Codie Sanchez on Building Wealth Through Creative Deal-Making | The Mindvalley Podcast | Ep #60

I saw these women be brutalized and murdered, and I was pissed. I realized I didn't want to be a reporter anymore. I wanted to be able to help more people make money because I think money equals freedom.

Codie Sanchez is an award-winning journalist, investor, and the founder of Contrarian Thinking.

She's now on a mission to create 1 million financially free humans through business ownership. What comes after curiosity is cash.

What does that mean?

If you want to get cash and a lot of it, you really have to be curious about whatever you do. It's like, I don't inherently love laundromats or car washes, but I became insatiably curious about the game of business. Like, could I learn how to do dealmaking and buy businesses without a ton of capital so that I was really, really free?

Can you expand on that?

Yeah. Money is a weird mirror for how we see the world. It has no emotion to it. The only thing that it has is the ability for you to be the architect of your life. The more money you have, the more you push back on the world. The less money you have, the more the world No pushes on here.

What is an easy first step towards building a side business? What are the top 4 types of boring businesses that you personally bet on? What businesses should we not buy?

So I think some of the worst businesses to buy that I would never touch with a 10-foot pole is one, if I was to talk to a young person today about the type of businesses that I like to buy, I would say one, I want them to be old. I want them to have a history of making money. Second thing I want from those businesses is I really want them to If you can understand those things, which is what the really, really—

Well, it's so nice to have— like, I'm so happy you're here.

Thank you for arranging this.

I started really delving deep into, you know, who you are as a person and how you got started. And you got started as a journalist reporting on human trafficking and violence against women. And you suddenly shifted careers. Was there a pivotal point that made you shift careers?

Yeah. Yeah. I am, you know, probably maybe similar to you. You've, you've been in a region before that has conflict in it, right? You've spent time in a place where some people are sort of treated like second-class citizens. And what happened in Mexico for me is I saw what happened to women who had no power, AKA no money. And the things that happened to them were not good. And so I watched that happen live in a city called Juárez, which they called La Ciudad de Muerte. And I saw these women be brutalized and murdered and work in factories for, you know, below poverty wages. And I remember as I watched it thinking, the difference isn't so much that they're Mexican and I'm American, it's just their socioeconomic level is different. They just don't have as much money. And so nobody cares if they live or die. Nobody knows their name and nobody remembers them at the at the end of the day. And I was pissed. And so when I saw that, I realized I didn't wanna be a reporter anymore. I didn't wanna just tell people that story. I didn't feel like that was enough. I wanted to be able to help more people make money because I think money equals freedom. And so I, I wasn't so sophisticated about it back then. Like it took me a while to get there, but I thought, well, I better at least understand money if I wanna be free and maybe I can build a little team of other people that wanna be free. Uh, and then from there, If I can do that, then maybe I can be like a, the Trojan horse in finance, kind of learning how those on high make money and share it with others once I come out on the other side.

Do you think it was a universal calling that financial empowerment is your purpose?

Mm, yeah. Um, it certainly feels like for me, I lose track of time when I obsess on a big problem, like a problem that I think I'm uniquely situated to solve. And, and so maybe that does feel that way. It feels like I could make a small dent on the universe if I could help more people talk about money simply, but hopefully quite profoundly. And so that feels like purpose to me. Yeah. But I, I don't know, you know, how much of that is hubris or ego. I just know when you find something that you lose sense of time in, that to me is a signal that you found some form of purpose. And to lean into it. Because I think often what comes after curiosity is cash. And so, you know, if you can lean into that thing that you can't help but do, like that you lose track of time of, that, you know, you forget that you haven't slept for 24 hours because you're obsessed with the problem set, then I think you can unlock a lot of joy in work, but maybe a lot of compact too.

What comes out of curiosity is cash. What does that mean?

Yeah, I talk about the 3 C's. So I think if you want to get cash and a lot of it and it to be sustainable, you really have to be curious about whatever you do. And so you can make yourself curious. Like, I don't inherently love laundromats or car washes, but I became insatiably curious about the game of business. Like, could I learn how to do deal making and buy businesses in creative ways without a ton of capital so that I was really, really free so that I never became one of those women and maybe I could help some of those women. So I was really curious about, How come all these guys have this money and power and we don't? And how do I get it? So I think if you find a curiosity lane, it is easier for you to become obsessed and obsessed people win. And then once you become curious, if you can follow a, a, a space or a place in which people pay for cash or things, then you can attract more of it. So I became obsessed with finance and money, and I knew that finance and money was also a place where people paid money for things. And so there was, there was cash located there. And then the third is the crowd. Like, Is the problem that you're gonna solve with the thing that you're uniquely curious about, does it have enough people that need that thing that are already asking for it? And if so, I think those three things together can make you a lot of money.

Wow. So basically you, I, you identified those three scenes and that led you to decide that you are not just satisfied with going, following the status quo and, you know, building wealth little by little and you want to come up with creative ways to build wealth, right?

Sure.

And you condensed all of your hard work, blood, sweat, and tears into this lovely book, Main Street Millionaire, which as I said, I binge read and really, really enjoyed. And the book is about that we can, instead of working for a decade to make $1 million, why not buying a cash-flowing business that is already making $1 million, right? So if to our, for our listeners who are listening and they might be in their 30s or 40s and they don't have a huge capital and they're not satisfied with their 9-to-5 job.

Yeah.

What is an easy first step they can take towards building a side business?

Yeah, it's a great question. Well, one, uh, back in the day I read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad. Do you remember that book? Robert Kiyosaki.

So it's sort of like, that's why I'm not as rich as you, but because I didn't read that book. You see? Yeah.

Now you will be. You skipped it. It's good. You went to the next level. So Robert Kiyosaki sort of talks about, he has something called the Cashflow Quadrant, which is like 4 ways to make money. And he obsessed about this idea of like, instead of being a W-2, you should really own your own business. And I agree with him on some, some, some veins there. But I think his idea was sort of like, it was the beautiful foundation for making money. It was like how to become, like a little bit wealthier and how to make a little bit more money. But I think if you wanna break out of wealth, you have to understand the language of deal making, uh, which is what I talk about in this book. You've gotta understand what equity is and what distributing equity is and why you are valued one way or another based on your skills and how to get other people to give you money to do deals. Like if you can understand those things, which is what the really, really rich understand, then you will be unstoppable. And so this business is about how to buy Main Street businesses, boring businesses located all around you. But it's also about speaking the language of the really, really rich because they just think different than us. So, you know, if you go and look at the people who bought businesses back before I was on Wall Street for a long time, I thought in order for you to make millions or buy a business, like you had to be so rich I couldn't even fathom. And then I watched a bunch of guys in private equity do it and I was like, wait a second, They don't use their own money. They find a deal that's already cash flowing from an entrepreneur who already came up with the idea, tested that idea for years, and all they do is come in and buy the business that's already making money using somebody else's money and grow it a little bit. They don't have to have the brilliant startup idea. They don't have to have stockpiles of cash. They're literally like this weird middleman. That, that is to oversimplify it, but I was like, why couldn't we do that same thing? And the reason why we typically can't is because you're like, well, I have to have a bank loan, you know, well, I have to have a ton of cash myself. Well, where are my rich friends? And so as I started obsessing about this idea and starting to buy my own businesses, I realized, wait a second, we don't have to do it that way. That in fact, all around us, there are so many businesses because baby boomers are everywhere and they own 50 to 60% of all businesses and they're ready to retire. So we'll have like 75 million businesses close or transition in the next 10 years. Which means we have a massive supply problem, businesses that are owned by baby boomers, but we don't actually have a demand problem, enough people who know how to buy those businesses and structure deals. So if we could help more people learn how to buy the businesses using the profits of the business to buy it, which is what private equity does, then couldn't we transfer 75 million businesses from one generation to the other using non-traditional financial structures, like not having to use a bank? Couldn't you maybe change the trajectory of our country and stop having the really, really rich own everything. And we take a little bit of that back if we pair those two groups. And this book tells you the path to do that.

Wow. Speaking of baby boomers, one thing that, uh, as a society we're not paying attention to is that less and less people are able to pass down their businesses to their children. Because in the past, children by default would've followed the footsteps of their fathers or, you know, their cousins and their uncles. But right now, I, I, I was reading in your book about how many small businesses we have from laundromats to dry cleaning to grocery stores, even like independent grocery stores or independent pharmacies. And that when the person reaches, you know, an older age or they wanna retire, How would, how are they, how are they gonna retire? There was no kid to pass the business down to. If there was no friend around, they almost have to just spend money to shut down the business. Exactly right. And therefore, like that, that's one of the mind-blowing points in the book is the fact that you're mentioning that by learning about how to buy boring businesses, we're actually serving the society big time by letting all of these amazing businesses go to waste at like no cost.

Yep, that's exactly right. You nailed it. I still get the chills, like, hearing you say that, because I've known that to be true for the last 3 years, and we've seen it firsthand. And, you know, the reason I even started thinking about private equity and buying my own businesses is I realized back in the day I had an uncle, Uncle Eb, who had a plumbing business, and the plumbing business was very profitable and big— millions of dollars a year in revenue. And he got older, and, you know, he came from like a very humble background. His family were sharecroppers. He didn't have formal education. Nobody really in my family at the time with him did. And so he had no idea that he could sell his business. So when he got sick and didn't have the energy to run the business anymore, what did he do? Well, he could have sold the business for probably $2 to $3 to $5 to $6 million. And instead, He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and months and months shutting it down, selling no assets of the business. And it's not that he wasn't incredibly intelligent as a businessman. He was, but nobody told him that this was a path. And even if you would've told him that this was a path, he probably wouldn't have fully believed that. He would've been like, listen, it's slowing down. The business isn't as big anymore. You know, he wouldn't have believed that his assets had value. And I don't ever want that to happen to somebody again. And if somebody in his business, like if one of his employees had read this book and had saw him think about shutting it down, they would've gone to him and said, hey, Eb, like instead of shutting down this business, which is definitely gonna cost you a ton of money, why don't you let me run the business and I'll pay you an annuity and your wife an annuity. So even if you pass from cancer, she will still get a check every 2 weeks from me. And what if I could do that because I already know how to run it and we wouldn't have to have banks involved and you just transfer some of the liabilities and the assets to me and I take over this business. And that should be happening all over our country, but it's not. The businesses are shutting down or private equity companies are coming in and buying them. And then all of a sudden we live in a neighborhood where the private equity companies own our houses, they own our grocery stores, they own our gyms. They own just about everything around us. And so I think it's a beautiful opportunity to save somebody's legacy, but also, you know, to take the $2 to $3 million in profit that Uncle Eb's business was making, then transfer that to you.

So if someone were to buy, again, I call it a boring business because I'll get to why sometimes the most, the easiest way to make money might be boring, might be conceived, perceived as boring. Yeah. But, it's actually to our benefit to take those routes versus a sexy startup creative idea route. Uh, and you talked in detail about it in the book. Uh, can you share about that part?

Yeah. Well, let's think about a couple things. So I kind of, I think sometimes there's so much noise on the internet, you have to go back to the math cuz numbers are a little bit harder to lie with. And so the math basically says that in a startup, 90% of the time a startup fails within any rolling 10-year period. So most startups don't make it. We also know that most startups make no money for the first 3 years. And afterwards, the average entrepreneur who's taken 3 years of risk and upfront startup costs makes somewhere around $40,000 to $60,000 a year. That's not a ton of money for as much risk as they're taking. Now compare that to a small business where you already know the business is profitable because you could see the financials and it's existed for 3 to 6 years. And this business you can buy using future profits at the business that you you already have a pretty high indicator that it will continue to make you money because it has for the prior X period of time. So instead of spending $100,000 and 3 years working on your startup in both your time and in money, why don't you take some of that cash and some of that time and buy more of a, a higher likelihood of success numerically? And I don't think enough people realize that 'cause starting startups are so easy to start. You just like kind of start it and then you don't realize that they slowly bleed you. Money. Like you are, you are spending for a hope that you win. The last thing I'll say on this is like, I have many startups. I think startups are incredible and the founders are some of the most unique humans out there. It takes a very rare breed of human to will something into existence that has never existed before. I think it's incredible, but I don't think we should confuse, hey, this thing has to exist in the world and I'm obsessed with it and I'm going to spend my life building it. With, I started this side business 'cause I wanted to make money. If you wanna make money, well then go to the path that has the highest likelihood of making money. If you have a mission, then go towards the mission. But like maybe don't confuse the two. Wow.

And could we say that our purpose is when our passion collides with money? Our passion meets money is purpose?

Well, so we think about it, yes, in some way. I have a sort of a three, circle, Venn diagram that I talk about. And one has skills in it. So what are you uniquely good at? One has passion in it, and then one has network in it. And so your skills are like, maybe you're an incredible interviewer, maybe you're very good at social media, maybe marketing is something you're really good at. There's your skill stack, right? Then you've got passion, what you're really obsessed with. Maybe you love making connections with humans. Maybe you love, um, writing, uh, interesting stories. Maybe you love just being based in LA. All right, your passions. And then the last one is your network. Where do you have an unfair advantage from the people that you know? And so that might be like, oh man, I, um, I know a bunch of people that run podcast companies that need social media. Management and then also need bigger distribution. And I'm really good at growing those two things. Well, then in the middle, you kind of find what we call your perfect fit business, which is basically where those three things come together to find you a business so perfectly tailored to you that you kind of can't believe it.

That's business matchmaking.

That was your— that was a good word you came up with.

Yes. Can we call you a business matchmaker? Basically matching the right personality with the right type of business. But what are a top 4 types of foreign businesses that you personally bet on?

Mm. So, um, one, I do think, so we have something called a deal box, which is in chapter 2 of the book. And in chapter 2, we kind of take you through what's called deal clarity, which is what is the right business for you individually? Where do your unique skill sets and your unique monetary Needs, fit. Once we have that deal box for you, it's kind of like a Tinder profile, I guess. It's like, oh, okay, you know, I want 6'5", you know, blue eyes, trust fund, whatever, whatever you want, right? And so in that deal box, you find the type of person that you're looking for in a type of business that you're looking for. And then after we have that, we get your little perfect fit Venn diagram, and then we can start searching for businesses. And so for me these days, my My perfect fit business looks different, but if I was to talk to a young person today about the type of businesses that I like to buy, I would say, one, I want them to be old. I want them to have been in existence for at least 3 to 6 years, which is not that old, but at least it's enough time to have a history of making money. The second thing I want from those businesses is I really want them to be in simple areas. So I want them to be something so simple you can explain it to your grandma.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, I don't want anything complex. I want them to be in a weak competitive area, which is like, I don't wanna compete with all the AI companies here in LA. I don't wanna compete with the Hollywood studios. I want a, you know, plumbing company as my competitor cuz I think I might be able to beat them. And then a lot of times I want companies that are stale. So that means they don't have a lot of innovation in them yet. They haven't, they don't have a cool brand. Let's say they haven't used social media. Maybe they have a fax machine.. And tho— once I have those characteristics locked, then I could find what industry I wanna go into. And now I require the indus— the business to make me a lot more money. But when I started out, I was like, I wanna make at least $10K a month. That was like my idea in the beginning. I want the business to pay me $10K a month, and if it can do that, then it might move forward in my deal box.

Wow. And how can you tell, uh, which niche markets you shouldn't go after? Because the market is changing all the time.

Yeah, I don't focus as much on market dynamics. I, we have something, um, that we call BRRT, which is that you buy a boring business. So what I define as a boring business is a business that is all around you today that you are paying for, that doesn't have intense competition, um, but is so simplistic that you could explain it to somebody else. These are typically trades businesses, service-based businesses, either professional or, um, personal service business, uh, also called home service businesses. So that I wanna buy a boring business in a recession-resistant asset class. So that's like, for instance, if somebody's like, well, do I wanna buy a business right now? 'Cause what if the world goes sideways? I always ask them, well, if your toilet was broken and it was in a recession, would you still call the plumber? Now the answer's yes. Now if you bought a luxury framing business and your frame broke in a recession, would you just go to Target and get a new frame instead? Probably. So you kind of are trying to think, all right, in this market, I, in a recessionary market, you either wanna be in a hyper-luxury business where recessions don't hit them, or you wanna be in almost what's considered like an essential services, like what, what kept open during COVID What are businesses that are so needed that the recession doesn't impact them a ton? We have a list of 130 boring businesses that you can buy if, if you pre-order the book, actually you get the list. So a twofer. And then we want, uh, the, the third R and, or the third letter in BRRT is raise prices. A good thing to look at is most small businesses are underpriced in their services by anywhere from 30% to 300%. Most small businesses never raise their prices. So I kind of wanna look and see, are there, are there some cheaper prices here than they should be? And then lastly, I want a business that is tech-enabled. So that means that I can add technology to it and make real change because right now they're, you know, writing receipts on pieces of paper as opposed to sending Slack messages. And so I care a lot less about should you buy a, laundromat or a car wash or a podcast production, uh, business. I instead wanna take you through this little, I wanna, I wanna take you through like sort of a Candyland and have you find the exact right character for you. And if you can do that, then you become really hard to beat in deal making as opposed to, I, I think a lot of people today say something like, say I'm in real estate. If I was in real estate, they go, the best way to make money today is you go into single family real estate. Why? Just go into single family real estate. So you have inherent bias, right? And I don't, I don't actually believe very much in that. I think the best way to make money is to learn the language of money and to learn dealmaking and then apply it in a way that you see deals all around and you get to execute on the best one of them, whether it's in single-family property management, podcast production, it actually doesn't matter. And the last thing I'll say on this is if you're, if you don't believe me on that, go look at my holding company. It's called Main Street Holding Company. Look at all the types of businesses we have in there. We got a solar business, we got painting, we got window cleaning, uh, we got Podcast production. We sold that business, but we used to, like, it's all over the place. So, um, and it's not just me that is, if you go and look at, uh, private equity companies, they're all over the place too.

Mm-hmm. What businesses should we not buy?

Mm, that's a good question. So I think some of the worst businesses to buy that I would never touch with a 10-foot pole is one, uh, I don't like hotels. Hotels are real estate masquerading as a business where people can call you 24/7. They're super expensive. And a fun fact about hotels is Um, on average hotels have negative profit margin because they make up all their money in taxes. And so, um, it's a very sophisticated business to run and you have to be a really good operator. And the great operators can make a ton of money, but you have to be really good, like base level, you've gotta be good. Um, the second business that I would never own, uh, if I was gonna run it is, is a restaurant. Restaurants also have, uh, very small profit margins. In fact, all over LA right now, I was just talking with one of our business brokers from our company called BizScout where we They, uh, list businesses for sale and he was saying they're having the highest level of restaurants being sold in LA that he's ever seen. He's been a broker here for 30 years. And the reason is because they increased minimum wage to $20. What they don't realize is most restaurant workers are minimum wage workers and restaurants operate at like a 15 to 10% margin. So basically you raise the wages, you kill the business. There's not enough profits in the business to have those wages and everything else. And so, um, restaurants are expensive and they're, they require pros. You gotta figure out when do I, you know, when do I buy this? Is somebody gonna, gonna come in and eat shrimp on a Tuesday or on a Sunday? And if I buy the wrong amount, it goes to waste. And then the third business, um, that I typically don't do in any way, shape, or form is like, I don't like any business that's super volatile. So if there's like a dropshipping business, for instance, so if they're, you know, able to go and have no moat around my business and I have to compete with everybody in the world, including Amazon as they white label new products, uh, I probably don't wanna play that business because I don't wanna compete versus Chinese knockoffs and Amazon. Wow.

So basically risk-wise, it sounds like you are not really taking super high risks. These, if the business is needed even during a recession, um, your risk factors are pretty low. Am I correct?

Well, I think like mathematically speaking, you're right. 90% failure rate in startups. If you look at Small Business Association loans where they loan out money to buy small businesses, you can see failure rate. And so the failure rate goes from the best years, 5%, to the worst years, like 23% failure rate. So that means then we have something like a— let's even be generous and say a 70% success rate, which is pretty damn good. So yes, mathematically it appears to be a lower failure rate. On the flip side of that, I do think the game of business is risky. And so we have to be honest about the fact that one, I've never met a rich person who took no risk unless they inherited it. But if you're not inheriting it or you're not marrying old, which is a different type of risk, then I think you gotta take some risk in order to get ahead. And so I don't wanna say that there's no risk or less risk. There's a lot of ways to fuck this up. But what I do want to have people think about is like, we wanna obsess on your first deal. We want you to learn as much as you can. That's why I put out a book like this. We put out all the free content at Contrarian Thinking and all the socials because If your first deal works, you'll realize that this works, and then you can apply that and do more deals. If you mess up your first deal, then you're gonna think that dealmaking doesn't work. You're gonna think that acquisitions doesn't work, and you won't do it again. And so I kind of obsess on, can we get people to learn a ton and do a deal so that they can continue to stair-step into bigger deals?

Well, if you are a woman and you're listening to me, this is to our amazing audience, uh, members, You might be thinking to yourself that, okay, I don't have the money to buy a small business, and I'm not gonna get creative with money because debt is scary. Like, I'm a single woman, how am I gonna pay it off? I might lose everything I have. Yeah. How can we— that's a big blockage of mine personally. And even when I was reading your book, it was— there was still a part of me that was like, I was like, no, but like, I cannot be in debt. You know, what if, what if, what if? And then it made me wanna, you know, get married like yesterday. So, and we don't wanna get married from that place. All right.

No, that would last.

So what is your message for women like me who are really scared of debts?

Yeah, well, one, it is good to have a healthy fear of debt. I think that is very smart for you to go, ah, I wanna be sure that I don't get in a position that overwhelms me. I think that's smart. And so you should like give yourself a little pat on the back. That's the voice inside your head saying, I wanna protect you. And we should listen to the voice that wants to protect us. But we also have to go, yes, and can we be reasonable as opposed to can we be programmed? And I think what happens with a lot of us today is if somebody says, like, if I was to say money is the root of all, people would say evil, right? We're like programmed with these things inside of us that as a society we think are true. We can fill in each other's sentences with pre-programming on negativity for money and debt. And debt is an interesting one. We did some research on it because in almost every language from the Buddha saying that debt is bad to the Quran saying debt is bad to even the Bible in some ways saying debt is bad. And so no wonder it freaks us out because historically, when debt was created, when a lot of these instruments were being talked about, debt was not democratized yet. So back when this, you know, the Bible was written and the Quran was written, a normal person could not go to a bank and take out a loan without a huge interest rate. And so of course religious institutions were like, debt is meant to trap you. That is a feeling we have deep inside because it used to be true. And now we know that debt is all around us and actually really helpful. It's just leverage. It's no different than you spending money on audience and growing your audience and saying, I'm going to spend here so that it's not just my eyeballs I have, I have many eyeballs, which means I have leverage. Debt is just another word for leverage. And so one, I wanna block a little myth, myth here that debt is bad. If you look at the richest people in the world, why does Kim Kardashian go and get a mortgage for her $38 million house here. That's debt. She's super rich. She doesn't need it. Why? Because Kim is a badass businesswoman and she realizes that if she has capital and she can get somebody else to give her more capital, that she has the ability to gain more wealth. And men just get this game more than we do. So we, as, as women overall, I think I see a lot, we negotiate half of the time that men do for our salaries. We take on about 30% only of SBA loans. More than, more than 60% of SBA loans are done by men. And, and obviously there's a wage gap. My argument against the wage gap is that's not actually men saying, women, you're worth less and I'm gonna pay you less. That's actually us women saying we don't negotiate as much and we think that we're worth less. And I think if we become the victor, not the victim, things change. So that's like just a myth-busting overall. Debt in the Bible and from when we were kids is not the same as debt today. There's no part of us that feels bad for getting a mortgage on a house. That is debt. There is no part of us that thinks we should go pay cash for a car. That is debt. There's no part of us that thinks we should spend cash every single day as opposed to have a credit card. That is debt. All of those things are debt, which can be really dangerous if you use it incorrectly. It's the same with buying a business. But we, we, we don't feel that way because we haven't learned dealmaking. They've kept the language of money a secret from us. And through that, they are actually enslaving us in a different way. And so One, I think you have to get over your fear of debt. And two, one of the ways that I do that really tactically is in, for me, I need to like see the numbers, you know what I mean? I need to see, okay, if I buy this business and I invest $10,000 of my dollars and I get the seller of the business to finance me the, the other $100,000 to buy this business, How much money will I make each month based on profit in the business? And what if the business loses 50% per month or 20% per month? Will I still make money on the business? I need to see it, otherwise it causes me stress. And so I think one of the things that limit mistakes and fear in doing deals are tools. And so you'll see if you buy the book, you basically have a ton of different downloads and templates you get. And one of them is called a scenario calculator.. And the scenario basically, just like you would punch in if you wanna figure out what a mortgage is, if you punch in, hey, I kind of want a business that does this much money, it costs this much, and I make this much per month. And then what if something bad happens in the market? How much would I make then? And that will make you feel a little bit better about taking risk because you can see the future a little bit. Okay, I'm okay if this thing falls by 50% still. And I think that helps a lot of people.

Well, it sounds to me that the reason we have more male, or much, many more male entrepreneurs than female entrepreneurs is due to the fact that men are better negotiators. And the art of negotiation has a lot to do with self-worth.

Yeah, very true.

Which means lack of self-worth in women has created more successful men when it comes to business. Than women. Otherwise, like, that's— I think that's the only reason that we don't have as many successful female entrepreneurs as we do have, like, male entrepreneurs. It's so interesting. Every time, with every conversation which involves something painful to me, the root of it goes back to self-worth. Like, I did not think that this conversation will go back to self-worth again. I didn't know the relationship between being a successful business owner and having self-worth.

Yeah, it's a good point.

This was really, really interesting. Thank you so much for sharing.

Oh, my gosh, it's really nice that you shared your vulnerability on it. I mean, I think there's 3 reasons why women on average don't make as much as men and maybe why there aren't as many entrepreneurs. One, I do think is we don't negotiate as much for sure. We need to negotiate more often. And as we negotiate more often, we'll get better at it. And so we'll have more successful negotiations. Two is we don't take as much risk. We don't take as much risk physically. That is part of being a female human. We were meant to be and created to be not the hunters, but, you know, the gatherers. That is just sort of scientifically how we were created. And so our risk tolerance is lower than men. And you could see this also in financial risk tolerance. Women have a lower risk tolerance, doing surveys about finances, what they're willing to do one way or the other. And so we don't take as much risk on average, of course. And then I think the third component of it is our skill stack isn't as valuable yet. And so on average, we just haven't had as many at-bats. Like, you know, not that long ago we couldn't vote, and not that long ago we weren't in business. And we stand on the shoulders of giants, of former female generations and men who helped equalize the playing field for all of us. And so I think we also have to give ourselves a little love when and men, they're like, we are catching up. Like, it wasn't so long ago that we weren't actually a part of the equation. And so our skill stack is not as refined yet. You know, there aren't as many of us in science and math as there are in other areas, and those make more money. And so I think one of the things that men also do really well is they talk about money. And that's one other thing I obsess on in the book is like, when did it become bad to talk about money? Like, why is that sort of a weird thing if you think about it? It's like, you know, you don't talk about money, politics and religion. It's like, I guess politics and religion I could understand because you could really offend somebody. Why money? Why? Because we feel like it's gross and we shouldn't? I totally push back on that. I don't think they want us to talk about money sort of the way that corporations don't want you to tell other people how much you make at it. You know, they don't want you to share your salary because you might figure out that Sally makes more than Joe and Joe doesn't like that. And I think that's why we've been programmed again to not talk about money, to talk about dealmaking. And men have slightly gotten over that more than we have. It's not that normal for women to go, how is your spending per month? Like, why are you spending it on that versus that? And men do that to each other all the time. They go, hey, you just invested in that deal, let me bring you into another deal. And men bring— it's called club deals, known for being at the 19th hole of the golf club, which was like, you know, where they would go and have drinks. And women, we don't do that yet as much. And so, um, I think there are a few reasons why, but you're right, it goes back to self-worth and, and also I think fear, like risk is, risk is scary. And so it's, it's okay to say that some of this sounds scary, but I do think it's not a lack of money you don't have. It's not a lack of intelligence you don't have. It's a lack of knowledge. And when you know that, that should be super empowering. It's like, wait a second, Codie Sanchez Sanchez, so you're telling me if I read about dealmaking, if I go and look and watch other people do deals live, if I see a bunch of at-bats, I will feel more confident in actually buying a business and I will decrease my fear and increase the likelihood of me winning. Yes, I, I can almost guarantee you that. I think that should be pretty empowering.

Well, that is very empowering. Thank you so much. It's, it's, yes, it's a lot to, this has a lot to do with the fact that for, you know, generations after generations, women weren't really encouraged to develop their skills and, you know, all the shame around money. I remember as a little girl being like, told that a good girl should not talk about money, you know. So yeah, that's sort of there. Um, I want to shift to wealth-building mindset because you mentioned in many places that wealth building has everything to do with the mindset, and just one little shift can completely change your wealth-building process, right? Um, you also mentioned that you don't want to be rich, You wanna be free.

Yeah.

Can you expound on that?

Yeah. Well, I think, um, one of the reasons that we don't like money, or maybe that you have feelings about money one way or the other, is one, if you don't have it, you feel like that's your fault or that somebody else got it in an unfair way. It's either I'm not good enough or they cheated. Those are like the initial, they got lucky, they cheated, or I'm not good enough. That's kind of what comes up. Money is a weird mirror for how we see the world. And so if that's you and you feel those little twinges come up, that's a little sign. Okay, I'm having some negative storytelling happening here because money is really just simply a hammer or a nail or a screwdriver. It has no emotion to it. It has no energy to it. The only thing that it has is the ability for you to be the architect of your life or somebody else to be. The more money you have, the more you push back on the world. The less money you have, the more the world pushes on you. That's it. It. You just have the ability to tell people, no, I don't want to do that. No, I'm not going to do that. Or yes, you are going to do that. That's all money is. And so when you realize that, you're like, you know, we're sitting in LA, and so people here, I think, often confuse money with, uh, status or fame. Yeah, right. And they have the Lambo and they have the outfits and they have the bags and they're invited to the parties, and all of that is a signal of money. Me. But people who are doing that, they're playing status games, not wealth games. And status game is the lowest level game you can play. That is you attempting to show through external stimulus that has nothing to do with your internal capability that you are somebody. And the thing about it is at the end of the day, we all die and nobody's more than anybody else. And so that's a dumb game. It actually is a really low ROI game too, 'cause you have to spend a bunch of money for other people to think you're something silly. Now instead, if we focus on wealth, well, wealth requires, if you're gonna get it besides marrying rich and getting lucky or being given money and getting lucky, wealth means that you have created value. Wealth is a value transfer. That's it. So it means that you have created something or have seen an opportunity to create something that provided more value for other people. And so if we think about it that way, then you have to ask yourself the tough question. If I don't have money right now, have I developed skills that are good enough to be highly valued? Have I developed negotiating ability to ask for my worth on the skills that I have developed? And also, do I even know what my skills are worth? And I think that is a big issue for a lot of us is we teach in the book something called expertise to equity, which is like chapter 6, I think. And in expertise to equity, it's a way to get a percentage of a business with $0 using your expertise and experience. So for instance, if you wanted to buy a business and you were like, I don't wanna spend a penny, I want no debt, I want no risk, but I wanna own part of a business or a whole of a business. You're like, yep. Okay, how would you do that? Well, you might say, okay, look at all the things that I'm good at. I'm a really good podcaster and I know how to podcast. It's just what I know about you. So I don't mean that that's, you have many skills, I'm sure. Okay. Okay. If that's the case, then you might say, all right, a bunch of people ask me on the internet, how did you grow your podcast? How do you get these big guests on your podcast? How do you, how do you get people to pay attention to you? How do you run the ads? Right. Let's say any of those. Well, what you do is you take those skills and every time somebody asks you a how-to question, how did you do X, you say, I like to say back, what is that worth to you? Like that value? It's just out of curiosity. Like, I'm not asking you to pay me. I'm just trying to understand the value of some skills I have. And, you know, if you're like, how do you get— I don't know if you think this is cool, but like, how do you get Codie Sanchez on a podcast? Like, what's, what's the way that you do that? How did you sneak in there and get her to do it? Um, then you said, well, I'm curious, like, if I could get you guests like Codie, what, what kind of value would you associate that? You'll get a number.

Oh, my pricing just went right up, right up, babes.

So you kind of go to a bunch of people, and when they ask you for something, you kind of say, what's, what's that worth? Can I just like understand that? You're learning how to value the business that is you. And then what you do once you understand your skills is the marketplace just opens up around you and you start to see, huh, they're asking me how-to questions. They have a business. You start saying, well, how much money do you make in that business? How big is that business?

Huh?

What if I provided X service, Y service, Z service for you and I made you X money, brought you X talent, did X for you? Would you give me a percentage of the business? For doing that service if I hit this milestone that you care about? What you're gonna find is more often than not, if you can do 3 things, make a business more money, cut a business's costs, or decrease a business owner's pain, you can get a percentage of a business without any cash. And so the problem is we just don't know how to do that, but that is all around us. So that would be how to buy a business with no risk, no money, and only your expertise and experience. The only thing it takes from you is the knowledge of how to analyze your skills value them, and then successfully, to your other point, negotiate and sell yourself, which is like chapter 8 and 9. How do you tell somebody else that you should be the one to get a percentage of their business?

What is acquihiring?

Yeah, this is so good. If somebody owns a business right now and you haven't ever done an acquihire, you should listen up because this is how you find talent if you can't find any. This is how you increase the size of your business and how you do an acquisition typically without any upfront costs. So for instance, It's oftentimes in venture capital, let's say, a business closes down, but another business buys it out. And they call this an acquihire. For instance, a buddy of mine on the internet, Sean Perry, his business was not bought by Twitch. They like acquihired him. And that means that another business says, well, yeah, your business is maybe worth something, but actually the 3 of you, the top performers in that business, I wanna hire you. And so for that, I'm going to bring you over to the business and I'm gonna call it an acquihire. Why would a business do that? Well, one, they want talented people. Why would the people who are in the business allow them to do it? They're done running their business. They don't wanna do it anymore. The business isn't doing very well. They're tired with risk, or they want what Sun Tzu calls a golden bridge. They want a retreat from the thing that they're on and they wanna look good. They wanna look like, hey, Hey, like I sold my business. And so you are giving them this golden parachute or golden bridge to retreat on. And I've done this many, many, many times. And it's incredible for talent because oftentimes you have a top performer in a business and that top performer has chosen a level 1 game, which means like not a very good business to be in. They might be miserable in an agency. They might be running a gym that's not doing very well., but they're a really good operator. They shouldn't be in a level 1 business. And so, if you can take them out of that, their business, apply them to yours, but you just pay them maybe a little bit more salary than they were paying themselves in their business, maybe a bonus if the people stay at your business for a certain period of time or hit certain goals, then you can buy their business without any cash upfront.

One of the biggest values I see in acquihiring is obviously finding talent It's not easy. It's not easy. I've been trying to hire talents for my company and it's really hard, right? So with AccroHiring, you're already hiring someone who's proven success, right? Yeah. But a question that keeps coming up for me personally in my business, when you spot a talent and you know this person is talented, she or he can do what I need, but they know that they personally are not invested in you. Would you go with it or not?

Well, I think part of your job as a CEO is to be a dream salesman, right? Your job is to sell a dream so big to a high performer that their dream is bigger with you than by themselves. And I've been with CEOs like that before. You know, my, one of my last CEOs at one of the other companies, his name was Jed Bowen.

He—

I was, I, I was running a business on State Street that was doing billions of dollars a year in assets under management. We had a big business. I mean, we're talking tens and tens of millions of dollars in revenue with this business and billions of dollars in assets under management. And I was, I was crushing it and I was having a great time and I had an awesome team. And I remember I met my CEO, Jim Bowen. I went to a holiday party and he was there and he— I told him what I did for a living. And he looked at me and he said, you should come work for me. And I was like, I was like, doing what? He's like, build out our Latin American business that you've already done over here. I'm like, well, how big is it right now? He's like, it doesn't exist. And I'm like, Jim, I'm not gonna come from my, one, like I make too much money. Two, I'm not gonna come to your nothing when I have this huge thing. No way. And he says, he said it real loud, I'll never forget. He goes, here's what's gonna happen. You're gonna think about it, you're gonna think about it, you're gonna think about it, then you're gonna say yes. And I was like, get the fuck out, who are you? And lo and behold, over a series of lunches, get-togethers, meetings with the team for a long time, he sold me a vision that was so much bigger than what I could ever do at State Street. And he was right. And I built a business that was $1 billion in assets under management at, at First Trust. And that business was way bigger because it was like more mine than it was at the other company. And he gave me this freedom to like stamp myself on this business. And because of that, I, I became part of that business. If, if he would have let me run that business the way I wanted to and been more creative with it, I probably would've stayed. I was like very happy and making a shit ton of money and, you know, didn't have as much risk. And so I think the question for you is how can you show them that this isn't, it's not the you show, it's about them. It's like what you are gonna do here can be so big. Like the sky's the limit. I'll never limit an employee's upside. They can make whatever they want. They could come to me with the craziest offer of, of upside that they want. And as long as they deliver the results, let's go. Because I really believe in a big, huge umbrella. I think about this a lot with my business. Like, my business is this huge tent, and underneath this tent can be a billion stars, just like a circus. Like, there's one person, whatever that person's called, that's in charge, that kind of tells everybody where to go. But, you know, sometimes the star of the show is the trapeze artist or the elephant walker or the horse rider. And at the end of the day, what's the person who owns the circus? They just put up the And they let the stars run. And so I think if you can sell them that dream, and you'll only be able to sell them if it's true. You know, if you want somebody to just come and be your sidekick, then you probably won't be able to get the top talent. But if you're like, one day, if you make more money than me, that'd be awesome. I'd be thrilled to see that. Then that is how you bring in top, top talent.

Wow. So the key to bringing top, top talent is to be willing to have them make more money than you in a business that you were starting?

Well, think about it this way. So investing's really cool because investing is one of the only things in the world where like, um, what would be a good example? Like, um, who invested in Facebook? Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel invested in Facebook, in Mark Zuckerberg. Peter Thiel was way richer than Mark Zuckerberg at the time. Peter Thiel gave Mark the money and he said, Mark, I wanna invest in you. I wanna back you. Go build this huge company. So Mark built it. Now who's richer? Mark. Is Peter mad that Mark is richer than him when he made Peter billions of dollars? I don't know how much, hundreds of millions of dollars. No, of course not.

Although deep, deep down in his heart, he might be.

Maybe Peter would actually, maybe he would. But no, I think at the end of the day, like as a, a CEO for your employees, if one of my employees gets richer than me, it means they that one, I've helped them a lot. Hopefully I've helped shape them into a really powerful human. Two, really good at hiring, 'cause that must mean we're picking the right type of talent and developing them. And three, hopefully they let me invest in them so that they actually were able to build something big alongside me. And lastly, I have a long-term vision with this business. So like, I wanna run this thing for 50 years. And if you think about your company that way, am I always gonna be the one running the entire business? No. Would there be a year in which the president, the person who actually runs it instead of me, makes more money than me? Fuck yeah. I'm all on board with that. And I remember one year, Jim in particular, early on in their career, well, actually, let's be honest, the first in contrarian thinking, my main media company, I don't make the most money at this business. I have other businesses where I make a lot of money, but I put all the money back in the business. So do my employees make more than me?

Yeah.

Yeah, they do. And, and I think that's really cool. Now, long term, will I make more if I sell and as we get bigger? For sure. But like getting them to think that way, I think means you can get massive, massive talent.

Wow. So let's talk about Art of Negotiation. Firstly, one interesting thing that you mentioned in your book is that people who don't have money are embarrassed to negotiate. But people, rich people do negotiate. Why is that so? It's so accurate, by the way.

Yeah.

People who don't have money, like they feel shy to negotiate, but then you see super wealthy people and they negotiate that for every dollar.

Yeah. You know, your bank account will be a reflection of two things. I think the speed at which you move and the amount with which you are comfortable getting uncomfortable. Faster you move and more you take on discomfort, the more money you're gonna make. And one of the things that makes at least Americans more uncomfortable than anything else is negotiation. We literally in our culture like don't know how to do it, you know.

Oh, us Middle Easterners?

Oh, you guys are sharks negotiating against Middle Easterners. Is actually— no, you guys and Indians, fucking forget about it. I expect— and the Indians, like, you like, like them while they're doing it. It's the weirdest thing. Uh, but, but in the US, we're not as good at it, and we're— it's not normalized. And, uh, and I think we have to change that, and we have to do exactly what you did, which is, as you said, that you gave big smile and you, you know, you were like cute and kind. And that is how you negotiate. It's, you do it from a place of like kindness and I wanna get to know you and I'm not trying to do anything, but like I am gonna try to get the best deal and so are you and that's gonna be okay. Right? And so I have a, I remember when I was young though, I don't know if you remember this, but like when I was young, I remember one time my mom, my mom was actually the best negotiator, better than my dad. She still is today. My dad, we kind of joke, says he is a really good negotiator, but then My mom closes all the deals. She's just, she's relentless. We call her the pit bull. And, wow. And so I would watch her do it and I would be like, "Ma, like stop it. Like you're embarrassing me. Like don't do this in front of my friends. Like stop." You know, I thought that her doing that was a signal of us being poor. And for some reason I was able to get over that eventually once I was in the world of finance and realized, oh, the smartest, richest people do this. I thought it was like she was being cheap and poor. And she's like, "Pay 'em, mom. You know, pay 'em." She used to get so mad at me. She'd be like, "It's not your money. Like, get out, leave if you wanna leave, but unless you're paying it, I'm doing what I'm doing. Leave the adults alone." And so I do think it's normal for poor people to feel more concerned about negotiating and to feel like that lessens their status. Then the second that you realize, "Oh, wait a second, the rich negotiate everything," it'll all change. And one of my friends, Noah Kagan, I wrote about him in the book too, he's amazing. He's Jewish and I think Jewish are incredible at negotiating too. And, uh, and he, uh, negotiates now. I don't know if he does it every single time now, but he's famous for going to coffee shops and like negotiating for his coffee at Starbucks. Could you imagine? If I would have done that with him, like when I met him 10 years ago, for this— if we had gone to a coffee shop together and Noah had negotiated for a Starbucks cup, I think I would have died. I would have paid for his coffee and mine, and I would have like kicked him out. I would be like, you are so embarrassing, you're so rich, Stop negotiating with the barista. And he looked, I mean, when I told him the story, he looked at me and he is like, he couldn't fathom why I was uncomfortable with that. And he's like, if I can save money, then I can go use it to make more money. He, and he's like, listen, if you're uncomfortable with negotiating, you should probably do this more than me. So next time you're negotiating the coffee. And now I remember that. So maybe you could start with even negotiating something as weird as a coffee.

Wow, that's a good start. That's a good place. Yeah, right? Yeah, an easier place to start. Okay, let's go to some practical advice for our lovely listeners. If you are someone whose job could potentially be affected by AI and can be replaced, what is your advice? Should we leave that job? Should we— what should we do?

If you're concerned about AI, I think you should look at the industries in which AI is probably going to have least impact first. At least that's what I'm doing. So that would be things like hard assets, right? AI is in the ether right now, at least. And so can they go out and can they paint a house better than you and your company? Can they go out and pave roads? Can they go out and build houses? Can they do hair? Can they do makeup? Like every single type of skill where we can do it with our hands and it requires bodies and where it's experiential, aka humans want to engage with other people in the real world because we're so over-screened these days. Probably has a less likelihood of AI getting involved with it. The more specialized the experience, the more specialized the trade or technician, the more— the less likely AI takes over right away. But I think the most important thing that you can do in any instance of where we have like crazy technological growth is you learn about it. And so in our small businesses, we have a fund, Contour Thinking Capital, where we invest in small tech enterprises that that support small businesses. And so, for instance, like we invested in Sense, which is a software company for laundromats. That's part of that is using big data in order to analyze laundromat data. So I think you can think about how do you layer things into your life overall with AI. But I'm not, I mean, overall, over time, technology has been better for humans by and large, maybe minus Big Pharma and maybe minus less social connection with social media. Like all data points to positivity with humans and machines. And so I tend to be a techno optimist.

Wow, I love that. Me too, actually. I do think technology has definitely done more good than bad, but sometimes we forget about it. But the fact that, you know, look at the level of access we have to each other as, you know, human beings. Back in the days, like I remember, and my cousin would go to America and I was in Dubai and I was like, oh my God, how am I gonna like ever talk to him? Then webcams came, and then, you know, iPhones, and then FaceTime, and now you can see whoever you want within like, you know, a second. That's a blessing. And I think us humans, we forget about the blessings technology has brought to us. So I want to talk about your community. For people out there who are now listening to Codie Sanchez and are wondering if there is a community where they can receive more support and more information on what kind of a business they should buy or how to get, how to use creative financing, where can they go?

Yeah, well, I think there's one really important thing to note. So when it comes to learning anything in life, there's two things you have. You have the education, then you have the implementation. So nobody ever loses money learning things, right? That's always a benefit. Fill your mind, decrease the knowledge gap. That's what the book is for, for When it comes to implementation, when you decide that you are like, I am going to buy a business, I have decided after reading the book that this is what I wanna do and I wanna increase the amount of money I make by buying a business, then I think you go into a community like ours because the risk is in the implementation. So the risk is in taking your time and money and buying the business. And that's where I wanna decrease people's likelihood of committing mistakes. I kind of think you need, we don't think, what we realize is over the last 3,000 students that have gone through our M&A Academy, We've realized there's really 4 things they need, and you guys know all about this at Wine Valley, but they need education, then they need resources, which is like tools, calculators, spreadsheets, then they need coaching. So they need somebody to actually pick up the phone and talk to them about what they do. This is when we do office hours. And then finally, they need a community with people that they can get together with consistently who all have the same goal. And if you have those 4 things, you have an increased likelihood of success. Over time. And so we kind of obsessed on how can we get people together in a group with a singular goal that is so rare because nobody's talking about buying businesses and surely nobody's doing deals together live. One of the other things we did that I think's really cool is, um, so the, the way that you learn investing is through something called an investment committee. So when you're in, when you're in finance and, and private equity, every single week, maybe sometimes multiple times a week, you get together with your investment team and you beat up deals. So you'd be like, look at this deal. Look at, oh, I don't like this. What about that? No, no, no, you should do this. Oh, let's bring in the, the, the commercial real estate guy. He needs to look at the deal. Let's bring in the attorney to look at this. And you have this like little group that analyzes a deal. It's called your investment committee. And so we recreated that in our community. So every Monday we get together and people do deal reviews and they do them live and everybody's under NDA and they share all the numbers. Hey, here's what the business is doing. Hey, here's what the commercial real estate lease looks like. Hey, can you guys look look at this deal over here. And then you have what's called wet blankets, which are people that go, hey, I want you to do a deal different than your family, right? Your dam— your family will very much often be like, just don't do anything different. Don't change. Just be exactly you. Are you sure you wanna do that? But this community wants you to buy a business, but it wants you to do a right deal. So we throw a wet blanket on you and go, ooh, here's all the reasons we hate this business. So you have other people alongside you who will help you decide good business, bad business.

Business.

Then the last thing we do that I think is really important to the community is our office hours. So we pulled together a bunch of the top facilitators in buying and selling small businesses, so like business brokers, attorneys, commercial real estate guys, franchise guys. And so when you get on, you're like, I'm kind of looking at a franchise, then you want to get on a call, work during the office hours of one of the franchises. And we're modeling it after like, could we have— what would it look like if we had a university, uh, that's like office hours, curriculum, et cetera, with a private equity group that you got to sit in on, 'cause nobody ever shares these deals, which is like, uh, investment committee with the final part, which is like a brokerage, which a lot of us couldn't afford that. Typically when you buy a business, you have what's called a buy-side broker or an M&A broker, and they're the ones that help you source the deals and figure out how to put together your deal team, the people who will help you close it. So we have this last section where we have a couple brokers in the group and we have a a vendor list where they say like, I've used this attorney, he's good. I've used this accountant, he's good. Because I think what decreases fear is knowledge plus shared experience plus consistency. And so I'm trying to give some finance institutions a run for their money with our community and we'll see if we're able to do it. Wow.

Is that what's coming up next?

Yeah, well that is, yeah. I mean, we're working on accreditation right now for these programs. I don't know if we'll get it or not, but the idea is that this is an academy where We do more deals than private equity companies. I mean, our, our students have already done $360 million worth of transactions that we can track. So I don't see why private equity firms basically say they're really, they're small companies, like the biggest ones have a couple hundred people. And so I don't see why they have to do all the deals with these few people. Why can't we mimic how they do deals and how universities do deals, but we allow everybody to own the business instead and we don't take a percentage of any deals. That's what the private private equity guys do. They own it all. We actually say we don't want anything. We want you to have skin in the game. There's a cost to getting into the academy. You have to fill out a screening mechanism to make sure it's a mutual good fit. But pending that, you, you take all of the upside. Like, you go do it. And so, I mean, Wall Street hates this, but like, that is what I think the future is, is I think we could do more deals than private equity companies in our own academy. Wow.

So you're basically introducing a, a whole new level of, um, businesses.

Yeah.

In the ecosystem basically, because it's not small, small businesses, it's not the top of the pyramid, it's not the private equity. So you are gonna create a piece in the pyramid.

That's the idea. Yeah. It's like, why, why can't we all go learn how to buy our own community businesses? I mean, this is how businesses used to be transferred back in the day, right? Like before big corporations and private equity Maybe you, you were talking about this, like you had a business and you transferred the business to your kid or maybe to an apprentice, right? An apprenticeship they killed. They said you can't actually apprentice anymore. It's, it's illegal. You can't do unpaid internships, you can't do unpaid apprentices. And by and large, it's not that normal for a business owner to transfer his business to his employee. That's weird. Why would we say that, that the way that it should happen is like big corporations get in the middle as opposed to like, not only just a family-owned business, but like a community-owned business for years. Like that would make a lot of sense. And so that's the idea. And I think, I think if we continue on this path, we're gonna be able to make a big dent in the universe, if not achieve it.

Wow. I love it.

Thank you.

Let's shift gear into Codie as a woman, as a wife. I see you post a lot of nice videos with your husband. And I saw that you posted that your biggest regret is not putting marriage above all else. So what I'm sure our listeners like me are thinking, how do you spend quality time in a marriage while, you know, running all the businesses you run?

Yeah, well, I do think, you know, I have a lot of empathy for like young Codie who was single trying to figure all this out. And I, I think sometimes it could be, it's scary, you know, being single and having the weight of the world on your shoulders. And so I give a lot of credit to the fact that I have a partner that I get to shoulder things with. And so now that I have that, I, I wish I didn't believe everything they told us back in the day, which is like, marriage is really hard. And, um, you know, you're gonna have to battle together and, you know, 50% of all marriages end in divorce. And I get why they say all of that. A lot of it is true, but in actuality, like my husband is the best deal I ever did. You know, the two of us together are incredibly more powerful than either one of us individually. And don't get me wrong, like we're not, we're so far from perfect. You know, Tanner sees it all. We definitely fight, we have issues, we have all the normal things, but we have just both realized, I suppose, that the most critical thing is that you have another human that you travel through time with. And if you prioritize that and you find a human where, you know, there's yin and yang and your skills match, which is what ours are, are, then like there's also nothing better than working with your spouse. And don't get me wrong, it's actually, it's more work up front learning how to work with your spouse, much harder up front. Um, but then I get to share all my wins, all my losses. So does he. And we both speak a common language. So, and, and guess what? That's also what we used to do. We used to work with our spouses. And so it kind of feels like everywhere in the world they're trying to get us to disconnect from the, the nuclear family, from the nuclear community, and become sort of these amorphous, one-off individual things. And I don't think that makes us happier. Uh, and so if I could impart anything to young women earlier, it's like marriage is awesome. I mean, queen of, queen of singledom and fuckery, Alex Cooper, who I have a lot of respect for, but like that was her thing, was like single, kind of fuck guys, do whatever you want, be all over the place. Married, seems really happy. And so I think we should try to become better humans and we should you could prioritize marriage. Well, you shouldn't do anything. You should do whatever you want. But I wish somebody had told me that like it could make me really happy if I was to get married. And I don't have kids yet. We're gonna try it out. Hopefully that works out for us. But I also sort of feel the same way. I always thought like, and we'll see what I think, but, uh, I thought you couldn't do it all and maybe you can do it all, just not all at once.

Do you think working with your spouse can help with that doing it all?

I do. Situation. I do. And if not working with your spouse, at least deeply conversating about what it takes to win both areas.

Wow. And, uh, you said that you're planning to have children. Is a part of you freaking out about managing children and work?

Yeah, I used to, and now not so much. I mean, it's also very natural. I mean, think about what women used to have to do back in the day. Oh my God. They were work— I mean, it took all day just to like get food and make it. They were working harder than us in most things. And now these days, I don't wanna minimize at all what it's like to be a mom with kids. I have no idea. It must be exhausting. But I do think that we've been doing this for a long time and we probably, you know what's cool actually, the women that I get to know, or at least my friends, so sample size small, but they tell me that after they had a kid, they're so much more efficient. They just like, they don't fuck around. They don't have time for it. They're not trying to do extra happy hours and unnecessary stuff. They're just like, they're dialed. They come in, they do what's required, they do it at a high level, and then they're out of there. And I think that sounds pretty great, so I could get on board with that too.

Wow. I love it. Well, thank you so much. That was so lovely. Mindvalley family, Codie Sanchez, um, check out, um, Main Street Millionaire, the book that definitely changed my feelings around business, and I know it's gonna help you a lot. And can't wait to have Codie back on the Mindvalley show again. Thank you so much.

For so good, such good questions. Thank you, guys. Thank you.