My First Million Wiki

Codie Sanchez

8 min read

Codie Sanchez

The most interesting thing about Codie Sanchez is not what she teaches people to buy. It is what she chose to leave behind.

She had a PhD from a Brazilian university, an MBA from Georgetown, and a career that took her from Goldman Sachs to State Street, where she oversaw $580 billion in institutional investments. At First Trust, she built a billion-dollar Latin American asset management firm. By any standard metric, she had won the game.

Then she started buying laundromats.

The Risk-Averse Entrepreneur

There is a popular narrative about entrepreneurs that involves burning bridges, taking massive risks, and diving headfirst into the unknown. Codie Sanchez did the opposite. She bought businesses while still collecting a corporate paycheck.

“I made millions before I ever really ran my own thing by myself,” she explained on My First Million (ep. 512, 31:00). “I was actually so scared to leave the big corporate canopy that I bought businesses while I was still working for somebody else.”

This is not the founder mythology we are used to hearing. It is more honest. The average person considering entrepreneurship does not want to bet everything on a single idea. They want optionality. They want to test the waters before jumping in. Sanchez provides a blueprint for that quieter path.

The Three Pillars

Sanchez has built something unusual: a business model where the parts reinforce each other in ways that are hard to replicate.

Pillar One: Media. Her newsletter, Contrarian Thinking, reaches over one million readers weekly. Her combined social media following exceeds 11 million. She generates roughly 100 million impressions per month. This is not a side project. It is distribution infrastructure.

Pillar Two: Holding Company. Unconventional Acquisitions owns 27 or more businesses, all below $10 million in EBITDA. These are the boring businesses she preaches about - laundromats, car washes, RV parks, painting companies, roofing operations.

Pillar Three: VC Fund. Codie Ventures invests in deals that come through the content funnel.

The genius is in how these interact. She talks about buying businesses, which attracts deal flow. She uses her audience to help grow those businesses. She uses her community as a pool of potential buyers when she exits. Each piece feeds the others.

Gateway Drug Businesses

Sanchez has a phrase for laundromats: gateway drug businesses. They are simple enough for a beginner to understand, but not necessarily a path to massive wealth unless you scale.

The economics are illuminating. “The average laundromat makes somewhere around 500,000 a year at 10 to 15% margins,” she noted (ep. 512, 38:00). That translates to 75,000 in annual profit. Respectable, but not life-changing for a single location.

The real insight is where the money comes from. Walk-in customers feed coins into machines. But the serious operators build Wash and Fold delivery services on top of the laundromat infrastructure. That is where margin expansion happens. The physical location becomes a hub for a service business.

This pattern repeats across her portfolio. The obvious business model is rarely the actual business model. Car washes look like car washes, but after Mr. Car Wash went public, the multiples on car wash acquisitions spiked. Her best deal, she said, was an RV park where the real value came from land appreciation rather than camping fees.

The SOWS Framework

Sanchez has a framework for evaluating acquisition targets. She looks for businesses that are:

  • Stale - Companies that have not evolved in years
  • Old - Owners approaching retirement with no succession plan
  • Weak - Struggling but fixable with better operations
  • Simple - Business models a newcomer can understand

These are not venture-scale opportunities. They are something more reliable: cash flow machines that nobody glamorous wants to touch.

The Real Risk

The counterintuitive danger in small business acquisition is not overpaying. It is running out of cash.

“The biggest issue with buying small businesses is that you run out of cash because they either lied to you… or they didn’t actually track their finances very well,” Sanchez warned (ep. 512, 44:15).

Her worst deal was a bookkeeping business - ironic, given that the seller misrepresented the books. She was lied to and stolen from. The lesson: even experienced operators get burned. Due diligence matters, but it does not eliminate risk entirely.

The Grifter Question

Success in the “teach people to make money” space invites skepticism. Sanchez has faced accusations of being a business guru whose real business is selling courses.

Her defense is straightforward: she makes more money from physical businesses than from community products or courses. “The second that I make way more money with communities courses I will be shouting it… we built the best thing ever and you’re welcome,” she said (ep. 512, 1:00:00).

The distinction she draws is between her approach and the Tai Lopez aesthetic - flashy cars and get-rich-quick promises. Her content focuses on the boring work. Service businesses. Cash flow. Operations. The unsexy middle of business ownership where most of the actual value creation happens.

Andrew Wilkinson offered an external perspective on this: “I love Codie Sanchez and I love Nick Huber. I think what they’re advocating is basically, ‘Look, don’t go and work for someone else when you can create your own job.’” (Best & Worst Businesses ep., 39:21)

Wilkinson identified the core tension in the sweaty startups movement: “There’s a fundamental question: are you buying your own job or are you buying a business? If the business returns more than the cost of the owner’s salary, then I’d say that’s great.”

The Journalism Connection

Before the MBAs and the hedge funds and the laundromats, Sanchez was a journalist. She graduated early from Arizona State with a journalism degree. She won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for print journalism, covering violence in Juarez, Mexico.

This background explains something about her content strategy. She knows how to tell stories. She knows how to find the interesting angle. When she talks about boring businesses, she makes them sound fascinating because she understands narrative structure.

It also explains her content volume. She treats social media like a newsroom, publishing constantly across platforms, testing what resonates, following the data.

The Angel Investing Critique

In an earlier My First Million appearance, Sanchez offered a contrarian take on angel investing: it is too fun.

“One of the biggest things I have a problem with angel investing is it’s too fun. It’s like gambling, right? Like you get excited about the founders and guess what - founders are charismatic. That’s how they raise millions of dollars.” (ep. 176)

The logic is uncomfortable but sound. The qualities that make a founder good at fundraising - charisma, vision, storytelling - are not the same qualities that make a business good at generating returns. Excitement is a warning sign, not a buying signal.

This is the throughline in her philosophy. Distrust excitement. Embrace boredom. The less fun something sounds, the better the odds might be.

The Content Flywheel

Sanchez generates approximately 100 million impressions per month across platforms. This is not vanity metrics. It is a deal-sourcing machine.

When you talk publicly about buying certain types of businesses, people who own those businesses reach out. Sellers find you instead of you finding them. This changes the negotiating dynamic. It also means better deal flow - you are seeing opportunities that never hit the open market.

Her community serves a similar function. Members looking to buy businesses can partner on deals. Members looking to sell have a built-in pool of qualified buyers. The information asymmetry that normally plagues small business transactions gets reduced when everyone reads the same newsletter.

What She Studied

One detail from her My First Million appearance stands out. Sanchez studies political movements and think tanks as a hobby. She mentioned following the American Enterprise Institute and the work of Arthur Brooks.

This is an unusual interest for someone in the boring business space. It suggests she thinks about influence and idea propagation at a structural level. How do movements grow? How do ideas become mainstream? How do you shift the Overton window on what kinds of businesses are worth owning?

Her success in making laundromats and car washes seem appealing is, in a sense, a political achievement. She shifted the conversation.

The Digital vs. Physical Debate

Shaan Puri has acknowledged the validity of Sanchez’s path while expressing a personal preference for digital businesses. “I’d rather be in the situation of being able to choose to spend my time doing it the other way,” he said, while adding he would “ask Nick Huber and Codie Sanchez which one they think is better” (Q&A ep. 457, 01:15).

This captures something true about the boring business movement. It is not for everyone. Managing physical locations with employees and equipment involves a different kind of work than building software. Some people thrive in that environment. Others would be miserable.

The contribution Sanchez has made is expanding the menu of options. For the person who would hate building an app but would love running a local service company, she provides a roadmap.

Codie Sanchez has appeared on My First Million multiple times, including as a guest co-host on episode 512 (October 2023) when Sam Parr was on paternity leave, and as a guest on episode 176 (April 2021) discussing distressed asset acquisitions.

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