four, what am I in the middle of doing that this change will erase? What experiment are you still running? What were you about to find out about your messaging, your marketing, your pricing, your audience? And question five, what is the smallest version of this change that still gets me the new thing? You know I love me some minimum viable experimentation, and this is a really important question to answer. Then I want you to put a date on it, and then decide. Even better, walk away from the exercise and come back in an hour or a week. Two things this is not, by the way. It is not an artificial waiting period, I have recommended that for other situations, but not this one. I'm also not telling you, "Oh, just sleep on it." It's also not a veto. It's a piece of paper that will never say no, it simply tells you the price.

Hey, you are a grown-ass human who runs a business. You still get to choose, so why bother writing it down? Well, for the same reason you do when your client is the one changing their mind. The person who wants the change is never the person who feels the cost. With a client, those are two different people, you and them. When it's your business, both people are you, they're just a few months apart. So this page is how those two people get to talk to each other. Let me explain how this actually looks, I want you to imagine a guy who, oh, let's say he runs a two-person human resources consultancy. His clients are small to medium professional firms like law offices, dental groups, maybe a few architects, and he has decided that the name of his firm is just boring, and that the whole thing needs to become a people operations studio. New name, new website, new messaging, he's already picked out the fonts.

But he writes it up first and he's flying right through it right up until question three, who has to be retaught by name? He writes down nine names, two employment attorneys, a payroll provider, and six clients who regularly send him work. And when he looks at that list, he realizes those nine people make up about 80% of my revenue, and every single one of them is about to have no idea what to call me. Here is the part I absolutely love. He renames the firm anyway, and he makes nine phone calls before the new website goes live. He pays for the reteaching upfront in the form of nine somewhat awkward conversations instead of finding out a year later in the form of reduced referrals. Same change, it's just that he knew the cost, and he was willing to pay it upfront. If you are doing a rebrand, you usually draw attention to it, you announce it.

There are some posts, maybe even an event, at least some confetti. But with that same habit, this exact same five lines can be running in three other places in your business that never get the attention of a rebrand or a launch. But that doesn't mean they're not doing damage. Let me point them out, the first example is what you sell. Every time you retire an offer, you ditch everyone who ever bought it. They loved it, they would be happy to tell their friends about it, but they can't because it's gone. Their testimonials describe something that doesn't exist anymore.

And by the way, if you've ever seen a testimonial that you wrote for someone on their website applied to a different offer or product that you know nothing about, I'm sorry, but I think that's scammy. So your new offer will start out with zero social proof. The next example is what you charge.

If you restructure your pricing every few months, here's what you're never gonna find out: what any of those prices actually does in your business. For example, does the higher one scare people off or bring in better clients? No idea, it only ran for 10 weeks. Meanwhile, you've got clients on four different legacy rates, and you are the only person who knows which is which, and you're not totally sure either. And the last example is what it all runs on, the new email platform, the new scheduler, the new CRM, the new social channel that's going to be different this time, you just know it. This is the purest version of the problem because when you switch tools, nothing about your business actually gets better, but everything has to be rebuilt. It is all rework and here's the kicker, the channel you walked away from in month four is probably the one that was just about to pay off.

This is the example I am personally most guilty of. Every single time, I was absolutely convinced that changing platforms was a major upgrade, when I'll be honest, looking back, 90% of the time it was just busy work because I was novelty-seeking. I finally learned my lesson when I moved from one platform to another because of a specific feature that I wanted, which of course, the original platform added before we'd even finished with the migration, now I know better. Notice I have not said never change anything because ADHD, and there is a version of this that works beautifully. It's change you plan, the one you wrote up, priced, and told people about before it happened. Same change, completely different cost. The pivot you scheduled and the one that your low boredom threshold chose for you, they're probably gonna look identical on the website.

They do not look identical when it comes to time, money, and energy.

So before we wrap, there are a couple of things I would be doing a disservice if I did not mention. First, sometimes the change is right, and it's still costly. Hey, this podcast had a different name for its first four years and its first 226 weekly episodes, it was called The Driven Woman Entrepreneur Podcast. I decided to call out to other entrepreneurs with ADHD more directly, and I also wanted to make it clear they don't have to have an official diagnosis, that's why it's ADHD-ish. I also wanted to drop the gendered focus at the same time, so I changed it.

It was absolutely the right call, and I would make it again, and it cost me anyway. The easy but time-consuming part was all the brand assets that needed to be redesigned, revising the web copy, updating the name in all the places that it existed. If you have ever changed your name for a marriage or a divorce, it's an ungodly amount of places that you realize your name needs to be updated.

But then there are the unexpected cost of the connections you lose when the very thing you decided to change was what they connected to you by. In my case, it was, and still is, all of the other businesses that market exclusively to women or those that market to entrepreneurs who don't identify with ADHD or at least don't do so publicly. And because the Internet has the memory of an elephant, I continue to get dozens of pitches every month from people who would love to be a guest on The Driven Woman Entrepreneur Podcast, which does not exist anymore and hasn't since 2024. Oh, and secondly, rough is okay, your hours, they're gonna be guesses.

Your list of names, incomplete. Your change order will be wrong, I promise you, but do it anyway. A bad estimate absolutely beats no estimate at all, and no estimate is probably what you've been working with all this time.

So here's your assignment, and it is small on purpose. This week, just do the change log. One page, three years, 20 minutes tops, and total the hours and see what survived, that's it. Save the change log for the next time you feel like shaking things up. Hey, remember, if there's a change you're itching to make right now, do the change log with DiAI. Tell her what you wanna change, ask her to give you the five questions, and remember, DiAI is only free in beta through the end of the month, and it's coming up quick. And if getting your positioning to the place where you can actually stop redoing it, well, that's where I start with the ADHD method with my one-on-one coaching clients. Every client I work with, we start there. The links for both DiAI and to book a free consultation with me are in the show notes. And remember, it's your business, and you can absolutely change whatever you want. Just write it up first and count the cost, because you cannot manage what you cannot see.