Codie A. Sanchez

Contrarian Thinking

Opportunity is found in the disconnect between narrative and the truth. 

CT is where hundreds of thousands of investors, entrepreneurs, and contrarians come to learn about unconventional ways to diversify income, generate wealth, and increase profits. 

Join here
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https://contrarianthinking.biz/li

Founder - Investor - Writer

Unconventional Acquisitions

We buy, sell and invest in small businesses and teach others how to get into the ownership seat.

Co-Founder

Entourage Effect Capital

EEC Advisory Board Member

EEC is one of the first Growth Equity firms in the cannabis industry, we’ve invested $150 million in cannabis since 2014

Managing Director - Partner

First Trust

I head the Latin America & US Offshore Investment Business, providing investments and market strategy to enable some of the worlds leading pensions, institutions and advisors to reach their investment goals.  We've built a business from the ground up, to one of the fastest growing firms in LatAm.

Head of Latin America Investments

State Street

Worked in Latin America and the US with Fortune 500 Companies, pensions, sovereign wealth funds, central banks, endowments, and foundations to manage their investment portfolios. We navigated some treacherous regulations and industry changes to raise billions in previously uncovered markets.

Director Institutional Sales

Goldman Sachs

Investment Associate

Vanguard

ETF Consultant & Distribution Specialist

The Arizona Republic

In-depth Investigative Reporter Mexico

Investing millions in Main St businesses & teaching you how to own the rest | HoldCo, VC fund, Founder

On a mission to create financially free and free-thinking humans.

I founded a media company called Contrarian Thinking that teaches people to think critically and cashflow unconventionally with boring businesses.

Our newsletter has over 900,000 weekly readers, here → contrarianthinking.biz/li

Our community has taught 2,000+ members biz buying, biz growing, and doing deals. 

This is how I got here:

• Got my degree in PR & Journalism from ASU's Honors School (honored to be partying mostly); MBA from Georgetown University; Ph.D. from Fundacao Gestulio Vargas.

• Started as a journalist at the Mexico border. I witnessed horrors there that made me realize money = power to change the world. I wanted to speak the language of freedom ($$), so I went to finance.

• Joined Vanguard ETFs in 2008 (wild timing). Then: Goldman Sachs→ SSGA → LatAm investments for First Trust → MD/Partner at the largest cannabis private equity firms.

Then, candidly, I got tired of the rules and trappings of the traditional finance world. I went a little rogue, and not everyone always liked that.

Now, I value experience over degrees.
Betting on myself over making $$$ for other people.
Main Street over Wall Street.

My mission is less suits, more boots. Meaning: we the people holding the power… and the purse strings.

🔗Join 500,000+ others who get our free newsletter: contrarianthinking.biz/li
🔗YouTube: @CodieSanchezCT
🔗Instagram: @codiesanchez
🔗Twitter: @Codie_Sanchez
🔗Learn how to buy a business (& get support doing it): contrarianthinking.co/our-courses
🔗Weekly business-buying newsletter Main Street Minute: contrarianthinking.biz/minute-li

Founder

We help free minds and build bank accounts.

Dear chronic people pleasers, 
 
5 reminders as you to learn to be disliked: 
 
1. People criticize you to hide from the real work: having to change themselves. You winning is a mirror most people can't handle. 
 
2. You'll never look back and wish you made more nameless humans on the internet like you. Never give first-row opinions to those who paid for nosebleed seats. 
 
3. Never take advice from someone who hasn't achieved the thing they're advising about. Listen, sure. But filter advice viciously. 
 
4. Our brains are trained to focus on the negative, aka survive. People question me online all the time — about my ethnicity, my career, my body. It's all good, it'll happen to you too. Always remember, you're the one doing sh*t not talking sh*t. 
 
5. Choose your f*cks carefully. You’ll never be everything to everyone anyway.

↓ ↓ ↓

♻️ Repost if this resonated
💥 Follow if you need more of this energy

Investing millions in Main St businesses & teaching you how to own the rest | HoldCo, VC fund, Founder | NYT best-selling author

You can flatter & pander.

Or you can become ACTUALLY likable:

• Do what you say you’re going to do
• Show your results, not your intentions
• Your job isn’t done until THE job is done
• Communicate - less words, more meaning
• Bring solutions, not complaints
• Do the dirty work
• Don’t be boring

The truth:

People like competence.

So does money.

(Feel free to share if this resonates♻️)

What they told me about partnerships was bullsh*t. The Disney movies got it wrong. 
 
It’s not knights on horses and damsels in distress. 
 
Instead, it’s two animals, defining territories, testing boundaries, pushing one another. 
 
I wish they would have told the truth. That I’d need to step up, be more, set lines, move some, and allow him to be the wild, strong, hard-edged independent man he is. 
 
I wish they would have told him he’d have to back down, lift me up, and allow me to be the spark, the fluid, mercurial, creative woman I am. And sometimes... be late to sh*t because timelines are more like suggestions right 😉 
 
Half the problem today is we try to tame one another. 
 
We want men who have six-packs, can throw us up against a wall, leaders of men, and build empires... but we want them to “want” to wash the dishes and fold their underwear properly. 
 
Men want women who are sexy, strong, make their own $$, well-dressed, actually like to listen about golf scores but also, who cook them apple pie like their mommies. Extra points if you do it in aprons. 
 
The TRUTH... 
 
You gotta choose. Do you want the mommy, do you want the docile tame non-threatening man, or do you want the edges? 
 
Turns out only edges allow you to sharpen one another. 
 
So I’ll choose edges, adventures, questions, and creation any day. 
 
We’ve never been given anything the easy way… but man is it more satisfying on the other side of two humans who do the work.

It’s a tragedy how many hate what they do.

There is nothing I love more than solving big problems.

Playing the game of business.

Having big conversations.

Meeting smart people.

You deserve to do work that makes you feel the same way.

Feel free to repost or follow if you’re a psychopath like me who’s willing to publicly proclaim how much you love working😂

Best part of your business? The people.

Worst part? The people.

Business horror story time:

I hired an exec, paid her $200k a year + $200k in bonus.

She secretly launches 2 side businesses, tries to take our clients to one, and was secretly launching a competing product all within the first 6 months.

Yikes.

We found out, let her go (obviously), but I had to chuckle because she bankrupted her last company... and then changed her name since she now claims it was a success.

Moral of the story...

If you're in business, expect it.

Protect your house because your biggest costs will always be wrong people trusted.

Just me... or have you also had business horror stories?

You need ownership.

But here’s why the future belongs to business buyers:

Building = years with no profit.
Buying = cashflow from day one.

When you buy a business, you're not gambling on potential. You're getting proven profits, existing customers, and someone else's 10,000 hours of work... Made yours overnight.

The wealth-building playbook has changed.

Old way: Build a startup, pray for funding, burn cash, hope to be the 1 in 100 that succeeds.

New way: Buy a business, use existing cashflow, own your time.

Less sexy? Maybe. But it works.

What type of business is smart to buy? You can use the SOWS shorthand:

S - Stale (little to no innovation)
O - Old (been around forever)
W - Weak (fragmented competition)
S - Simple (services people need daily)

These businesses are:
• Too small for PE firms..
• Not right for competitors..
• But the Goldilocks fit for someone like you.

And the timing is right on this opportunity:

→ Baby boomers are in the process of retiring en masse: 75M predicted by 2030
→ Millions of them are small business owners with no succession plan.
→ So what if you buying their business grants them retirement?

You can buy a business WITHOUT:
• Risking your savings
• Sacrificing your lifestyle
• Having previous ownership experience

Is it easy? No.
Is it worth it? I say yes.

If you want to learn the fundamentals (and find out if biz-buying is worth it for YOU)…

Then here’s your invitation to my short, jam-packed, free biz-discovery deep dive on May 7th.

💥 Register here → https://lnkd.in/ePbkK2Xb

Note: this is a live class, and spots will fill up fast :)

A reminder that it’s ok to rise a lil earlier and grind a lil harder...

The most expensive thing you’ll ever pay for is not what you think...

It's the Isolation Tax:

Behavioral scientists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder once ran an experiment on train commuters.

They asked passengers to predict whether they’d enjoy their commute more if they kept to themselves or talked to a stranger.

Most assumed silence would be better. I probably would, too.

But when they actually tried it?

The people who held conversations with fellow passengers reported feeling significantly happier than those who stayed quiet.

This paradox is what we, as a society, are now dealing with at scale.

We’ve built a world that defaults to isolation, even when real connection makes us happier and probably more wealthy. We increasingly live a “remote life” amid a complete restructuring of human interaction.

And we’re paying for it.

We engineered the world for comfort. No lines, no friction, no small talk, no interaction. Everything you need, delivered in a click. But this comes at a cost:

• It costs us the opportunities that didn’t happen because we weren’t in the room.

• It costs us insights we never heard because we muted the conversation.

• It costs us the ideas, friendships, and laughs we simply missed out on.

They sold us on isolation, and we bought it.

The bill might not be in dollars — but it may damn well be the most expensive thing we ever pay for...

PS: This is an excerpt from my newsletter, which you can get in your inbox weekly (free) here → https://lnkd.in/e__8gyVX

I don’t want to be liked. 
I want to be so good, I’m respected. 
 
Repeat that to yourself when it gets hard and the hard requires toughness. 
 
Don’t be easy and likable. 
 
Be righteous in what you do and believe.

Don’t be less for other people. 

Don’t let them bend you or break you. 
 
Don’t be a doormat walked upon, be a pointed nail... 
 
One that holds things together and one that others would never tread on.

💥 Feel free to repost or follow if you need more of this energy

An entire generation has been misled about startups and wealth.

Entrepreneurship is hard.

You'll lose money, sleep, time, and at the end of the day... It’s statistically likely that you’ll still fail.

Business IS risk.
You SHOULD expect to fail.
You can never FULLY eliminate risk.

But...

There is 1 path to entrepreneurship that increases your chance of success:

Acquisition.

Buying a business, THEN building it.

Let’s look at the failure rates of the most common acquisition loan…

Default rate for SBA 7(a) loans:
• 2021 best year: 1.02%
• 2008 worst year: 24.7%

Compare to the failure rate of startups:
• 23% fail within 1 year
• 48% fail after 5 years
• 65% fail after 10 years

So why do acquisitions fail LESS?

3 main reasons:

1. The bank won’t give you a loan if the business is clearly a bad idea financially.

2. Cashflow covers a multitude of sins. Even unhealthy acquired biz's can generate cash.

3. Lindy Effect: the longer it has succeeded, the more likely it is to continue succeeding.

But the fact is, despite lower failure rates…

Acquisitions can still be catastrophic failures.

Why?

It often boils down to 1 of 3 issues:

1. It was a risky/bad deal to begin with.
2. The deal price and/or terms set up the buyer for failure.
3. Bad cash management (this is the #1 reason ANY business fails)

Don’t want your acquisition to fail?

Simple. Don’t make one of those mistakes.

Piece of cake, right? 😉

If you want to learn the fundamentals of buying a business, then here’s your invitation to my short, jam-packed, free biz-discovery deep dive on May 7th.

💥 Register here → https://lnkd.in/ePbkK2Xb

(But FYI: this is a live virtual class, so spots will fill up fast)

37 money-making basics the rich have memorized:

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If you're hungry to learn the language of money, try this free guide → https://lnkd.in/eKWu-NhY

Money Making Basics:

Quitting 1 job, to take on 21 jobs...

7 tips to manage time as an entrepreneur:

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💥 Follow for more like this → Codie A. Sanchez

7 tips to manage your time:

If you want to get rich, master negotiation. 
 
13 negotiation tips from 15yrs in business: 
 
1. See things from the balcony 
 
This is something I learned from my first boss at State Street, Yang Butler. We get too caught up in the day-to-day - the battle, not the war. Remove yourself from all the chaos and see everything from on high. 
 
2. Search the shadows 
 
Often, the person across the table isn't the real decision-maker. Powerful forces lurk in the shadows. It's your job to find who they are. 
 
3. Dive to the bottom of the iceberg 
 
Most problems are like icebergs. What we see is see the tip poking above the surface. Dive to the CORE problem beneath, or you'll sink like the Titanic. 
 
4. Study the language of your opponent 
 
Understanding their language is understanding their desires. But 93% of communication is non-verbal. The rest lies in tone and body language. 
 
5. Do your homework 
 
The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Do you understand the history of those that you negotiate against? Because it is likely to repeat itself. 
 
6. Build a golden bridge 
 
"Surround them on three sides, leaving one side open, to show them a way to life. Show them a way to life so that they will not be in the mood to fight to the death." –Sun Tzu 
 
7. Write their victory speech 
 
Get in their head: If they "win" this negotiation, what will they brag about?Show that what you want is actually a win for them. 
 
8. The Emotion Canyon 
 
Don't raise your voice. Don't fire off that angry email. Don't let 1 impulsive moment ruin the gentle work of closing a deal. Keep a canyon between emotion & reaction. 
 
9. Appear to need it less 
 
It’s not he who wants it less that wins. It’s he who appears to need it less. Be willing to walk away, and watch the tables turn. 
 
10. Relax into the silence 
 
We hate awkward silences. We'll say anything to fill the void.. even reveal key information. So when things go quiet, embrace it. Smile. Relax your body. Sip some water. 
 
11. Say yes as much as possible 
 
This doesn't mean give in to everything. Say "yes" even when you don't. Make concessions for non-monetary terms they care more about than you do. 
 
12. Respect costs you nothing 
 
But it means everything to your opponent. Call out their strengths. Acknowledge their position. Empathize with them. You might just get a yes.

13. Negotiation is a SKILL.

LEARN IT. Knowing how to negotiate will serve you in salary talks, personal relationships, but most of all... IN DEALS.

You want to learn all the steps of dealmaking so you can buy your own small business someday?

💥 Come to my live training session on Wednesday. Save your spot here → https://lnkd.in/ePbkK2Xb

You will miss nights out, birthdays, and many a party you don’t want to.

People will say you are “too good,” “never come,” or “too into your own thing.”

It will feel lonely and hard.

I can promise though, if you keep going for longer than you thought and harder than is normal, it will be worth it.

You aren’t boring.

It's just building season.

↓

Follow me Codie A. Sanchez if you need a buddy to build alongside your crazy a$$ 😉

This (legal) scam has shut down some of the world's biggest brands...

Toys R Us
Joann Fabric
Payless Shoes
J Crew
Sears

Their bankruptcies were all due to 1 thing:

Private equity asset stripping.

Here's how it works:

First: a PE firm buys a company using borrowed billions.

They make the purchased company take on the debt – and often buy the company's land, then start charging them rent. For example, Toys R Us took on $5B in debt overnight.

Then: Cut costs. Lay off workers, cut back on inventory, stop reinvesting in the business.

The PE owners then pay themselves massive amounts after selling the assets.

Finally: the company files for bankruptcy.

When your favorite stores vanish overnight, ask yourself... Who made money on the way down?

(PS: If this enrages you like it does me... follow me Codie A. Sanchez for more on buying & building Main Street businesses. We're bringing back a nation of owners.)

If you need some time back...

Use the SODA Framework:

↓ ↓ ↓

But if you need to find out the who, how, or what holding your business back...

Take a look at my upcoming (in-person) scaling workshop I'm hosting with my top CEOs → https://lnkd.in/eFvJHYwa

SODA Framework

We’ve completely forgotten why we're entrepreneurs.

When did we become a group of vitamin-D-deprived, Allbird-wearing, alternative-milk-drinking, extreme PowerPointers?

Many of us got soft.

We don’t climb mountains, we only take risks with other people’s money, we sit behind keyboards bragging about how ChatGPT did all the work.

What a terrible thing to strive for.

How can you make the most money by employing the fewest people and doing the least amount of work? How can you get mailbox money? Or a fast exit so you can tweet about it?

The secret:

Entrepreneurs don’t exist just for a bunch of zero’s and some big exit, but because we are crazy people willing things into very existence.

We are supposed to be the next generation of explorers, risk-takers, adrenaline junkies. Addicts to the masochistic mission of achievement and ownership.

The feeling of being so damn unemployable your only option is owner. The inability to sleep because of visions so big they pull you from bed in the dead of the night. Dreams so futuristic people laugh when you tell them.

Those are the entrepreneurs I admire.

My husband and I have a saying: “Protect those who can’t, cast aside those who won’t, enable those who want.”

Here’s to all of you who want so badly your wants become realities.

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💥 Follow me Codie A. Sanchez for more

How to teach your people to prioritize.

The CEE Frame:

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💥 Follow me Codie A. Sanchez if this kind of info is helpful to you

The CEE Frame

What's the difference between an "employee" vs "team member"?

From my interview with Dave Ramsey.

What a treat to sit down with this man.

Even more fascinating to visit his studio and see how his ($300M/year!!) business operates. Turns out, he practices what he preaches on most things...

You can listen to our full conversation here → https://lnkd.in/e5Zaj7nW

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