Why You Don’t Need a Startup to Get Rich with Codie Sanchez

You right now could be working in a corporate job and feel like you are stuck. The beautiful part about working in corporate America is you learn on somebody else's dime.

Codie is a legendary investor and founder of Contrarian Thinking. She's built a multimillion-dollar empire by acquiring boring businesses like laundromats, car washes, or vending routes, and then turning them into steady cash machines.

In order to make a lot of money in investing, you have to do two things. You have to be contrarian, and then you have to be right. What I've found is that you don't have to be the most intelligent person out there. If contrarian thinking came from this idea of, I want people to think differently, but my Trojan horse is money.

Can you give us some insight into how much money it actually costs to start one of these boring businesses?

I think there's 6 paths to buy a business with $0. So let me share that with you first.

Hey, young improfiters, you know how everyone's obsessed with building the next big startup? Grinding 24/7 and hoping it takes off. In this Gap Classic episode, we challenge that entire narrative. My good friend Codie Sanchez believes that real wealth often comes from buying simple, overlooked businesses that quietly make money every single day. Codie is a legendary investor and founder of Contrarian Thinking. She's built a multimillion-dollar empire by acquiring boring businesses like laundromats, car washes, or vending routes. And then turning them into steady cash machines. In this conversation, Codie broke down how to spot undervalued businesses, finance deals creatively, even if you don't have a ton of cash, and how to set up systems so the business runs without consuming your life. I learned so much from this talk and I'm super excited for you guys to hear it too. So let's jump right into my conversation with Codie Sanchez.

Welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast, Codie. Young and Profiteers, I'm excited to be joined today by Codie Sanchez. If you don't know Codie, she's a self-made investor and investment expert. Sanford, who took the insights she gained from working in high finance to build her own portfolio of what she calls boring businesses— laundromats, car washes, trailer parks, and other unglamorous but potentially high-margin small to medium-sized businesses. And now she's out to help others do the same, and she's quickly becoming one of the biggest female business influencers in the world. Codie is the co-founder of Unconventional Acquisitions, a company that helps people learn how to buy small businesses. She also founded Contrarian Thinking, a popular newsletter that discusses investment strategies and trends. Codie, thank you so much for being here today on Young and Profiting Podcast. Welcome to the show.

Thanks. I'm excited to be here finally, actually, since we messed up earlier, but now we're gonna crush it.

Yeah, we had some technical difficulties, but all that matters is that you're here now. So, ooh, salish, just have a great interview. We're very, very pumped to have you on the show. I was telling you off camera how excited I was to have you on the show because it's not so often I have such a great, you know, female business leader on the podcast. Really few and far between. So I appreciate you coming on the show. So you have an unorthodox background for an entrepreneur and investor. You actually started as a journalist. Um, you started back home in your state of Arizona and not just any old journalist. You were an award-winning journalist that covered really important issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, and Mexico border issues. So can you tell us what made you get into journalism and why you ultimately left field?

Idealism, really, you know, you're young and you wanna save the world, but you haven't even figured out your own life. Right. And I think that was me. And so if, if you're young and listening, I imagine there's a moment in time where you think everything's screwed up, nothing's the way it should be, and I'm gonna be the one to fix it. And I, that was, that was me at a young age. And I thought, it doesn't seem right that so many people don't have while few have. It doesn't seem right that I'm Latina and a bunch of Latinos are hanging out to dry along the US-Mexico border, and maybe I could make an impact. And, and I think that was a noble, beautiful idea in a lot of ways, but also pretty ridiculous in some, which is that I really hadn't figured out life in general, and it's hard to give much if you don't know much.

Mm-hmm.

And so at that time, you know, I was in school, I graduated about a year early from Harvard of the West, really, AKA Arizona State. And, uh, and I was looking for what my purpose was gonna be in life and And I needed to make some money cuz I didn't have any either. And so I got a grant from the Howard Buffett Foundation and decided that I was going to go cover border issues along the US-Mexico border. And I did that for a while until I really realized there is a difference between being the one that tells the stories and getting someone's story rewritten. I wasn't rewriting anyone's story. I was just telling them in an almost voyeuristic way to a void of humans that really didn't make much change and that didn't sit well with me. And so I thought I better figure out how to become something besides a journalist or I'm gonna become very jaded, very young.

Hmm. So then from my understanding, you went into the finance world, you ended up working at Vanguard, Goldman Sachs, you were head of Latin American investments for First Trust, really exciting stuff. And you were in corporate for 12 years before you decided to take the golden handcuffs off. So why do you feel like you were in golden handcuffs and what made you ultimately leave the finance world?

It's amazing how fast 12 years flashes, which is something only old people say, which apparently I'm nearing. But, um, it, you know, the beautiful part about working in corporate America is you learn on somebody else's dime. And I'm a huge advocate for failing often without the ability to bankrupt yourself. These days there's so much entrepreneurship, about how you have to sleep on somebody's couch and you've gotta do it the hard way. And if you weren't homeless for a minute, you're never gonna make it. And I don't actually think that's true. I think you right now could be working in a corporate job and feel like you are stuck because your lifestyle has crept up to the point where it matches or sometimes even exceeds what you're making, even if you're making a decent amount of money. And those handcuffs will tie you to a job you hate. Working for people don't— you don't like on things you don't want where you are no longer the architect of your life. And that's what happened to me. And what I mean by golden handcuffs, they're self-imposed, but they're still there.

Yeah. And I really like how you're highlighting that you didn't feel that this 12 years was a waste. You actually gained a lot of experiences and without those 12 years in corporate, you wouldn't have gained the skills that you know now to buy all these businesses. And I'm sure you learned a lot from private equity and this this area in the world in terms of how you're investing as an everyday person now. Is that right?

Absolutely. I mean, I was a young idiot just like the rest of us, you know? And so when I was first investing, I thought I knew everything until I lost my first dollar and then a couple dollars and then a couple more dollars. And so, um, you know, big corporations are soul sucking in many ways, but one thing they do well is they usually invest a lot in their employees because they understand the numbers, which is simply that if you hire somebody, and then that person doesn't work out, you typically spend at least twice the cost of anywhere from 3 to 6 months of their salary. In some companies, it could even be a year. So you basically waste hundreds of thousands of dollars for every employee you hire that doesn't work out. And so they do a lot to try to train the people that they have in the seats that they need them. And I benefited from that. I think one of the companies I was at, Vanguard, they told us, you know, who knows, who knows if that's true, that they spent about $100,000 on the training of the, the, group that I was in, which was this accelerated development program. So I actually think you can learn a ton by working for somebody else. And you've probably seen this too, because in internet land, there are a bunch of people that have never worked for anybody, that have never been an employee, never had an employee, never had a boss, never really been a boss except maybe to vendors or some one-off individuals. And they're almost kind of like these cute little morons running around with no idea how real business works.

Yeah.

And I think it's a huge disservice to them. And if they had just spent like a few years working for or with somebody else, then they could go jump to the next level and build something big. As opposed to what happens is they build something kind of big fast, but then they don't know how to sustain it, what a business is, what a P&L is. And that's actually all hard to learn while you're on the rocket ship. Mm-hmm.

I completely agree with you and I've seen that for myself. So we both started in corporate and for me I was at I worked at Hewlett-Packard and Disney, had leadership roles. I ended up leaving. A lot of it had to do with COVID and having more opportunity and starting a side hustle. But at the same time, I also felt a little bit like I didn't get the same respect like other people my age with the same experience level of experience. And so I decided to leave the corporate world. I'm wondering from your perspective, did you feel like any sort of patriarchy in, in the corporate world, or were you treated differently as a woman?

Yeah. I mean, I've had my, I've had my ass grabbed more times than I could count in finance for sure. You know, and that was 12 years ago. So could you imagine like 20 or 30? I mean, it must've just been, no wonder those women are kind of hard. You know, I remember when I was coming up and there were a few, very few women, uh, above me in finance, you know, I was always like, oh, I don't wanna turn into her. She seems kind of mean and mad. And, and I kind of get why actually, because there was always sort of, there was allowed to be one. It wasn't a real rule, but it was kind of there. Um, on the flip side though, I do think you get to choose your reality. And the reality that I chose was I look different than everybody else. You look different than everybody else. So every Chad, Brad, Tom, Matt, Larry is gonna be forgotten in their gray, blue, or black suit. And I'm gonna be probably remembered just for having a name that's a little bit different. And I look slightly different than them. And the way that I communicate, my skillset comes across differently. So I think there's huge benefit to being slightly outside the norm. And our lizard brains just don't realize it because we still think that we're on the savanna, you know, and could be eaten by a lion at any point when it feels slightly uncomfortable to not fit in. But it took me a long time to get that. I mean, I remember one time, I'm sure you have stories like this too, but I remember one time, um, you know, I kind of was giving somebody a hard time about the way they were acting at a company event and they had been drinking and I thought that they were making some poor life choices. And, uh, and so I said something like that to one of them, a gentleman, and he was like, and this is why we don't hire women. And I was like, whoa, there it is. But on the same vein, you know, at that point I was just kind of like, hey, fuck you, man. Like, what a dumb thing to say. You've been drinking too much. Go home. And then, you know, the next day he comes in, he's like, I'm super embarrassed. What a silly thing to say. And so I think there's always colors or shades of gray to this, to the fact that for a long time men have been in charge of, of much. Um, but I also have an incredible dad and an incredible husband and incredible guy friends that have lifted me up. And so I try not to paint, paint too broad of strokes for one particular sex or the other.

Yeah, I love that perspective. I, I really, really agree with your approach. It's like there are some downsides and some things that you have to deal with, but there's also a lot of opportunity in looking different and being different and standing out and a lot of people are really, you know, supportive, uh, in the corporate world as well. Okay, so let's talk about contrarian thinking. I really wanna go deep on this and get an understanding. So you have a news, a blog called Contrarian Thinking. You talk about this topic a lot and the benefits of being a contrarian investor. So what is the transformation that you take people through, uh, in terms of gaining financial freedom through freedom through this approach?

It started in 2020 when what I really wanted to do was I wanted humans to question any of the narratives that were being thrown at them. You know, at that point I'm really big on one thing, which is freedom for every human to make their own personal life choices as often as they can. Um, and my understanding at a baseline from starting in Latin America was the difference between me, last name Sanchez, and all these other last name Sanchez's was really that I had some economic freedom. I was born like lower middle class. Middle class in the US. And so I just, I had more opportunity than a lot of these people do. And so I thought, gosh, if finance is the cornerstone to financial freedom, if it's at the bottom, then the next level is physical freedom. So like you can do what you want, where you want, with whom you want. And then at the top of it is philosophical freedom, AKA I can think what I want, I can do what I want. I can't get people to think for themselves until they feel safe and secure. For the most part, it's hard for most people to do that. They need a roof over their head. They need to know they can pay their rent. And so contrarian thinking came from this idea of, I want people to think differently, but my Trojan horse is money. It's, if I can tell you how to become really ridiculously wealthy, then, and I can kind of glean that towards humans that I think are by and large good because they also believe in freedom, which I find is an underlying principle is really important. Then that means finally, once these people become financially free, they can share this pervasive mentality I have, which is we should question the world around us and that should be okay. And so at Contrarian Thinking, that's what we do. We talk about civilizing the mind, we talk about building the bank account, and we talk about making savage the body because you need to have a strong bank account to have a strong mind. And in order to have a strong mind and bank account, it often really doesn't make any sense if you're unhealthy and sick and overweight and fat. And so let's try to have this kind of third-degree black belt in 3 areas of our life. And that is a life's pursuit that I think is worthy.

Interesting. And then in terms of contrarian investing, uh, from my understanding, um, the basic definition of this is basically going against market trends. So you, you sell when other people buy, you buy when other people sell, but I think you've got a lot more that goes into this. So can you elaborate more in terms of, uh, what you mean by contrarian investments?

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Sure. I can't remember. It's a famous investor, but I can't remember which. It might have been Carl Icahn or it could have been Warren Buffett, but one of them said, um, in order to make a lot of money in investing, you have to do two things. You have to be contrarian and then you have to be right. And that tends to be true, but very hard to do, although simple to say. And, um, what I've found is that you don't have to be the most intelligent person out there if you can find where the narrative is different from the numbers. And what do I mean by that? These days, the narrative is what you hear on Twitter and Instagram everywhere, which is AI is incredible. And the, um, you know, my new startup that's raised $50 million from these venture capitalists. This is, this is the altar of which, at which we pray as Americans in capitalism right now. And so if that's the narrative, then I started looking at the numbers and I said, okay, well, I kind of get it from a venture capitalist perspective, the people giving the cash out. They make a lot of money because they give it a lot of money to a lot of people. And like 2 out of 10 of every, their portfolio companies make it big. And those 2 outta 10 have to hit 100x to wipe out the fact that the other 8 largely lost. And so I was like, huh, if that's the truth, then we have 8 founders in that mix that spent on average 3 to 10 years hating their life, sleeping on floors, you know, uh, making no money and eventually failing in their startups, and that is what it takes to innovate at a venture capital level. So I thought, well, where, where are the numbers different for founders and entrepreneurs? If that game has 80% potential failure rate, where is there an 80% potential win rate? And what I found is they're in something called boring everyday businesses. When you buy a business that's already profitable, that is already operating as is, uh, and that business has been in existence for more than 3 years, in some cases 20 years. And you know that that business has done X for the past 3 or 20 years, the likelihood of it can to continue to do X for the next 3 or 20 years is pretty high. So as long as you don't spend too much money acquiring it and you structure the deal right, and you know how to analyze it, you're de-risked as opposed to a startup where you have to pray hopes and dreams, uh, that you can succeed. And so that's the way we think about contrarian investing right now. I think the trade is in these, you know, boring everyday businesses, but it's really finding that difference between the noise and the narrative. Hmm.

I'm so excited for this conversation, Codie, because even as me, I'm an entrepreneur and my entrepreneur is something that I, uh, my, uh, company is something that I founded. It's really innovative, but I'm really excited about the idea of investing in boring businesses that really might not be a lot of legwork for me to, you know, start up and, and have some passive income. So very excited about this episode and I think a lot of our listeners are gonna be really excited about this topic cuz nobody's really talking about this, even though it's bubbling up as such a hot trend with you sort of leading the charge, honestly. So let's talk about that.

Can I interrupt for one second? Of course. There's two words you said there that I'm so particular on these days.

Sure.

Passive income. Um, I know you don't actually live by the mantra that so many people on the internet does because you're an entrepreneur. You've built something, it's a profitable thing. You've been in businesses, you've been an exec. At high-level companies. But I think these days those words used to not bother me and now they do, because what passive income meant back then was, you know, that your time, your time wasn't tied to making money. And so if you own a piece of real estate and somebody lives in that, but you don't, you could make money that is unrelated to the work you are doing. Now, I like to use the word horizontal income because passive income has become used by a bunch of 20-year-olds On the internet telling you you can get rich in 30, 60, or 90 days if you follow my foolproof plan. Although, oh, by the way, I only make money by telling you about my foolproof plan, not actually doing the thing. Huge issue. I think huge issue. And you've seen 'em too. Yeah, of course. And you know, for mine, I'm always like, this shit is not easy, but it is simple. There is a road to follow, but nothing I talk about is like click a button and oh, by the way, you've got an Airbnb arbitrage model and you are just off to making hundreds of thousands. That doesn't work. It doesn't work. If it worked, nobody would tell you about it. They would just do it all by themselves. And, um, and so I talk about horizontal income. Vertical income is like your salary, you know? So you work at a company, you're there 8 to 5, you make money when you're there. Horizontal income means you might have a little bit of your time, like along the top, kind of like this. Sometime always involved, basically no matter what. But you could stack lots of them because, uh, you could have a real estate portfolio over here.. You could have a stock portfolio over here. You could have a boring business that you find an operator to run, so it only takes you a few hours a week, but there will, there will be an upfront cost. All right. That's, thanks for coming to my TED Talk. That's my rant on passive income.

I, I appreciate you differentiating that and I, I agree with you 100%. By passive income, I basically meant like instead of, I'm always having to think of new processes, how do I build this? How do I do this? Whereas when you buy a boring business, according to stuff that I read from, from you, you need SOPs. You need to make sure that everything's already in place so you can kind of take it and scale it, right? Instead of having to create everything from scratch. So I just meant it's sort of easier than having to reinvent the wheel every single time starting your own business.

Totally. Well, and, and you, you, you know, my father said something that, uh, always sticks with me, which he was like, um, you haven't actually been an entrepreneur or run a company until you've woken up at 2 in the morning in the middle of the night and sat in one, in your living room, on your couch, in the absolute darkness and wondered, how are you gonna figure any of this out? Mm-hmm. And until you've had that moment where you, you just are not sure, you are living in a cloud of uncertainty and that cert uncertainty feels catastrophic. You've probably never run something and you've probably never built something. I think we can decrease that likelihood, but at some point, for almost anybody who's willing to do a hard thing, like own their life and own their outcome and own their own business, there will be a moment. And so I think you're exactly right. It's, it's like, can we ready people for that? But tell them that it's so worth it. Just like, yeah, you're gonna feel sore after you do a workout, but you're gonna be glad you did it.

Yeah, I totally agree with you, Codie Sanchez. Um, so let's talk about this idea of having multiple income streams. I've been running this podcast for 5 years and I always see like trends in and out, right? So like when I first started, everyone was like multiple income streams. And then lately lots of talk about focus on one thing. Like just had Alex Hormozi on, Leila Hormozi. Their whole thing is like focus on one thing. Matt Higgins, former Shark, also said the same thing. Like really just focus on one thing later on. Once you're rich, you can diversify your portfolio, but in the beginning, focus on one thing and get really good at it and get rich from it. So I know that you, uh, that, you know, suggests you have multiple income streams. Do you wanna give your perspective on what you think about this topic?

Yeah, well, I'm friends with Alex and Layla, so I love them. Um, I think there's multiple things. One, I just don't like risk. I don't like risk. I want to never have a likelihood where I can't pay my mortgage or pay my rent. I don't want you to sit there wondering if you're going to have to pack up and move the kids out because you have taken one huge swing and you have fallen down short. What we forget is what the numbers tell us. I go back to the numbers and the numbers tell us that most small businesses fail, that most startups never even make it to their first million dollars. For every case on Twitter showing you how easy it is to start something, if you go to the numbers, it tells you that that is an anomaly by and large. And so for me, somebody asked me the other day in one of our groups where we talk about buying businesses, is, you know, they were like, I have a $250,000 job. I'm working at a company, but I really wanna focus on small— buying a small business. I don't, I don't know if I can do both at once. Should I quit my job? And I was like, absolutely not. Absolutely not. You should keep that income and take a small incremental risk that allows you to get to the next step and pay the hard— the, the hard work is like, yeah, why don't you work two jobs for a period? I'm not saying there's like a free lunch thing, but don't put yourself in a position where You, you're not able to feed your family or yourself. I don't think that's necessary. Now, to their point, there's something called the 80/20 rule, right? Or Pareto's law, which is basically that 80% of your, your outcomes will come from the 20% of the things that you do in almost everything in life. And so I do think they're right in that focus is critical. In my business right now, I own 26 businesses, but 80% of my time goes to one business. And the rest of those businesses are operating with independent operators, like a private equity model. If I had to split focus between 26 businesses, I wouldn't be here. And so there's this balance where two things can be true and have nuance, which is if you feel something so strongly that you couldn't sleep for the want of it, you have to build it, then do it and focus on that thing exclusively. But for a lot of people, they're like, man, I just want to spend 3 more weeks this summer with my kids, or I just want to go on one more vacation that I can, or like, I'd like to just not have to worry about the price of guacamole and avocados on the side. And so for me, wouldn't it be nice if I could just have this little extra? And so, um, anytime anybody's listening to anyone, including me, I think you should be asking yourself, do I just want this because that's what she is saying? As that's what he is saying, or do I actually want this myself? And where can I question everything and find the truth for me? Because there is no one truth. There is just what is appropriate for you.

Exactly. We, we talk about that a lot on this show, like defining your rich life. We had, uh, Ramit, uh, Sadhguru on and he was talking about defining your rich life, what that means to you. Uh, so I love that. Um, let's talk about your, um, contrarian thinking program. You actually have an, I think it's unconventional acquisitions. So you have this program and by By the end of it, you hope that these people have 12 different income streams after 1 year. And I read that the average millionaire has 7 to 10 income streams. So it's no wonder why you want people to have these multiple income streams. Can you help us understand what this might look like having 12 different income streams? How is that manageable? I know you mentioned, you know, some things, uh, previously in terms of having operators for some of them, but can you just walk us through how that's manageable and give us an example of what that looks like?

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Yeah, so what I really want people to do is learn the framework, so I want you to be able to buy your first business that either supplements your salary if you wanna exit your company or supplements your expenses. And so I wanna teach people how do you buy a small business that can either replace what I'm making right now, or that can replace my expenses so that I can continue to do the work if I want to, uh, at my job, but I never have to. I can have my fuck you fund, uh, that's, that's funded from something else. And, um, and so that's the first step. And then what you'll quickly realize is once you buy a business, and the average person who goes through our program buys a business typically in 11 months, and that business is somewhere between $100,000 to $10 million in total revenue. Mm-hmm. And, um, and we screen people because not everybody should do this. And so we screen them to kind of make sure, are you, are you sure you're ready for this? And what I've found is what happens is you'll buy your first business. And then you'll spend anywhere from 90 days to a year, a year and a half kind of stabilizing that business, running through it. But then you're going to add different what I call revenue lines that could be income lines to an individual through your business. So you're going to say, all right, I bought a laundromat and now I want to increase the revenue of the laundromat. So I'm going to add vending machines as another revenue line. And then because I see how that works, I'm going to add vending machines for soap. And then because I see how that works, I'm gonna add a wash and fold service, and then I'm gonna add a delivery service. And what you're basically doing is you're diversifying your revenue streams through one business. So there is a focus or a through line to your business. Um, but you're being really smart in acquiring your new profit centers. And that's something I wish I learned earlier because I always thought you had to grow organically. Like I've gotta go and I've gotta get this one customer or this one client. But what if instead you could acquire the clients and wrap them up inside of your business? And that's what I tend to do, uh, again and again. But the, the only caveat I would say there is that I do think you need to focus on skills early as opposed to income. Mm-hmm. So I have a model that says learn, earn, invest. Most people go, I wanna invest, I wanna invest and make money. But really what you have to do is first you have to, let's say, let's say you wanted to buy a boring business, you need to spend a minute Learning about buying a boring business, 90 days. Some people take a year, but let's say that 1-year trial, uh, period of really learning how to execute on deal making. And while you're doing that, I want you to earn money and I want you to learn how to increase your earnings potential. So whether that's negotiating for a higher salary or whether that's getting a better job with a better salary, or whether that's doing commissions. And after you've done those 2 things, then I want you to use that money and I want you to invest it in something or invest your time or expertise. And so that's kind of how I push people to start thinking about diversification of revenue lines.

Hmm.

That seems like a really, really smart framework. Something that I wanna follow up on is you mentioned that you're screening people and making sure they're ready for this. So what is a typical profile of someone who might be ready to have a boring business look like?

There's sort of, there's I was counting them the other day. I think there's 6 paths to buy a business with $0. So let me share that with you first and then I'll— then it'll kind of tell you what type of person can do what, because it differs. So if you wanna buy a business with $0, you can buy a business, uh, basically by using seller financing. So you can say, hey, I'd really love to buy your podcast. Uh, you don't wanna do it anymore. How about I take over the business? Your business makes $100K a year. I'll pay you $300K for the business over the next 3 years. You take all the profits, I'll grow the business. Anything that's the delta is mine, and I own the business at the end of the year. So that's called seller financing. Super common. Then you have revenue share. So you might say, hey, your, your podcast is doing awesome, but I bet you could monetize it better. What if I came on board and whatever your podcast is making right now, I don't want any of that.

That.

But if your, your podcast, if I could make you an extra 20% or an extra $200,000 a year, I'd like 25% of that in perpetuity. And maybe we could negotiate for a percentage of your business, like 5% of your business. And so I don't have to put any money in, but I've just given you $200,000 more for just my sweat equity and revenue share. And you could do that same thing with profit share. You could be like, I'm not gonna do it from top line revenue. Instead, only when you put dollars in your actual pocket. Will I take 20% of the profits that I grow you? And I'd like to take a small piece of equity in the business too, so I get to continue to be paid in perpetuity. And then you could also say, okay, uh, what about if, um, you are a business right now and, uh, you have assets. So let's say you have a trucking company or something. You have a bunch of trucks. Why don't I go get a loan on the trucks? And because I do a loan on the trucks, I can buy your business with this capital. And then the fifth way would be like, I go raise money. I hear Codie Sanchez's got some money. Uh, I hear Alex and Leila are flush with cash, so I'm gonna go ask them for some money. I'm gonna buy your business. They're gonna take a part of it. I'm gonna take a part of it. And then the last one is like an asset sale. So like, oh man, a bunch of businesses are going over under with COVID What if I reached out to my other podcast, um, friends that are, that aren't gonna do their podcasts anymore, and they actually had some sponsors and info products that they're just shutting down. What if instead I kept those going and I just paid them a commission on that? So I'm gonna let them have 10% of those products for the next 3 years, and the rest goes to me and I'll run it all. Don't worry about it. Uh, and so we could do an, we could do an asset purchase. And so, mm, when the people come into the group, what I say to them is it really depends on what type of purchase you're gonna do. You could buy a business tomorrow with very little risk if you do a revenue share a profit share, an asset sale, right? There's no skin in the game. And if you go bankrupt or the company fails or anything, you're not gonna go bankrupt. You're gonna be fine. Now, if you're gonna put your own money on the line or get a loan, we need to make sure that you have enough money and understanding of running a business so you're not gonna go under.

Mm-hmm.

And those are the things that I try to talk people into. Typically, if you've run a business before, you should be able to buy a business. If you've been an exec at a company before, you should be able to buy a business. If you've done real estate before, you should be able to buy a business. Um, and if you have some excess cash so that no deal can ever go sideways enough and ruin what momentum you already have, you could buy a business. But I'm really conservative again, cuz I hate risk. So I'm always like, please dear Lord, just don't come over even and talk to me if you're not ready to do the work because it does take some.

Yeah. And I know that a lot of my listeners are entrepreneurs and as an entrepreneur and a founder of a company, you can also. Use some of these strategies to your advantage. So for example, all of my executive team, they've just put in sweat equity or have taken a reduced salary and they've got equity in my company. But as a result, I have, you know, 4 other really smart people helping me build my company and I go so much further with my team members. So it's, it's like a win-win for both parties.

Exactly. And then what you want 'em to do, this is where it's fun and we can always talk about this later in case this is too technical for all your people, but But what's really fun is for somebody like you, you also have a different type of purchase you can do, which is audience, right? Mm-hmm. So lots of people like you do sponsorship deals or ad deals, and that's great. You know, you have a high level of integrity, so you only do things that are great for your audience. But you know what a better play would be is you look for a few companies that you really like and you say, I wanna do distributing equity deal with you. I'm not gonna take any cash upfront, or I'm gonna take a decreased cash rate, and instead Um, I don't know, I love this, you know, this notebook company. And so notebook company, I wanna put you as the sponsor for all of our, um, you know, podcasts or for some of our podcasts. And that would typically cost you $100,000 in ad spend. Instead of that, you're going to give me $100,000 in value in the company as I drive XYZ metric and I want a percentage payout every quarter based on the ownership percentage I have in the company. So I want a profit share or a rev share because you don't really want to do just an equity deal because then you end up not making any money and you still got to pay your employees and everything. You need some cash to come in. And so distributing equity is a really cool way to do a deal if you have an audience.

Oh, that's really creative. And I have a podcast network, so I will definitely keep that in mind. Can you give us, um, some insight into how much money it actually costs to start one of these boring business? Like, what does this investment typically look like for some of the popular ones?

Really varies. I mean, the cool thing about businesses is you can go as big as you want. I mean, I was doing deals when I was in private equity and running my own funds that were hundreds of millions of dollars. And I've been a part of billion-dollar deals, although I didn't lead that, that deal. And so it can totally vary. What I would say is if you want to use your own cash, it's a good metric to think I'm probably gonna have to put something like at least $10 to $25K down to buy a small business. Can I put $10 to $25K down? Then I can use my cash and I can buy a small business using seller finance. Like you can do that for sure. If you want to get creative and not use any of your own cash, which I was just talking to, uh, Alex and Leila about how do we do more transactions without a bunch of cash up front? Um, Um, then, you know, typically, like technically you don't have to have cash. You could just do a deal using sweat equity, rev share, or the fact that there are these 11 million small businesses and they're looking for homes. Like these people need to sell.

Mm-hmm.

We had a guy the other day actually who was in unconventional acquisitions. It was so cool. So he worked in Phoenix, Arizona, and he was a general contractor. Uh, he was in the construction trade. I can't remember if he was general contractor or not. And he worked for a guy and he had worked for a guy for 10 years in this construction business. But the gentleman who headed the company was getting old and, uh, and he listened to one of my things. And then on our next Monday call, cause we do a call every Monday, he got on and he is like, you know, I went to my boss essentially and I sat him down and I said, hey, um, I don't know if you were ever thinking about this, but if you ever were gonna retire, uh, from the business or think about selling the business, um, I'd love to talk to you about it because I would love to buy this business from you., and I'd have to figure out a creative way to get cash to do it because I don't have a lot. But it— but if you're ever looking for somebody to take over your business, I'd love to have that conversation. And the boss— his boss basically was like, oh, this is great. I'm ready to retire. I just— none of my kids wanted this. I didn't really have any idea. Would you want to, like, start figuring out a plan inside the next 30 days? He's like, I only really— I want to work like 2 days a week, but I don't want to work 5. You could just use the profits from the business to buy it from me. You know, I can watch and make sure you're doing a good job. And if you hit all your metrics within 90 days, we start to transition over. He literally had the whole plan for his employee. And that doesn't happen every time, but you'd be so surprised, or actually you wouldn't probably, but people listening would be surprised how often running a business is so tiring after 10, 20, 30, 40 years. They're like, please, dear God, take the thing. But I don't wanna just shut it because it's my baby to Yeah.

Seller financing is something that we really don't think about often. So it's very interesting. And something else, uh, to your point right now is finding a highly motivated, uh, person who wants to sell their business. So talk to us about what we should look for and why it's so important to find somebody who's actually highly motivated to sell their business.

It's so, it's so true. I think you never sell anyone on anything. You only find people who are already predisposed to want what you're selling. You find people who are ready to sell. You don't teach people that they need to sell. And so in that case, they kind of look like this. There's two archetypes. If you could think about it, there's you. You are young entrepreneur. You've only been doing it for, you know, 5 years or less. You're, you're excited. Your business is growing. It's in a cool industry. Your brand's associated with it. There's all this optionality. You might take some cash as investment if you wanted to accelerate your company, but you're probably not ready to sell your business because because you're still excited and there's all this room for growth and you have a cool curve. The opposite, what we're looking for is somebody who's probably over 50. They've run the business for 5 years or more. The business has very marginal growth, 3 to 5% growth a year. Um, they've been running this business in an area that's pretty commoditized, you know, think roofing companies, landscaping, um, accounting and, uh, and they don't have a big growth plan for the business. They work a lot typically, or they're looking for change because of death, divorce, disease, unhappiness. There's a different word for it, but I always forget the D for it. And also, and also disaster. They call them like the 5 Ds of selling. And if one of those is happening, then, uh, you are primed and ready as a motivated seller.

Hmm.

And then once we find a motivated seller and we're evaluating their business, I'm assuming we need to look at like profit and loss statements, but what other things should we look at? Really?

I think there's 3 things you need to get 80% of the way to a deal, and the devil is in the 20%. But if you wanna get 80% of the way to figuring out what a business is worth and maybe should you buy it, you need these 3 things. Things, and they are, first, you need a profit and loss statement. So what does the business make and what does the business spend each month? And, uh, and typically you want that to be expanded so you can look at it weekly and monthly. You don't just want an annual one because some businesses have a lot of what's called seasonality, so variability in their sales or expenses. Then the second thing you want is their tax return because they put together the P&L, but the IRS puts together the tax return. And so very seldom is a small business owner going to pay the IRS more because they lied about their business making more than, than it really did. So you wanna match those two up. And then the third thing, um, that you typically need is there's, in almost all businesses, there is some, there's that 80/20 rule again. There's like the 20% that really matter. So let's do an example of like a car wash. Your lease really matters, or the cost of the real estate really matters cuz that's one of your biggest expenses. Um, the utilities really matter because electricity and water are one of your biggest expenses. So you wanna find out what is the other 20% that is gonna drive 80% of the success of your purchase.

Hmm.

Um, that makes total sense. I heard you say before that you should really only consider businesses that are easy to understand or that you already understand. Why is that so important?

We're learning a new skill as is here, right? We're learning deal making, how to buy a business, how to do a deal. If we don't have to layer on another skill, which is an industry-specific skill and an industry that's hyper-complicated, that's a win. Keeping deals simple wins deals. I think the worst thing that you can do is allow, uh, a really fancy PowerPoint to come into the mix here and give you a bunch of false hope and projections about what could be as opposed to what is. Is. And so I like really simple businesses because then it's easy for me to understand. I think most deals go wrong because they could— if the deal doesn't make sense on the back of a piece of paper or on a napkin, then the deal probably doesn't make sense in general. So most people in our world in finance, you know this too, you know, people in finance want things to seem complicated so they can charge you a lot of money for them to solve it, but the truth of it is it's usually a lot simpler than we talk about. Nobody's curing cancer here. I mean, you can understand how a laundromat works, how a car wash works, how a roofing company works. It just takes some work to understand it. So that's why I don't like anything that says proprietary on it or, um, you know, bioengineering or complex patents or even complex attorney companies because there's too much ability for me to not understand what's happening. Keep it stupid simple. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. Um, something else that I've heard you say before is you've gotta really look at the profitability and not just at potential for growth because everybody could say like, you know, we're projected to do this, or we've got, you know, it's such a fast-growing space or whatever it is. Why do we actually have to look at the actual profit profitability and only really consider that?

Right. I believe in buying companies based on realities, not hopes and dreams. That's the difference.

Mm-hmm.

Really, if you think about it, private equity versus venture capital. Private equity, which is what I do, but sort of buy these boring businesses. Private equity buys businesses based on the money they make today, and they apply a very small idea to the money they think they could make in the future, but they buy it based on what it makes today. Venture capitalists invest in a company now. With a hope that the company becomes something else in the future. If the company that a venture capitalist invests in stays the same the day that they invest in it as the day they go to sell the company, big, huge issue, right? Mm-hmm. That means the, the invest, the investor's not gonna make any money. If a small business stays the same the day that I bought it as the day that I sell it, that's okay. Cuz I anticipated that and I just cashflow on that bad boy for some amount of time. And that's really the difference between the two.

Yeah. Another tip here that I've heard you say is look for a business that doesn't do a lot of marketing or advertising and still is profitable. Why is that?

I, I always call it the fax machine test. Every time I see a fax machine, I get all tingly because, uh, it basically means that they haven't spent much money on technology, probably haven't done much marketing. And that's something that's called value add. It basically is just the same as a piece of real estate. In which you're like, oh, look at this awful shag carpet. And then you peel up the corner and you're like, beautiful original hardwoods. Awesome. Like they don't even realize what they have. Oh, they, um, you know, they boarded up, uh, this room and made it into something ridiculous. When in fact, when I peel it back, the room's way bigger. Look, there's a window underneath here. I don't even have to add the window. That's what a lot of these boring businesses are. They're kind of a pain when you first take them over because there's there's nothing systematized, right? You know, a lot of these guys have their tax returns in paper folders scattered around their office. So it's like not hard to do, but it's a lot of work to systematize that. And then you get to layer on the fun stuff, like, gosh, could you imagine if a company actually paid attention to reviews and had software to get them at the top of Google Reviews? I could instigate that. This company's never once tried to get a review, and I think we could change the company. And so we have something called the 3 Ms, which basically talks about, it talks about markets, marketing, and, um, measurements. And those three things all have all of these different variables in them. So like markets, if you own a business and you are located in, I don't know, um, you're a baby, you're a toddler, uh, what are those called where you go and you like take kids? Daycare. So say you're a daycare for toddlers. And you're like, okay, at this point we don't take newborns. Well, a new market might be you start to take newborn, newborns. Another market might be that you add a preschool in the back. Another market might be you just add another one 25 miles away in a new location. So you think about all it, what are all the different markets we're not serving that we could get revenue lines on? Uh, and then you go to marketing, which might be like, we don't use Facebook ads, we don't use TikTok. Why don't we have a YouTube? What about if we had cold call outreach? And then measurements is what inside the business are we not actually measuring right now, where if we measured something, then we actually usually outperform in it. And so we apply this 3M strategy to all the businesses that we run.

Um, this information is so good. So I wanna give you a moment to tell us where we can find more information for unconventional acquisitions, your program, any sort of free resources that you have. 'Cause I, I personally wanna learn more.

Well, if you can spell unconventional acquisitions, which is actually harder than you think, there's a lot of I's in that, uh, then you can go to unconventional acquisitions. And there's a free blog. I think everybody should get on it. It's called The Boring Business Brief. And every week we basically break down a different idea of a business to buy, a deal done, um, lessons learned. That one's really good. Um, and then if you also go to contrarianthinking.co/recession, there's a really good piece that we have. I think you download it. That's basically all the ways to make money on buying businesses. Starting businesses, uh, in a recession. And both of those I think are really useful.

Amazing. So we'll stick those links in the show notes, guys. All right, so I wanna do a quickfire segment. We've got about 10 minutes left of the interview and I do wanna get some of your like day-to-day conventional wisdom at the end. So right now I wanna do a quickfire segment. I'm gonna name some boring businesses and I'd love for you to tell me like what's the upfront cost typically if you have, if that's, if that makes sense. Pros and cons, basically a data dump for us. So let's start with a laundromat.

Laundromat. Well, how about this? I bought my first laundromat for $100K. It made me $67K a year. I, um, then ended up buying 2 more laundromats, rolling those up, and we sold that for close to $1 million. Um, you can buy a laundromat typically for less than $100,000 all the way up to $1 million. And you can do seller financing on these as well. You typically pay 3 to 6x the profit of the business for a laundromat. They're what I call the gateway drug. Good business to start with and learn with. For you, I'd say don't buy a laundromat. You can do a higher ROI and a higher returning, uh, deal, but a good one for a person who's just like, I wanna do this for the first time ever without a big huge business.

Mm.

And what are the cons of a laundromat? Like, what do we have to look out for?

Yeah. The cons of a laundromat are the biggest con I think is that you can't typically make like tens of millions of dollars with a laundromat. Mm-hmm. You can make a couple hundred K to maybe a million or two. Um, the second con is, you know, the customer that you're serving can be challenging. You know, you've been to laundromats before. They're typically not in the nicest neighborhoods. Um, you typically have, you know, machinery that can get broken into. I haven't really had any vandalized, but that can happen. Happen. So your customer segment is not Tiffany's, you know. This is a, this is a different customer segment, so you have to be thoughtful on that. Um, and then the other thing about laundromats that's just worth noting is, um, they take a lot of equipment. And so if you're going to buy one, you really got to make sure you understand what that equipment is worth. Otherwise, you could get into a point where you buy a laundromat with all these machines, but the machines are all old, they're not going to work anymore. So you got to do some work on the equipment and appraisal.

Got it. Okay. So the next one is vending machines. Uh, so I'd love to understand the pros and the cons of buying this type of business.

Vending machines are great because they're very, this is a very cheap business to start or buy. I mean, I see people buy vending machine businesses for anywhere from $3,000 to maybe $300,000. So it's a really good, again, entry-level business. The problem with laundromat or with, uh, vending, the problem with vending machines is that you can't sell very much out of one location. So they're not very efficient, right? You might make a couple hundred bucks per day per vending machine, but you'd have to travel all around to go both fill them up again and collect the money. So they're not a very efficient business where you can just go to one location. They require some logistics, putting money in, taking gear out. The second problem with vending machines is they don't scale very well for reason Y. Um, so there are some companies that have scaled, uh, vending machines, but not very many. And then the third, uh, issue with vending machine businesses, I think, is you— it's basically like a mini real estate play. So you have to go negotiate deals with every single location that you go to, and they could take those deals away or they could require more cash. So you have to make sure you know how to negotiate and the right way to talk to a seller of the location. The good parts about vending machines though, are they're very cheap to start. They're really easy to run. Again, easy, not simple. Important caveat between the two. Um, and, uh, there's a bunch of technology now that'll allow you to track your expenses, your inventory, and all of that remote, which didn't used to exist. So that makes them a lot easier.

Hmm. So interesting.

Okay.

The last one is car washes. What are the pros and cons?

So if I had to look at these three in order, I'd say Okay. Vending machine, easiest business, uh, least cost, probably the least profitable. These are all averages. Second business would be laundromats, medium cost, medium expenses, uh, medium revenue. The car wash is most expensive, potentially the highest revenue of the three.

Mm-hmm.

And so the good part about car wash is, um, one, uh, all three of these businesses can be relatively automated businesses, and you don't have to be on location all day in all of those businesses, which is really nice. Car wash has that same characteristic. They also can scale pretty easy. So car washes, uh, you know, you can add multiple bays to them. You can offer, uh, in-person service. I don't do that with mine. I like it better when it's just a location and you can self-serve, which also means you make less money, obviously. Um, The thing to know about car washes is the equipment's extremely expensive. It's the most expensive of any of them. So you really have to make sure you analyze the equipment and make sure that it's in working order. And then it's really real estate. You've gotta, you just look at the location, location, location, location. Do you have at least 10,000 cars that drive by per day? That's your, called your car count. Um, do you also understand you, your utilities and, and water bill? Cause that'll be really big, uh, for a car wash. And also, are there any taxes? Sometimes they levy taxes on those. Types of businesses. Um, but I've owned all three, uh, and I think all three have a place, maybe not for everybody, but to start. Hmm.

And I have to ask you, are there any boring businesses that you wanna mention that are getting you really excited right now?

Right now the businesses that are most exciting for me are probably, I really like buying professional services. Like right now I'm buying accounting firms. Typically just bookkeeping. I like the recurring revenue component of them. So every single month you pay somebody to do your books. I like that. Um, I also like businesses and professional services that do things like, uh, insurance. Uh, again, recurring revenue. It also has something that's, this is like very nerdy, but if any of these terms you guys don't know them, I think of money has a, money has its own language, right? You teach people this all day long. Money has its own language, and if you don't learn to speak it, you're certainly never going to get much of it. And so if you don't know words like recurring revenue, or what I was going to say is CapEx, um, which means capital expenditures, AKA the cost to build a car wash, um, things like insurance companies and accounting firms or bookkeeping have less of that. And so for somebody that doesn't have a bunch of cash to throw around, those businesses are kind of nice. So I've been playing a lot in the professional services realm right now.

Really cool. All right, so let's move on to some of your conventional wisdom for entrepreneurship. I saw you on Instagram and you're making so much noise in the digital space. Congratulations on all your influence that you're going on Instagram, especially in other channels. Uh, you talk about mirror selfies and basically you started taking mirror selfies every day with your to-dos. Can you tell us about that and how it helps you stay accountable?

Well, yeah, this one's a little bit funny. Um, so I've found that the most critical person to you will be that person you see in the mirror every day. Mm-hmm. And most people try to compete based on follower count or bank account. And I think the only account that actually matters is the one that stares right back at you. And so about maybe a year ago, I started realizing that I was letting my days slip away from me and that I was going along with whatever was happening as opposed to what I wanted to happen. And so I started posting a selfie each day and the selfie was just me in the mirror. And then it was my outline of things that I have going on that day. And the reason that I did it was a little bit of accountability. So am I actually going to do the thing I try to do, which is 1% better every day because compounding is magical. And, uh, and I thought maybe this is a good way to do it. People do it a lot for working out. Out, but I don't see very many people hold themselves accountable to what do they do with their time, their most precious commodity. Mm-hmm. And that's my idea.

Hmm.

It's really cute. You have another exercise you call the 1 in 60 rule. Can you tell us about that ritual and how it helps you stay on the right path?

So there's a saying in, um, among pilots that basically for every 1 degree that you go off course at any given time, at the end, you'll end up 60 miles away from the course of destination. And, um, and so when I heard about this, I started thinking about it from a daily action perspective. What if that's also true in the things we do each day? What if we have a plan, but every day we just get slightly moved off course, 1 degree off course? Would we also end up tens of miles or hundreds of miles away from where we wanted to be? And I think the answer that we all know inside is that, yeah, Yes, that actually is what happens. And so when I realized that, I, I like to put things into practice by putting them on my calendar. So I put on my calendar pretty much every week that I can, uh, a little time for me to sit down with a notebook and I talk about what are my outcomes that I want to have happen that week. And I ask myself a series of questions, and those questions lead me to hopefully steer myself straight each week. I think it's less important what questions you ask and how you do it and what day of the week that you do it, but that you have a pro practice where each week you're gonna course correct slightly for every degree that you get off. Hmm.

Young and Profits. This was an amazing episode with Codie Sanchez. Codie, thank you so much for joining us here on YAP. I really appreciated all your knowledge about contrarian investing and unconventional acquisitions, boring businesses. It was really, really interesting stuff. So I end my show with two questions. The first one is, what is one piece of actionable advice that our young improfiters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

The piece of advice I would give is that you don't actually need advice. You need to figure out your to-do list. Mm-hmm. And most people spend so much time listening to what other people say they should do with their lives when they know inside the things 1 through 10 they need to do to have a different outcome. And instead of trying to perfect, why don't you try to do? And I'll listen to my own advice on that too.

That's brilliant. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can be beyond financial.

The best deal I ever did was my partner. It was my husband. It's also the deal that was the most costly to me ever with my ex-husband. And so when you're still young and you have this option, be really careful who you tie your life life too, because whether that person is your significant other or that person is your business partner, or that person is a senior executive that you bring on, or somebody you decide to do a startup with, uh, your partner will be the single largest impact on the human that you become. And most people don't pay enough attention to that. So choose your partners carefully.

Mm, I love that. Well, Codie, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?

Oh, uh, contrarianthinking.co. Join the newsletter. That's hands down the best place. And then I'm Codie Sanchez, C-O-D-I-E, on all the, all the internet of things, whether you like Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. We're on every single one.

Amazing. Thank you so much.

Thank you. This is fun.