When Codie Sanchez looks back on her earliest social media content, she does what many of us do when examining our internet past: She cringes.
“Some of the first videos we made, I’m like, My God. There’s money floating around in the air behind me, it makes me want to die,” Sanchez says. “But like any new business owner, you get talked into things that aren’t you.”
Despite those questionable early choices, Sanchez has since become an internet force. She’s collected a combined 15 million social media followers and authored the best-selling book Main Street Millionaire, largely by promoting the same message: You, too, can become an entrepreneur — and the path to success goes through small business ownership. It’s an insight drawn from her own background, which her fans know well: Sanchez began her career in finance, then started buying what she calls “boring businesses” like laundromats, car washes, and roofing companies. She realized that these are overlooked assets, because they already have established consumer bases, are straightforward to operate, and are surprisingly easy to acquire, because their owners are often aging out and have nobody else to sell the business to.
As she figured out how to scale these businesses, she developed systems to buy and operate them, and then built an online movement of people who follow her path. Today, more than 10 years since she purchased her first laundromat, Sanchez has refined both her voice and her purpose: She is direct, honest, and supportive, with a cut-through-the-bullshit energy. And she now fronts a much larger enterprise called Contrarian Thinking, which operates in investment, advisory, and media services. But it took time to find her niche. Even influencers can get distracted by internet noise, and Sanchez admits that she spent too much time trying to follow other people’s paths to success.
This, she says, is now the mistake she wants to help others avoid.
Throughout her career, Sanchez has watched many people fall into a particular trap: They treat business advice as if it’s a one-size-fits-all solution — as if anyone’s path to success, or anyone’s book, or anyone’s philosophy can be followed directly and fully and will lead to the same results. But that’s just not true, she says. Businesses may not be unique, but the people running them certainly are. And too much business advice treats everyone the same.
“Most business-builders’ bookshelves are full of all the business-building books,” Sanchez says. “But if you can’t find your unfair advantages and you don’t know your weaknesses, you’re just going to spend a lifetime trying to apply other people’s formulas. If you try to mimic Alex Hormozi, who’s an incredible marketer and salesperson, but you are inherently more of a product person and a lifestyle builder, you’re going to build a disaster, not a business.”
After years of scaling her voice to reach millions, Sanchez has developed a counterintuitive obsession: She wants business advice to get more personal. Entrepreneurs keep looking for the “right” path, but she wants them to start by looking deeper into themselves first — to recognize their own strengths and define their own goals, and then build a plan that’s best suited to their unique abilities and needs.
“My belief is that you should have businesses that you own, that are profitable, and that you actually like to run,” she says.
But please don’t do it Sanchez’s way. Do it your way. She’ll help.
Image Credit: Jake Chessum
Sanchez grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, in a family of modest means. Her father owned a company selling granite and her mother was a special-education teacher. She saw them “lovingly work really hard” for the things they did have, including the ability to send Sanchez to Arizona State for her undergraduate degree. But at a young age, Sanchez realized something animating: Money isn’t just a way to afford things. Money is freedom.
“I always thought money was super important,” she says. “If you don’t have it, the world really asserts its will on you.”
That’s why, despite studying journalism in college, Sanchez ended up taking a job at the Arizona branch of Vanguard not long after graduation, working as an ETF consultant. She knew she could do the work, but felt like a perpetual outsider. Her cohort of peers had what she perceived to be more pedigreed backgrounds: closets of suits, degrees from fancy schools, a budget for lunches out and post-work happy hours.
“People weren’t that kind to people who were broke and didn’t come from anything,” she says. “I got a lot of slack for not going out and partying with my [peers]. One time, I thought I was about to get a promotion, but I was instead sat down and told that I wasn’t a team player because I never joined the happy hours.”
This was a tough pill for Sanchez to swallow. She realized that money wasn’t her only barrier. She also lacked the social awareness, the social language, and the familiarity with the political games necessary to get ahead in so many industries.
“That was the point at which I said, I am never going to let somebody hold me back because of my bank account.” She started building friendships with colleagues who also seemed slow to participate in the preferred office culture. “I figured if I could bond with a bunch of other people in the same space, we can all get ahead.”
That idea lingered as her career took off with roles at Goldman Sachs, State Street, First Trust, and Entourage Effect Capital, where she helped manage $160 million in assets. But as her financial success grew, she realized that she no longer wanted what she was working toward. “I looked down the hall and saw a guy with lots of fancy cars, second and third wives, kids that didn’t know him, and I just thought, My God. There are a lot of people who aren’t happy, and they’re very rich,” she says. “I couldn’t figure out how to not become that and stay in finance.”
This was the second big shift in the way she viewed money. She originally thought that it equaled freedom. But now she realized that, if you became a slave to making that money, it would serve as its own kind of trap.
Sanchez likes to talk about having “anti-goals” — the thing you identify as not wanting, as a means of triangulating exactly what you do want. For her, a miserable banking career became an anti-goal: She did not want to make a lot of money if it came at the expense of her happiness. Instead, she wanted to build a different kind of life and career. She wanted money without the misery, and a pathway to owning something substantial but also meaningful.
That’s why she began investing in small businesses. Those were simply the deals she could afford, and it began as a side hustle she could manage while still working in finance. Then those small businesses started to generate serious cash. She started to see a happy path forward, and finally got comfortable enough to close the door on the finance world.
“My parents didn’t understand how I could leave a job like finance, a job they thought was so lucky, the best I could ever get,” Sanchez says. Many folks in her orbit thought the same. But she knew she had to step off course.
As her own business success grew and her own unique future started to crystallize, she spotted an opportunity to think bigger. Instead of just investing in these businesses, she could also teach how to do that investing — becoming the face for a different kind of financial path. Rather than measure her success solely by the dollars in her wallet, she started to focus on a metric that felt more unique to her: how much she’s helped others earn.
Image Credit: Jake Chessum
In 2019, Sanchez launched Contrarian Thinking, a media and advisory firm that houses her many projects: content, investments, membership-based programs, and communities to support other Main Street Millionaires, all powered by the private-equity-based curriculum and operating processes she’s repackaged for small businesses.
It’s been a winning formula, one that fueled the success of her first book, Main Street Millionaire. But it’s also what got her thinking about the limitations of business books, or the steady streams of business-building content on the internet. “Increasingly, as a business operator, I’ve found that I don’t want non-tailored advice,” she says.
She reflected on where she gets the best business advice. The answer was: It comes by committee. “I need to have a sales guy, I need a marketing guy, I need a finance guy, I need an ops guy,” she says. And why is that so valuable? It’s because she’s surrounding herself with people who are compatible with her needs and goals. It’s like a customized board of experts.
(And if you want to build your own advisory board, she has a few good rules to follow: “Have they actually done the thing that you want to do? Do they seem happy with the decisions they’ve made in life? Is it a good outcome? Is it an enjoyable outcome? Do they have real subject-matter expertise? Is their advice repeatable across multiple different sizes and sectors? If it’s not, I wouldn’t listen too closely.”)
But most small business owners don’t have the time or network to build a trustworthy and experienced advisory board. And because these owners are often isolated, they don’t have the benefit of seeing how they operate differently from others. What are their relative strengths? What are their weaknesses? What do they uniquely need to move the business forward? Those are hard questions to answer alone.
Sanchez realized that, unlike most business owners, she actually could answer questions like that for her audience. That’s because her company serves many thousands of entrepreneurs. She had access to data and patterns that others didn’t.
Problems are at the center of all businesses. Any entrepreneur knows: You succeed by identifying your customers’ problems, building a product or service to solve those problems, and then articulating those problems in the most compelling way possible. But Sanchez wants entrepreneurs to also study their own problems — the things that consistently hold their businesses back. What mistakes are they making? What are their shortcomings?
To answer those questions, her team studied the successes of 15,000 operators within her Contrarian Thinking network, tracking how their performance varied despite following the same operating principles. This helped them uncover 12 pressure points that can trip up any business owner — things like an inability to build strong internal processes, or being too afraid to raise prices. Then she built corresponding personality archetypes based on those struggles, to really get a sense of who makes these kinds of mistakes and why. This way, she could help owners understand their own strengths and weaknesses, and identify the changes they should prioritize to help grow their business.
“There’s a good part to all archetypes, and a bad part,” Sanchez says. “Knowing these things helps business owners determine what advice to take, as opposed to taking all advice and being miserable and not successful.”
For example, if you struggle to build processes in your business — where nothing is written down or documented except in your own brain, meaning the business can’t function without you — then Sanchez deems you a Workhorse. These people work relentlessly, putting everything on their backs. But that’s a recipe for eventual burnout. If your systems aren’t in order, then your business cannot thrive without you, and that means you cannot live the life you envisioned when you became a business owner in the first place. “If you’re so competent that you end up doing everything, you become your own master — who enslaves you,” she says.
What’s a Workhorse to do? Start with these three steps, she says.
- Document everything that you do for the business. Sanchez likes doing this with video; she’ll record herself doing a task, then share it with her team so that they can repeat her actions. She says it’s the fastest, quickest, most efficient way to standardize success.
- Delegate. Assign responsibilities to your team based on end goals, not a task list. Give your team the target you want to achieve, a deadline to accomplish it, and let them choose their path toward success. Just like you’re going to lead your business in your own unique way, trust your team to meet your objectives utilizing their own unique skill sets and instincts.
- Design. As in, design yourself out. Design systems and communicate them clearly. Print and place checklists around your workspace to support complicated processes; provide your team with one-sheeters, not binders of instructions. Enable the business to run without you at the helm every minute of every day. Sanchez calls these “standards with teeth.” If you need to explain anything twice, she says, you’re doing it wrong.
“Unless you really like repeating yourself ad nauseam for the rest of your life, you had better figure out how to do systems and processes and put a communication plan and process in place for those,” Sanchez says.
Of course, some business owners are excellent at processes. They just have other problems holding them back — like the person who’s always afraid to raise prices and would rather discount than disappoint their customers. Sanchez calls this person The Good Guy, and she has a warning for them: If they’re afraid to charge competitively, their business growth will stall, they’ll be overworked, and their customers will always expect more from them for less. Sanchez wants to offer these people a challenge: Double your prices on your next three quotes, and see what happens. Most likely, your customers want and value your product, and they’ll pay the new fee. Once you’ve experienced that, you’ll feel emboldened to charge more. And you won’t cave as easily when a customer pushes back on price.
Once Sanchez developed these archetypes, she tested them on thousands of entrepreneurs inside her community — building customized plans, with strategic 90-day sprints, for paid members of a group called Contrarian Boardroom. Now she’s also built a new book around them, called Own or Be Owned, which she describes as a choose-your-own-adventure guide to business-building. She wants business owners to read it and say: I now know who I am, and I know my plan to get where I want to go. She points to her own existence as a reluctant influencer as an example of the value that can come from examining your strengths and your goals, and choosing the most effective path forward for the business you’re growing.
“Do I really want to be on social media every day? No. But it serves my goal, and I’m a clear communicator that can break down ideas with consistency,” she says. “I can’t find another mechanism better than social media for what I want to do — materially affect the ownership trajectory of this country and abroad — so I’m willing to do it. Once you determine that, you have to decide if you can have fun doing it, because I don’t want to do something that makes me miserable.”
Image Credit: Jake Chessum
Despite all this, are there still universal truths in business? Yes, Sanchez says — because although people are complicated and require customized business approaches, their businesses are not complicated at all. Businesses succeed for largely the same reasons, and they operate by largely the same market forces.
For example, she says, here are four pieces of universal advice:
- If you’re a small business owner, she says, don’t overinvest in social media. Going viral won’t be your savior, and it won’t be the thing that drives repeat business. “Most small business owners would do better by obsessing over Google reviews, Trustpilot, and cleaning up their website,” she says.
- For that matter, don’t overinvest in AI, either. SEO and AEO are important, she says, because search (in both AI and Google) can drive significant business. But small business owners don’t need to become AI masters. Your job is to build lasting human connections with local communities and clients.
- Hiring people is universally hard, but it can also be a universal motivator— reminding you that your business is the center of many people’s lives. “There’s nothing better than the first time you cut an employee a really big check,” she says. “If you talk to any Main Street owner at a deeper level, you could ask: How many people do you think you’ve helped put their kids through college? How many people do you think you helped buy their first house? For a small business owner, if you’ve been operating a few years, it’s probably five, 10, 15, 20 people. That’s incredible.”
- Here’s the greatest key to business growth: “Pick up the phone when somebody emails or calls you. Respond right away,” she says. “That’s the number-one reason your business will be successful.” Customers won’t wait around for long, and they’ll happily settle for your competitor’s lower quality if they’re also faster to respond.
But ultimately, Sanchez says, here is perhaps the most universal truth of all: Business may operate based on tactics and levers, but it is also a deeply human enterprise, and entrepreneurs should never forget that. A business serves human customers, but it also must be built to serve the human at its center.
Sanchez has been thinking about that last part a lot lately. She and her husband, Chris, will welcome their first child this winter. She does not want to be working all the time. So she’s focusing more on the things that matter to her: She wants a business that can operate at times without her. She wants to make many other people wealthy through the lessons she teaches. And she does not want to give universal advice anymore. Because business, and life, is about doing what works for you. And everyone is different.
“If you know who you are, your goals, and your why,” she says, “it’s always easier to decide whether you want to do something or not.”
