20 Years Of Business Advice in 22 Minutes

So it took me 40 years to get to the point where I built a company that actually runs before I step foot in the door. Everything I've learned has gotten me here, and not only taken time, but man, millions of dollars lost, dozens of mistakes. So I'm gonna give you every piece of business advice I learned along the way, the hard way, and that I wish I knew years earlier. So I hate to say it, but here's some truths. The first truth is the people that love you, they don't actually want what's best for you. And when I realized this, it hit me like a brick wall. Like, think about this. Your friends, your family, your partner, they do love you endlessly. But love isn't always fair. Like, family wants you to be safe and secure. The risk that you're taking is probably terrifying to them. And the problem is that risk is exactly where all the money lives. I spent 10 years hopping between 5 different finance firms, and every time someone in my family said, why? They were supportive on the surface, but every jump came with the same questions. Is the grass really greener? Are you sure this next thing is actually gonna make you happy? And in some cases they were right, but I think long-term trajectory, meta, they weren't. Basically, if I had listened to them, my life would've been completely different and I would've not been as successful. And the wild part is, in the grand scheme of things, taking a career risk literally was almost no risk. Every time I made more money, every time I grew and learned something different, but I listened to them for so long because they Oh, you've already reached the pinnacle, why keep climbing? And I think one of the best pieces of advice I ever got on this actually came from a monk, which is wild to say.

In the first few months of going to the monastery, I felt very selfish that, you know, I have a loving family and I left them, especially my mom, whom I love very much. And I went up to my guru and I said, you know, am I selfish to be living here by myself? And he reached over to his box of Kleenex and he pulled out a tissue and laid it on the table and says, you're in the middle and your mom's in this corner, your dad's in this corner, and your brother's in the other corner. And he grabbed the middle and he lifted it up and he says, When you uplift yourself, you uplift everyone that you're energetically connected to. In essence, what he was saying is that the work that you're doing on yourself, though you might think you're doing it in isolation, you're actually impacting so many people around you.

So, I mean, if you think about it that way, separation isn't betrayal. It's literally just physics. Like, you start working more, drinking less, having conversations nobody in your old circle can follow, like, yet. They love you, but they actually pull you back down because that's where they are and they want to be close to you. It's not always because they want you to fail. It's because your growth is proof their world is about to change too. And that terrifies people. And maybe you're going to leave them behind and they don't like that. And so I've realized a line that's really important. Risk always looks reckless to the people standing still. It only stops looking crazy once you can start lifting them with you. But by then you don't need their permission. You've already got the results. So I think you've got to ask yourself, what's your goal really? Is it comfort? Is it something bigger? Are you really being supported? Are you wearing a life vest? The older you get, the clearer this becomes. If you sit in the same chair and talk to the same 5 people every single day, nothing new is ever going to happen. Like, opportunity, turns out I've realized, does not knock. You have to go chase it. And it's why I've come to this conclusion, which is working from home is the worst thing that can ever happen to you. And if you want to make more money, get promoted, learn faster, level up, You have to be around winners in person if you want to win. And the hard part is they're like not on your couch. You have to leave your room because being poor is contagious and so is being rich. And I know that's not the popular answer right now and people hate me for it sometimes, but it's true. The internet, for some reason, treats work from home as the best thing ever. I think that's ridiculous. Remote work optimizes for your comfort. Growth is not about comfort and you don't get That friction, that difficulty from sitting on your couch. And so, like, when we built out this office, people started choosing to come in on the weekends. That wasn't because anyone made them, but because they actually wanted to be better every single day. Some of these people work until, you know, 12 in the morning sometimes, and then maybe they take off a couple of weeks. I don't think you can build that kind of pull through a laptop screen. And if you're remote because it's genuinely the only way the job can exist, okay, fine. But if you're remote because it's more comfortable, I'm sorry, you're trading growth for convenience. And I wish young Codie would've known this 'cause I would've made so much more money faster. I worked remote for a number of years and I watched other people get along farther than me. And I wondered why, 'cause I was a really high performer. And that was why. The real players are actually out there meeting face-to-face and you just like people more and you give 'em more opportunities when you meet face-to-face. It's really not fair, but it is the way it is. And so I think one of the biggest changes you can start making right away Is making your way into rooms where the high net worth, the hard workers live. It is true that you're like basically exactly as successful as the people you surround yourself with. If somebody's stuck at the same level as you, okay, you can still be around them, but you got to find people who've already broken through. It turns out proximity is not a nice to have. It's a must have. And it took me 25 years of advice to figure that out. One of the other lessons I wish I learned earlier was nobody's going to advocate for you more than you. So early on in my career, I decided to do something unhinged. I flew myself to Goldman Sachs headquarters in person for a role. Most people, you know, you apply online and never hear back. I stayed there for 2 days. I did multiple interviews, a full PowerPoint presentation I prepared and delivered live. I had people beat up my PowerPoint live, which was awful, you know, telling me flat out, I don't believe you. What's this? What do you know about that? I ended up getting the job because I advocated for myself. I got in person and I showed up. And then when I wanted to hit the big leagues and go to Credit Suisse, one of the biggest Investment firms in the world. I flew myself on my own dime to 3 continents. I flew myself to London, their headquarters in New York, and I flew myself to San Francisco where one of the partners was in. I didn't even end up getting that job. But that same guy, Ryan Schlitt, shout out Ryan. He helped me eventually raise millions of dollars for something else that I did. He eventually circled back and offered me that role at a different date. And even when they slammed the door in my face, I just kept my little tootsie just slightly in there so that eventually I could get back in. The world will not hand you access. You have to go out and get it yourself loudly, uninvited if you have to. The second half is what you do once you're actually in the room. So I came out of college making $37K a year. By the time I left finance, I was making 7 figures as a partner, and I was working for somebody else. I was still an employee. I didn't get there asking for 3% raises every year. I got there by investing, In what I was doing. I got there by negotiating my worth based on how much growth or revenue I drove the company. Salary was only about 20% of what I actually made. The rest came from me betting on myself, doing bonuses, asking for commissions on deals, all of it tied to like results instead of just me showing up. Dude, hard piece of advice. Nobody cares about how hard you work. They only care about what your outcomes are. If you can't deliver, It doesn't matter if you killed yourself to do it. And I wish somebody had told me that earlier because I really associated a lot with being a hard worker. And it turns out also, you know, most people, small business owners or regular employees, you don't negotiate anything. You know, you pay your vendors whatever number gets sent on the invoice. They accept the first offer on the deal. You just won't get what you don't ask for. No one is going to hand you anything. You can never assume you're going to get anything. And every time you don't ask for something in the right way, you're leaving money in somebody else's pocket. Make sure that you're filling yours first. The next thing I think so few people do, it's almost painful. Don't be afraid to promote. If your work isn't seen, it doesn't exist. Be a promoter. People talk about that like it's a bad thing. You know, when I walked into Goldman as a public school kid, I was in a room full of people who'd been preparing for that opportunity their entire adult lives. They went to the Ivy Leagues. They knew the vocabulary. They I just summered in places. Like, I didn't even know summering was a verb. I couldn't outcredential them and I couldn't outnetwork them. I didn't even know any rich people. The only lever I had left was duration. I was like, well, I'm going to outlast every motherfucker in this room, you know? So I was the first one in every morning and the last one out every night. And I know that sounds old school and lame, but it wasn't that much earlier. Like, a lot of people came in at 7:30. I was in at 6:30. And there was a managing director in our group named Jim, former military, hardcore. I don't think he talked to any of us 'Cause we were little peon juniors. He came in at 6:30 every morning, and I just kept coming in a little bit earlier every day until I figured out what time he came in at. And then I made sure I was there before him, and I made sure I was still there when he left. I didn't wait for someone to notice my work on its own. I engineered the moment where it couldn't be missed. And eventually my performance plus my hard work made him notice it. And once he did, he started handing me opportunities nobody else on the team got. I think, you know, what I wish I realized earlier is like, it's not my manager's job or your manager's job to know your work. Nobody should be auditing your effort behind the scenes, tallying up the hours, waiting to reward you. Your manager's busy, right? They're their own boss. They got their own fires to put out. If your best work is happening quietly where no one can see it, it's functionally identical to the work that never happened at all. And this goes for you as the owner as well. Don't wait to be discovered. Waiting means your competitor with like a worse product and a louder mouth is actually going to get all the money that's supposed to be yours. Show up early. Let them see the work happening. The story about your career or your business is being written whether you're the one telling it or not. And I think you got to be willing to let people watch you build it even when that feels exposed. A business that never really talks about its work, I think a lot of people think that's being humble. Like, I'm not a salesperson. I'm not a promoter. It's not. It's actually you being invisible. Most people are trained to stay quiet about their own accomplishments or progress because you think it looks like bragging. But actually, all that is is called proof. It's the most important word if you want to sell things to people. Every win you keep private is evidence you're withholding from the exact people who decide whether to trust you. The truth of it is, is that nobody else is going to tell you this, which brings me to something people are a lot less comfortable hearing. You don't need friends in business, at least. You need friends personally. Work is the place where your problems are going to come, but your emotions better stay out of. Like, you don't bring your relationship stress to work. You don't bring your family stuff, the argument you have. And I know, like, this advice goes against what the internet's been telling you for the last 5 years. I don't know. Every, like, influencer I see with a ring light basically wants you to believe Opening up more at work makes you more authentic, more relatable. What it actually does is make people start managing you instead of working with you. You are allowed to be a full human being at work. But let me be specific. What you're not doing is turning your team into your therapist, your coworkers into your support group. I know people aren't going to like this, but do you want to make more money or do you want to feel good about the advice that you've been given? Like, it's just the truth. The coworkers didn't sign up. to be your friend. They signed up for you guys to build big things together, which is why I seriously hate when companies refer to themselves as family. As the owner, you set the emotional temperature of the room. So calling your company a family, well, that doesn't really work. I don't know families who fire people, have performance reviews, and, you know, tell you that you can no longer work with them. I love you. But you are not serious people. If you say that to your team, that they're your family, you've promised them unconditional belonging. And now every business decision, well, you actually are betraying them. The issue is the habit of treating work as an emotional outlet at all. I can't handle any of the influencers online that say that you should cry at work. It's terrible advice. It's actually awful advice. Cry at home. Like an adult in the shower. That's the place to do it. And if something terrible happens to you at work, I don't mean like, oh my gosh, I just found out somebody died and I'm crying. That's fine. I mean, I can't emotionally regulate about the hard things that's happening in the workplace. And so I'm just going to— no, it's not okay. Go take a walk. Go get a coffee. Handle it like a professional. That's the way to do it. If someone on your team is struggling, give them space. Space. That's good leadership. Be kind. And if you're a leader, you can let your team cry. But if you want to be the leader, you can't be the one crying. Here's why that actually matters. When you become the go-to person in the business, you're going to get handed more things. The more hard things you get handed, they come to the one who looks like they can carry the hard things, who have the strength. People like that, they make more money. And people will still like you even if you are emotional and cry and all that stuff that might not matter for them liking you. They just won't bet on you as much. You don't need everyone at work to know what you're going through. You need to, like, be seen as I'm highly confident despite what I'm going through. And so watch how differently people start treating you when you do this. That is going to piss some people off, but it's actually going to make you a ton of money. And speaking of stuff that's going to piss people off, this advice is super controversial, but I'm going to say it anyways. Traveling while you're young is overrated. And I know the digital nomad life is extremely hot right now. It's basically like, oh, this is life experience and it's a highlight reel and everybody shows their Instagram photos of it. Here's the thing, most people who are traveling, you land, you find the same coffee shop every other backpacker on that route already found, you meet like the other hipster nomads that are doing that. A couple weeks later, you go home with a great Instagram grid and Absolutely nothing that changes the trajectory of your life. If you actually want something real, go build something in a place that scares you a little. Go move from your hometown where you went to college to the big city to work. You know, I worked and lived in Santiago, Chile. I worked in Mexico. I worked in Peru. I worked in Colombia. I worked in Uruguay. I worked in Brazil. I worked in Boston. I worked in New York. I worked in Europe. The reason that I worked in all those places, that wasn't a vacation when I lived there. I learned Spanish. I learned a little bit of portuñol, which is like Spanish and Portuguese slang. I learned different rules and figured out how to function when nothing was easy for me because I hadn't lived there before. So before you book the next trip and call yourself, you know, living for experience, ask yourself the real question: am I doing this because it makes my life better or because it makes me look more interesting to people who aren't even paying attention to your Instagram? And then I think what you're looking for eventually is basically that Real wealth looks a lot different than people tell you on the internet. It looks like freedom. It looks like taking long walks and calling it meetings, never missing a family moment because somebody else told you you couldn't. Yeah, that's like what actually being rich looks like. And I don't think anybody shows you that part because it doesn't photograph well. But if you were to see the other side of most photos of people in Greece on vacation, it's just a line of fucking bitches waiting to take a photo on Instagram. I just wish that I knew when I was younger It's okay if you aren't there yet. It's what financial freedom eventually buys you, and you don't get to skip ahead. And so what I've come to realize is there are only really a few ways to get rich in life. You inherit it, you marry it, you become a Fortune 500 exec, you own an asset management company, or you own a business. Those are really the 5 main ways. And I picked the last one on purpose because it's the only version of rich Like, you can engineer the easiest instead of hope for. So the advice here is like, money shouldn't really be your only goal. You'll get the number and probably miss the complete point of having it. That's why my own goals aren't so complicated anymore. Finance buys freedom. Family and freedom are what you actually spend it on. And you get to experience life once you don't have to do it super stressfully. Okay, I need my coffee. So I was also thinking about this other one. Which is one of my richest mentors told me, I win for one reason, I move fast. By the time most people are done analyzing, I've already made 3 mistakes and found a better way. The thought that I wish I could have taken home earlier is that being wrong costs you way less than being slow. Isn't that crazy to think about? At the time, I thought that sounded a little reckless, but it's not. A wrong decision costs you time, maybe some money, but you find out fast and you can correct. An undecided decision costs you the same thing every single single day you refuse to make it and you never find out because nothing happens. So you never figure out what the real cost is. You know, Kevin O'Leary, I think, said something really similar about why most people never make it as entrepreneurs. He put the number at roughly 2/3 of the country simply isn't built for it. Okay. But the reason isn't talent. It's that most people don't have the ability to make a decision. He's watched it in his own people. Half of them ended up as consultants instead of founders. Not because they lack the skill, but because they didn't have the stomach to commit to a call and live with it. And I think that is the real cost of indecision, that while you're deciding, the market, like your life, whatever, is moving. So somebody else makes your call while you're still thinking about it. Now it's gone. Whether you would have gotten it right or not kind of didn't matter. So a fast wrong answer is almost always cheaper than a slow right one, because the fast one teaches you something today and the slow one teaches you nothing at all. And the problem with this is we don't think about this like Jeff Bezos's two-way doors. One-way doors like, hey, I'm going to marry this person. That's a pretty expensive decision. You can't really go back on that. You'd have to divorce, go through it again. We should probably be pretty careful about who we marry. A two-way door is I'm going to leave this company and go to another one. Okay, no big deal. That didn't work out. Go do it again. When I started my first company, I didn't have a plan, not even for like the next 5 minutes. Or 5 months. I just acted. I plastered my company over every conversation I could. I remember putting stickers at a conference to get the word out. It's okay to look crazy if you're just getting started. It's okay to just make decisions that maybe you would look back on and go, huh, I wouldn't have done that again. You know, I've gotten death threats over a tweet before. I've had a business nearly run out of cash. I've had competitors copy my content line for line. I've had partners steal from me. And every single time the business kept moving because I kept moving. You are harder to kill than anyone has ever told you. If I had slowed down, competition would have caught up. But this doesn't apply to every aspect of the business. Some areas it is important to slow down. And the lesson I learned cost me actual money, not just time. So think about this one. For— if you guys are building teams, really important one to remember is that you want to fire quickly. And I know this is tough. But it's not just that you want to fire quickly. It's that you only want to hire A-players, which might mean that you hire a little slower than you want to. Most people forget A-players need A-players around them. Like, if you're the smartest person in every convo at your company, you've built like a glorified fan club, you know? So I spent years developing a hiring matrix that helps me pull in some of the world's top talent across my companies. This is what it looks like. If you want a link, it's down below. You can steal my homework. I look for a history of winning. I don't want just credentials. I want receipts. A-players do hard things. They stick with something long enough to actually get good at it. They get a few wins somewhere else first. Then you hire them. The other part that's really important, if you're looking for A-players who are people who have done hard things, you also have to fire all the people you get wrong. And you got to do it pretty quickly because keeping the wrong person during a growth stretch is flat out stupid. Stupid. When you 2x a company, you're going to expect to lose about a third of the original team. 5x a company and almost nobody will recognize the place. Like, once someone's gone, you need to put more actual A-players on the chart. And an A-player is going to look different when your company is growing here than when it's down here. And this is brutal, guys. But like, I guess you wanted the truths that I know at 40. If you want to build big things, have a big life, make a ton of money. If you don't, you can ignore this one. But when you own your own company and get to set the culture, it's important to set the expectations as well. And one thing I preach in my company is work-life balance is largely a lie. And I'm going to be honest with you guys about this. Everyone else is going to lie to you about it. Once people make it, they love telling younger people that balance was there the whole time. I've met some of the richest people in the world, and I promise you, they could not spell work-life balance when they were building. Maybe once it was built, they got some of it back, but not before. So work comes in seasons. You know, me and my husband call them deployments. There's a season where you work every weekend and miss things you wanted to be at. And there's a season later where you get to choose. And the mistake is thinking you're supposed to have both seasons at once right from the start. Nothing truly great was ever built with balance in the beginning. Nothing. Not a hot bod, not a baby, not a company, not a book. You don't actually want work-life balance. You're a liar. You want work that's It's fun. And I know that sounds a little brutal, but if it's brutal, it's because it's temporary and it's honest and it's what most people won't tell you. Everything I've just said, by the way, is maybe 5% of what's actually in my new book, Own or Be Owned. And I didn't write a book with hard truths in it like this because it feels good for me. I just didn't want you to have like quotes for a coffee table that didn't actually matter. I wrote down every detail I learned scaling you know, 6, 7, 8, and the 9-figure businesses. The wins, the huge mistakes, the stuff that actually works, and what's been making business owners miserable and make no money and people who want to be successful for decades. So like every framework I've built, every contrarian take nobody else will say out loud, I guess I'm just telling it to you guys because I wish somebody had told it to me, if I'm super honest. I'm going to probably share a few things I shouldn't at our live event on September 18th. We're going to give away $1 million in cash and prizes. This has never been done before for a book launch, by the way. Like, literally never in the history of a book launch do they give away $1 million in cash and prizes live. And maybe even more important than that is that what I'm going to teach you there during it hopefully makes you 10x that. So I want you to grab your spot for a chance to win. I'll put the link below in here for you because the truth is, like, if you've made it this far, you're exactly the person this book was written for. Most people won't make it here, but if you did, don't just watch a YouTube video and go back to your life. Come with me and I'll actually have you build the life where you're the one people are listening to on the YouTube videos. It's way more fun.