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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of the first videos we made, I\u2019m like, My God. <\/em>There\u2019s money floating around in the air behind me, it makes me want to die,\u201d Sanchez says. \u201cBut like any new business owner, you get talked into things that aren\u2019t you.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite those questionable early choices, Sanchez has since become an internet force. She\u2019s collected a combined 15 million social media followers and authored the best-selling book Main Street Millionaire<\/a><\/em>, largely by promoting the same message: You, too, can become an entrepreneur \u2014 and the path to success goes through small business ownership.<\/em> It\u2019s an insight drawn from her own background, which her fans know well: Sanchez began her career in finance, then started buying what she calls \u201cboring businesses\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, 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\u2019s paths to success.\u00a0<\/p>\n This, she says, is now the mistake she wants to help others avoid.<\/p>\n Throughout her career, Sanchez has watched many people fall into a particular trap: They treat business advice as if it\u2019s a one-size-fits-all solution \u2014 as if anyone\u2019s path to success, or anyone\u2019s book, or anyone\u2019s philosophy can be followed directly and fully and will lead to the same results. But that\u2019s just not true, she says. Businesses may not be unique, but the people running <\/em>them certainly are. And too much business advice treats everyone the same.<\/p>\n \u201cMost business-builders\u2019 bookshelves are full of all the business-building books,\u201d Sanchez says. \u201cBut if you can\u2019t find your unfair advantages and you don\u2019t know your weaknesses, you\u2019re just going to spend a lifetime trying to apply other people\u2019s formulas. If you try to mimic Alex Hormozi, who\u2019s an incredible marketer and salesperson, but you are inherently more of a product person and a lifestyle builder, you\u2019re going to build a disaster, not a business.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201cright\u201d path, but she wants them to start by looking deeper into themselves first \u2014 to recognize their own strengths and define their own goals, and then build a plan that\u2019s best suited to their<\/em> unique abilities and needs.<\/p>\n \u201cMy belief is that you should have businesses that you own, that are profitable, and that you actually like to run,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n But please don\u2019t do it Sanchez\u2019s way. Do it your way. She\u2019ll help.<\/p>\n Image Credit: Jake Chessum<\/em><\/p>\n 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 \u201clovingly work really hard\u201d 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\u2019t just a way to afford things. Money is freedom.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI always thought money was super important,\u201d she says. \u201cIf you don\u2019t have it, the world really asserts its will on you.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cPeople weren\u2019t that kind to people who were broke and didn\u2019t come from anything,\u201d she says. \u201cI 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\u2019t a team player because I never joined the happy hours.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n This was a tough pill for Sanchez to swallow. She realized that money wasn\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThat was the point at which I said, I am never going to let somebody hold me back because of my bank account.<\/em>\u201d She started building friendships with colleagues who also seemed slow to participate in the preferred office culture. \u201cI figured if I could bond with a bunch of other people in the same space, we can all get ahead.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n 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. \u201cI looked down the hall and saw a guy with lots of fancy cars, second and third wives, kids that didn\u2019t know him, and I just thought, My God<\/em>. There are a lot of people who aren\u2019t happy, and they\u2019re very rich,\u201d she says. \u201cI couldn\u2019t figure out how to not<\/em> become that and stay in finance.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Sanchez likes to talk about having\u00a0\u201canti-goals\u201d \u2014 the thing you identify as not<\/em> wanting, as a means of triangulating exactly what you do<\/em> want. For her, a\u00a0miserable banking career became an anti-goal: She did not<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n That\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMy parents didn\u2019t understand how I could leave a job like finance, a job they thought was so lucky, the best I could ever get,\u201d Sanchez says. Many folks in her orbit thought the same. But she knew she had to step off course.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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<\/em> how to do that investing \u2014 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\u2019s helped others earn.\u00a0<\/p>\n Image Credit: Jake Chessum<\/em><\/p>\n 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\u2019s repackaged for small businesses.<\/p>\n It\u2019s been a winning formula, one that fueled the success of her first book, Main Street Millionaire. <\/em>But it\u2019s also what got her thinking about the limitations<\/em> of business books, or the steady streams of business-building content on the internet. \u201cIncreasingly, as a business operator, I\u2019ve found that I don\u2019t want non-tailored advice,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n She reflected on where she<\/em> gets the best business advice. The answer was: It comes by committee. \u201cI need to have a sales guy, I need a marketing guy, I need a finance guy, I need an ops guy,\u201d she says. And why is that so valuable? It\u2019s because she\u2019s surrounding herself with people who are compatible with her needs and goals. It\u2019s like a customized board of experts.\u00a0<\/p>\n (And if you want to build your own <\/em>advisory board, she has a few good rules to follow: \u201cHave they actually done the thing that you want to do? Do they seem happy with the decisions they\u2019ve 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\u2019s not, I wouldn\u2019t listen too closely.\u201d)<\/p>\n But most small business owners don\u2019t have the time or network to build a trustworthy and experienced advisory board. And because these owners are often isolated, they don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Sanchez realized that, unlike most business owners, she actually could<\/em> answer questions like that for her audience. That\u2019s because her company serves many thousands of entrepreneurs. She had access to data and patterns that others didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Problems are at the center of all businesses. Any entrepreneur knows: You succeed by identifying your customers\u2019 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<\/em> \u2014 the things that consistently hold their businesses back. What mistakes are they making? What are their shortcomings?<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 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<\/em> makes these kinds of mistakes and why<\/em>. This way, she could help owners understand their own strengths and weaknesses, and identify the changes they should prioritize to help grow their business.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a good part to all archetypes, and a bad part,\u201d Sanchez says. \u201cKnowing these things helps business owners determine what advice to take, as opposed to taking all advice and being miserable and not successful.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For example, if you struggle to build processes in your business \u2014 where nothing is written down or documented except in your own brain, meaning the business can\u2019t function without you \u2014 then Sanchez deems you a Workhorse. These people work relentlessly, putting everything on their backs. But that\u2019s a recipe for eventual burnout. If your systems aren\u2019t 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. \u201cIf you\u2019re so competent that you end up doing everything, you become your own master \u2014 who enslaves you,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n What\u2019s a Workhorse to do? Start with these three steps, she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cUnless 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,\u201d Sanchez says.\u00a0<\/p>\n Of course, some business owners are excellent at processes. They just have other<\/em> problems holding them back \u2014 like the person who\u2019s 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\u2019re afraid to charge competitively, their business growth will stall, they\u2019ll 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\u2019ll pay the new fee. Once you\u2019ve experienced that, you\u2019ll feel emboldened to charge more. And you won\u2019t cave as easily when a customer pushes back on price.<\/p>\n
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