The 6-Letter Word That’s Killing Business Owners

You’re growing the business—but losing yourself in the process. In this video, Steve reveals the six-letter word silently killing more business owners than failure ever could—and why it’s costing you energy, clarity, and relationships.

You’ll learn how this hidden threat creeps into your business, how to recognize it, and what to do to regain control, balance, and long-term momentum. If you’re successful on paper but feeling the pressure behind the scenes, this might be the reset you need.

TRANSCRIPT:

Building a business is hard. You're working 80 hours a week, but you could be working 40. You're taking home six figures, but you could be taking home seven or eight figures. Your business could be worth so much more, but you're leaving millions of dollars on the table. You're grinding it out. You're not taking care of yourself. You're not exercising. You're not sleeping. Trust me, I've been there before.

It's not your fault. It just may mean that you don't have a system. And more importantly, you're missing out on this six-letter word. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna reveal what this word is and show you how you can get more of it in your personal life and in your business to just improve everything, okay? Because this is the silent killer of leaders, so much more than failure itself.

If you've never played hangman before, essentially we're trying to guess this word here, and every time we guess a letter, and if it's incorrect, you're gonna get a part of a person's body and they're gonna be hung. So let's go ahead and play the game. Let's guess. What's the first letter? X. That's a terrible guess. You just got a head. Now, if I draw the full person's body, I'm gonna draw a stick figure. Guess what? You lose. Okay, so let's not lose.

Any other guesses? Okay, you can put it in the comments box below. What letter would you guess next? I'm curious. T. There's no T in the word. Let me give you the first letter. M.

Now, every time I give you a letter, I'm gonna share more about this whole concept because it's super critical. So I've been a CEO, I've been a CFO, I've been an investor, I've been an advisor, and one of the biggest things that I see is that there's this lack of capacity, right, when it comes to leadership. So many leaders are just grinding it out, especially now with AI, social media, text messaging, emailing, phone call. I mean, there's so many sources of information bombarding us every single day. And it creates a lot of confusion, and it creates a lot of distraction, and we're all over the place.

And I know some CEOs, they struggle with the flavor of the day. They hear from one person this thing, and then they take their business in this direction, and then they whiplash them, right, because somebody else said something else at a conference, or they were watching another YouTube video, and now they're taking their business in this direction, and their employees are just being whipsawed, right? So that's terrible. So creating capacity to think about strategic activities could be the biggest payoff for you.

When I was a CFO, I was running a billion-dollar company. Literally, my schedule was like back-to-back, 15-minute increments, meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting. In some instances, I had to be like, pause, time out, I need to go to the bathroom. I told my assistant, I'm like, you need to schedule in bathroom breaks for me because I'm just going back-to-back all day, and it's terrible.

Now, I found time to think, and it was when I was running, like I was running like five in the morning, and that's when I'd do all my thinking, because when I'd get to the office, even if I got in early, people would find out, and then they'd come by my office and be like, hey, do you got a minute? And then it'd turn into like an hour. So that's what you have to avoid. So that's the first letter.

Okay, what's the second guess? Any other guesses? How about B? Nope, there is no B in this word. We got a leg. You better be careful. We got another leg and two arms, and then this person is dead. Okay, you don't want to be dead.

But so many leaders are walking around dead, right? They're just dead. They're dead inside. And here's the deal. You can build a business, a million, a billion dollar business, but at the end of the day, lose everything.

That was me once. I was traveling around. I was flying around the country. I was just grinding it out. And guess what? Sure, I built up a big reserve of money, and my business was successful, but then everything crumbled. I got a divorce, gave away half the money that I was working for. I hit rock bottom in my life. Not that I was like addicted to anything. I just hit like rock bottom. I was like so low in my life, and I had to start over.

And it's because I didn't create enough of this word in my life, and therefore I was just like grinding it out. Okay, any guesses? Any guesses what this word is here? I'm gonna give you another clue here. A. M-A. You probably thought it was money. It's not money, okay? So let's keep going here. So we have M-A. Any other guesses for letters? Do you want to go with? Hmm, N? Sure, let's go with N. Ding, ding, ding.

Okay, any guesses at this point? Okay, getting closer. How about, let's guess C. No C. Boom, there's another leg. All right. So in business, I see so many business leaders talk about revenue. They're like, let's just grow. Let's just grow revenue, and then everything will be fixed.

But you can't grow yourself into success, especially if you're not earning profit, and more importantly, if you don't have cash flow. 70% of companies that go bankrupt, they're actually profitable when they close their doors. They just run out of cash. So that is really important to understand.

Okay, so let me give you another letter here. The anticipation is probably killing you. M-A. How about G? Okay, if you've guessed it at this point, you have to drop a comment in the box, and drop your timestamp too. If you're looking at the video, drop your timestamp and write the letter, or write the letter, write the word in the comment box.

Now, at any point, you can put your timestamp and guess the word, but I just, I wanna see how long it takes you to get this. Okay, I don't wanna keep blabbering on here, but in business, I'm working with a ton of companies. They have a strategy in place. They have their initiatives. They have their actions. They have their key results.

But the problem is they don't have the time or the energy to execute successfully because their schedules are full, right? They're just, they're running around like crazy, or they don't have the capital to reinvest in equipment and systems and technology. And so they just get stuck in this hamster wheel. So I'm gonna give you another letter right here.

Okay, do you know what this is? Okay, you have to drop it in the comments box if you know. Okay, because I wanna hear, right? If you haven't guessed it, I mean, it's kind of a weird word, I guess, but you have to know this by now. Okay, let's guess another letter here.

How about S? That wouldn't even make sense, but I'm the one guessing for you because you have to be dropping it down the comments box. We only have one more arm left and this guy is dead. Okay, you don't wanna be dead. Like I said, though, so many people are walking around dead. They're building these businesses. They're successful. They make all this money. Then they get divorced. They end up in rehab. Their kids don't like them. Their spouse or partner doesn't even know them. They lose all their friends and they give up everything for what, right? And it's because they're just grinding it out.

And I'll give you the last letter here. And it's R, it's margin. And this has been a huge thing for me. So when I'm working with companies, like I'm a big finance guy and a big strategy person. I'm sure you'll pick that up if you watch my other videos or you listen to my podcast. I mean, my podcast itself is called The Margin Method, right? You probably guessed this just by me giving you a few letters and knowing my content, but margin is what it's all about.

In business, you have revenue, you have cost of goods sold, and then you have your gross profit for gross margin. That's the first type of margin. And then you have your op-ex, your operating expense, and then you have your operating margin. That's another type of margin. But beyond just financial margin, there's operational margin.

If you don't have SOPs, documented systems and processes, then you're never gonna scale or you're never gonna get out of your business because you're gonna be the bottleneck. All the decisions are gonna revolve around you. So if you don't have operational margin, you're just blocking and tackling, you're just doing the work and you never have time to innovate or to step back to fix the operating model, even if it's broken.

And then a leadership margin, I kind of touched on that at the beginning, when it comes to leading, if you don't have time to think, then you're just gonna be doing, doing, doing, and you're not focusing on strategic activities that will really move the needle.

It's not until I was intentional with this, with margin in my life, like literally I had to cut things out of my life and focus on the things that were most important because I had to create margin. I wasn't taking care of myself. I wasn't eating, I was overweight, right? I was pale, like I'm even worse now, like I'm pale now, but I was even more pale because I never went outside. I just worked and worked and worked. And that's a terrible state to be in.

So that's my challenge for you is figure out ways to create margin in your business and in your life. And when you do that, you'll free up capacity to focus on the things that matter the most and you'll be able to invest in the relationships that will bring you the most joy. When other things around you are falling apart and collapsing, it's that joy that comes from relationships that will keep you in a really good place.

All right, that's what I have for you. Thanks for playing along. I'm excited to see your comments, to see when you figured out this word. If you just figured it out now, you could put it in there right now too, okay? You're never too late to the game.

If you need help with any of this in your business, if you want to figure out a way to get more margin, we just developed a three-week plan. It's free, just go to the website, cultivar.com. You can take a seven-question quiz. It's really fast and you will get a personalized three-week plan for your business. It's really easy, week by week, just spend one to two hours on each of the challenges. And then we have the guides and the tools and everything else, and you will free up profit, cashflow, and you'll have more clarity at the end of the day. So be sure to check that out.

All right, that's all I have for you. Be well, cheers.