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Kids, they grow up so fast. One day they're taking their first steps and the next they don't fit into the tiny sneakers they took them in. You blink your eyes and their princess dress is two sizes too small. And their dinosaur backpack isn't cool anymore. But don't cry because they're growing up. Smile because you can profit off of it for real. There are a bunch of parents on depop looking for the stuff your kid just grew out of. Download depop to start selling shares and rent the Runway take off. But is it only a matter of time before they crash and high survival rates? Printing cash, that's one person's boring business, but another one's dream. We are thrilled to welcome to the show Cody Sanchez, founder and CEO of Contrarian Thinking and author of the best selling book Main Street Millionaire for her take on investing themes for both stocks and private companies and insights from her time putting money to work in Latin America. For Friday, December 19, it's Brumar Markets Daily and I'm Ann Barry. More market details to come, but first we are passionate here at Brew Markets about bringing to life why stocks move through the stories of the real operations they reflect. It's not just about the numbers, it's about the real businesses underneath them. We're passionate about busting through the jargon and steering clear of the slightly hysterical energy embraced by a lot of Market Market's coverage. And we always try to tie everything back to the most important business and global news in a way that feels relevant. So we were absolutely delighted and frankly, I was really touched to get this note from one listener who signed off as, quote, average mailman Joe. Now, Joe wrote, he says how much I love listening to this show daily. But he also wrote to express what he's wrestling with. Joe writes, quote, I'm a mailman and with this new world unfolding, where is the place in America for the average worker? Worker. I don't want to be a millionaire, but I do want the simple American dream. A house, a kid and a wife. But it seems so far out of reach and that I can never actually obtain that without having the want to overwork and the tenacity of an entrepreneur. Well, look, this is a real email we received from a real listener asking a real question that so many are struggling with. We are in a moment of in time where tech founder life is glamorized and it is fraught, in my opinion, with under reported failure. Over 90% of startups simply don't make it. We're at a time where meme stock mania, record prices and high volatility have yielded stories of millionaire day traders. But most of us want to just invest intelligently without having the time to follow every market move, every minute. So to help address Joe's question about how to move ahead, we invited to today's show Cody Sanchez, founder and CEO of Contrarian Thinking, a platform designed to empower workers from many different kinds of backgrounds to move from employees to business owners. Cody also authored the New York Times bestselling book Main Street Millionaire. And she founded Biz Scout, a technology platform to help entrepreneurs discover, evaluate, most importantly, buy small businesses. Now, Cody has a thesis on investing what she calls boring businesses. Although, spoiler alert, I was the CEO of one such business. So we talk about how we really find their stable cash flows actually pretty exciting. And we talk about how a similar thesis, a similar approach can be applied to public equity investing for folks who don't yet see a path to their own private business ownership. So stay with me for more on Cody Sanchez and for her take on how to address the concerns of Joe and millions like him. But first, a word from our sponsor, Vanguard. John, what do you know about bonds?
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That it's tough to pick a favorite.
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So many great actors, great impersonation. I meant bond markets. I love the bond movies too, of course. Well, bond markets are massive and sometimes can feel murky. But Vanguard bonds are institutional quality.
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The Lineup includes over 80 bond funds. They're actively managed by a 200 person global squad of sector specialists, analysts and traders.
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Vanguard specializes in a steady approach. They don't go all in on risky bets. Instead, they focus on reliability and consistency. And it's not always flashy, but it sets the standard for what dependable investing should look like.
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So if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for yourself@vanguard.com audio. That's vanguard.com audio all investing is subject to risk.
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Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor.
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And now my conversation with Cody Sanchez, founder and CEO of Contrarian Thinking. Cody Sanchez, Founder and CEO of Contrarian Thinking. You have built an empire, sort of literally, but also from a content and community perspective that's based around what you call boring businesses. So I've got a little confession to make. You have called laundromats your, quote, gateway drug because they have such low failure rates as businesses. I actually ran a commercial laundry business as a CEO, so I Love your pick.
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C
I had no idea. Usually everybody just says they want to own one and then they crazy. And five years ago maybe I was crazy and now I just saw like one of the former Dixie Chicks is starting a laundromat in New York. Laundromats seem to be cool. I don't know what happened.
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Yes, yes, Brooklyn's made them cool again with things like cocktails and board games and stuff. So I want to take your perspective on businesses like that because you talk about ones which have got great cash flow and apply them just a little bit to the public market. So sort of stock market flavor. What do you think of owning public company equivalents like a Cintas, which is uniforms, or a Vestas, formerly known as Aramark uniform. Do you think that there's a way to participate in that thesis outside of the private markets?
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Absolutely. I mean, these are the companies that make more money than anything else over the long term because they've been around forever. I mean, think about Procter and Gamble, a boring business in many ways since the beginning. Also a public company. I mean, you think about Warren Buffett for a long time was one of the largest, largest shareholders in mobile home parks. Public markets company that he had. You know, I think about one of the. The greats, Sam Walton, who arguably has had probably made more money for all of his family members than anybody besides Rockefeller, started as a grocery store, which I would deem a boring business as well, and now obviously has this huge empire. And by the way, that's public as well. So I think many of these companies. My argument is basically one thing, which is we should try to have companies that enduring and profitable. And it just makes sense to me that we are in the business of making money in companies and we have somehow lost that plot with Silicon Valley coming in and infusing all of this capital and this idea of a burn rate being normal. When you like take a step back, you think burning money, which is a derivative of burn rate that is not actually in fact that normal. And so there's so many ways to do it. I mean, some of my favorites, I start the book Main Street Millionaire talking about waste management. That's Wayne Hunga's company, also a public now public.
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That's right. Yeah.
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C
So if you can't buy the trash company, perhaps you buy part of it and you buy waste management. I'm not giving stock advice on one.
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In particular, but yeah, I mean, look, even self storage, right? We talk about. So we're here in Manhattan, you're in Austin at The moment we are here in studio and you walk around and you see these big windowless or fake windowed buildings, right? And you can actually participate in REITs in the space. There are public company ways to play it. You said something so interesting. Let's talk about Silicon Valley and its relevance to culture right now you've said multiple times 94% of startups fail. But we're in a moment where the cult of personality around Silicon Valley founders is off the charts, right? They're celebrities in their own right. How do you feel about getting heard and getting the boring business thesis out there in a moment in time where everyone just wants to talk about AI and tech burn rate or not.
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C
You know, I have always we call our company contrarian thinking. I mean that's what it says behind me right here. And, and I think that is because you cannot make unreasonable wealth doing reasonable things. You just, you can, otherwise it is in fact unreasonable. You cannot have, you know, an outlier type of life doing a normative thing. And I think we find with Silicon Valley that hype often does not equal actual cash flow and wealth creation for the many. So, you know, with AI, we'll probably have what happened in, in the Internet bubble happen in AI, which is nine out of the 10 companies will fail and the one, you know, to two companies that are left in the big sphere will make some people an exorbitant amount of money, but overall will not make the many a ton of money. And you know, we see this time and time again. And so I, I think it's really dangerous to chase hype. And over time the greats tell you not to do it. I mean, Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, sort of the goats of public market investing will tell you it is very hard over time to beat the market and don't ch chase hype. And so, and we invest in AI companies, but we invest in a diversified portfolio of AI companies. And I think, you know, this generation has been sold a lot of hype because it's easier to get. I mean, remember I don't know if you guys were tracking, there was a company called Cluly and, and I don't like to call out any founder because founding is hard building. But having a hype video that has nothing to do with what your company actually does, that actually in some ways makes the company look a little fraudulent and have a zero ethical compass has led to no surprise, led to a huge investment from a marquee name in Silicon Valley and then looks to be flaming out pretty spectacularly now. And so if you chase the hype, then you get burned by it too. And I just don't think it's necessary.
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Let's talk about some of those AI investments you've made, Cody, and then also talk about some of the more sort of boring or everyday ones. How much are you spending your time trying to get boring businesses, use tech tools, maybe get a little bit of AI infused into them to help them run better. How much are you talking to business owners about finding a way to do that, to compete?
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Yeah, that's exactly our strategy. We have a venture fund called Contrarian Thinking Capital and we are not chasing the next dating app, you know, or the next large, you know, LLM. Instead we invested in figure which was robots and AI powered robots. And one of the reasons for that was not, you know, to take over the world, but it was because we saw a warehouse deficiency in workers. And this repetitive motion that is in warehouses is a huge need in this country and we cannot fill the roles consistently enough. So it literally came from some of our warehouse businesses saying we're having a real problem with this. And then, you know, some of the other companies in our portfolio are, you know, Drillbit, which is powers, a lot of service companies. So these are, you know, if you think about it, you know, since one of our other portfolio companies, they're the largest to go back to our laundry days, they're the largest tech provider for, you know, full stack laundromats and dry cleaners. So you can have in one place everything from where you're, you know, where your purchasing happens to your inventory management, to the logistics for your fleet. And so these are really boring businesses. But that's a nine figure business now. And so I think this generation, you got a great opportunity here to invest in the picks and shovels and remember, that's usually where all the money is.
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Yeah, there's nothing boring about nine figures for everyone listening. Just to be super clear about that one, it's actually probably the most glamorous thing. Talk to us, to Cody, about personal finance. That's something a lot of people. You've got an enormous community, sort of 10 million folks plus of contrarian thinkers worldwide. You're a leading voice in helping people who don't necessarily have financial training. Think about ways to make wealth, preserve wealth. Talk about some of the founding pillars. If someone comes to you and says, where should I put my money first? Where do I start? What do you say to them?
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C
Yeah, we have a four step process. We talk about if you want to become wealthy and financially free. And it starts with this simply. One is learning the first stack. The first skill that you have that has an asymmetric upside, you can continue to ROI on it for the rest of your life is your skill set. So first you learn, and I don't obsess on earnings at all in the beginning. The next step is you earn. And so we have to optimize for you, asking for pay raises, increasing your skill stack, moving to more risk. The third step of the process is you invest. And that's what people are doing now. So you take those earnings, you invest them in the stock market, you invest them in small little partial parts of a business. And then the final stage that I think most people don't ever get to is ownership risk. And so we believe that if you don't take risk, you can never get rich. And maybe somebody else has figured this out, I haven't yet. But our generation is taking less risk than ever, which is scary almost across the board.
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A
Why is that, Cody? Why, why is that happening?
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C
There's lots of different theses about it. And one of them is that our parents generation, you know, they really tried to stabilize our generation and say like, no, no, take the safe route, go to college, you know, have more security. So some people blame the former generation for how they taught this generation. Other people blame the educational system which by and large prepares us to go into consulting or banking or corporate life as opposed to historically where it was quite normative to be an entrepreneur. That wasn't a sexy word. It was like I couldn't get employed anywhere else so I had to go. So I think it's a mixture of our parenting, our societal norms and our education. But you know, I was talking to one of the self made billionaire women in the world. Her name is Jenny just. And she's become a good friend. And we can actually track that the less risk you take, the less money you will have throughout your life on average. And that women take less risk than men do on average in their profession. And so we got to figure out how to change that.
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A
There's risk and then there is speculation. Right? There's a little bit of that sometimes tied into investing in startups. Back to your point, 94% fail. And so many people. I do angel investors, but I've invested in lots of other boring stuff first. And so what I often, I often turn down the opportunity to talk about angel investing because I think it should be the absolute last thing actually that folks do with their hard earned or hard invested cash. What's your perspective on that?
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C
My favorite mentor told me your first $500,000 in angel investing should be somebody else's because you're going to lose it.
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It's like movies. It's like investing in movies.
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C
Yeah. So I think it's an incredible thing to do. If you already have wealth and you're looking for some big swings that will probably whiff but one that could big. My rule of thumb is until you've made your first million dollars like you are a millionaire, you're self established. I don't think you should angel invest. That's just my rule. I think until that time you should be focusing on cash flowing assets because those you can eat, you know, you can't eat potential equity that's been marked up according to some unaudited portfolio. So that is my hard line. And you know, for instance, we have these venture funds, we don't take everyday retail investors. Why? I have 10 million of them. We get 120 million views. If I wanted to, we could put this out to the street and we could get a ton of investors in it. But we're very aggressive on making sure that people get financially stable before they start taking risk that is not in their control at all. They cannot affect the outcome, which is what angel investing in as opposed to, hey, I want to take a risk on buying part of a company that I work for. I want to take a risk on buying a company that I'm going to run. That's a different type of risk and you will learn from that in a way that angel investing is harder to learn from.
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Close your eyes.
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C
Exhale.
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Feel your body relax and let go.
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C
Of whatever you're carrying today.
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Well, I'm letting go of the worry.
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That I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts.
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Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe.
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C
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw.
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The discount they gave me on my first order. I. Oh sorry. Namaste.
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C
Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts. So good, so good, so good.
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Give big, save big with rack. Friday deals at Nordstrom Rack for a limited time, take an extra 40% off red tag clearance for a total Savings up to 75% off. Save on gifts for everyone on your list from brands like Vince Cole, Haan, Sam Edelman and more. All sales final and restrictions apply. The best stuff goes fast. So bring your gift list and your wish list to your nearest Nordstrom Rack. Today let's talk about some of the skills that help people bet on themselves and this point on education with respect to the choices folks make. Cody and the link to Risk, there's an interesting one. I, I had a look at a couple of trade school stocks. They are out there. There are some publicly traded trade schools and I compared the performance over the past two to five years versus some tech stocks and interestingly some of the trade schools outperformed some of the big tech stocks. If you were a young person today or someone thinking about how to be re educated or retrained, what's your thought on going to plumbing school or going to be an electrician or H Vacs versus you know, going to go into software or going to going to tech where historically the money really has been both as an employee and as a jumping off point to go into potentially outsized wealth as a founder.
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C
Well, I think, I think there will always be extreme polls. So you know, Pareto's principle says that you know, 20% of people will get the best jobs in the world. And so I think it would be foolish of me to say hey, if you are the, the best high performer in the world, one of the smartest people, you can get into the best schools and then you can go and you can get a job at Anthropic or you can get a job at some of these top AI companies. Yes, you should probably do that. You have an ability to make millions of dollars. We've seen the pay packages for some of these people. So like let's not, let's not Gaslight the top, top tier. But if you were for instance a good student, not the best student that existed, if you are a good worker, if you are smart, I think that you competing at that top 20% just like in acting, for instance, trying to think that you could be George Clooney if you're just a good actor, like are you outlier? So I think we have to ask ourselves those questions. And if not, if you are a hard worker who is competent and willing to do hard things for a continual amount of time, you can jump over some of these Silicon Valley jobs and certainly consulting and banking by doing a trade plus, I think the really important plus don't just go to trade school, go to trade school and you have to learn financial education, you have to learn how to do P and L and you have to learn how to lead. If you compare those two things together because of the inventory of businesses for sale plus the need for specialists inside of the Business I think this generation will be able to leapfrog the sort of corporate white collar jobs of the average graduate of college who by the way makes somewhere between $37,067,000 a year when they graduate college.
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A
Let's talk about appetite for and competition for the kinds of small businesses with the attractive characteristics that you've laid out. Cody. Now if you go back in time, these sorts of boring businesses you are looking at it was the individual entrepreneur going to, to buy and run their business private equity and this is my background and particularly some of the smaller private equity funds has very aggressively moved into trying to buy these businesses and then quote, roll them up where you go and buy lots of these different assets and then you find synergy. Once you've got a lot of them, you get one back office, get one set of tech support for example. Do you find that these industries are now becoming very heavily picked over? Is there enough to go around?
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C
Yeah, it's a great question. I think a lot of people are talking on let's say X or Twitter about this phenomenon and there is a bit, there's a large verbal movement around it. But let me tell you what I'm seeing. I mean we run like one of if not the now largest business buying and selling marketplaces in the country, Biscout. It's 58,000 listings on it, 120,000 connections of buyers and sellers and we have so many businesses that never get a seller who reach out to them still that is qualified and that's there are lots of people that like kind of halfway in go to buy a business. But if you have a port, if you have your profile filled out, if you have pre qualification from a loan provider which is not very difficult to get depending on your background and if you have like your LinkedIn and a few things linked you'll get a response from sellers and they are looking for you. So the math simply says that although we are talking about this a lot as a society, the actual doing is still incredibly low. And so I do not think this is picked over and, and that's because we have the data that shows that it's not. Now the one caveat I'll make to it is it is, it is hard. You know, once you don't, you don't know how to, to do a deal process, you haven't run due diligence before. You know these are big words that need educational training on it. That's why our and thinking exists to do that. But I don't think it is Actually complex as much as it is hard work like this is not rocket science to learn how to analyze a P L of a laundromat. It's really not.
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A
Well, let's, let's just segue a little bit Cody, from that into talking about global opportunity. Because when I look at your background, you've actually got a ton of experience in the Latin American markets. If you go and check out your LinkedIn profile, you are head of Latin America investments at First Trust until 2019. You were there for over five years. Years before that you're at State Street Blue chip financial name. What do you think of the LATAM market, the Latin America market right now? I'm very curious to know.
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C
Yeah, well it depends hugely by country, sort of as it always has down south. But what I would say is like Latin America to me always moves in, in a, in a rhythm. And you know, the countries that I have liked to do business in and continue to like to do business in are Chile is an incredible market to do business in, so is Brazil. Actually the, the bond market in both of those markets, if you can get comfortable with localized risk, currency risk and having to hedge has always been quite lucrative. I invested in a lot of Chilean bonds back in, in the day. Obviously I'm, I'm, I'm still out on Argentina because I've been burned there way too many times. Mexico as a market really depends so intensely on the presidency and who the ruling party is in this current moment. Not a great business environment in Mexico still I think that could pot potentially change. But the interesting part about these markets are, you know, Chile for instance, financial center of Latin America still is highly stable and so investing in that region, if you can do it localized and you can get used to currency is, is still something I do to this day.
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A
So how much would you say to folks, look overseas, look at international investing opportunities. You, you built some boring businesses, you've got your US portfolio. Where do you think that the Latin American or you know, Asian play comes.
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C
Into a bit little this from my perspective. I think most people who are listening should have a diversified portfolio in the stock market and you need to have some emerging markets inside of it because the risk dynamic is just different. So that that return helps you with U.S. market volatility and just standard portfolio theory. So you know, when we sold it, I think the average person in the US probably over complicates what they do from a stock investing. And, and I was similar. I don't think you're going to beat most hedge funds or serious investors. And the way to do it is to under pick a few stocks that you like to learn about, have those be your outliers, maybe put additional capital in them because you want to learn something about those. But most people, in my opinion, should have a diversified 60, 40, 40, 60, 70, 30, depending on your time horizon to retirement. Shut up, leave it alone and don't move it. Which is why I started my career at, at Vanguard and went to State street and spent most of it in passive index investing. Because I think public markets are super hard to outperform in unless you're your, you know, derivatives, hedging currency. And even then they're quite hard. And instead I'm a big believer in keep your costs as low as humanly possible, watch intensely what your financial advisor and trading platform cost you and pay attention to diversification of risk and dollar tax, tax harvesting. And that's it.
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A
Let's finish by talking some more about you, Cody. Just tell us the story of how you go from doing exactly what you described. Working at Vanguard, working in these sorts of environments, working Latin America, to going all in on contrarian thinking and taking that risk, betting on yourself in the way that you are so passionate about, about telling other people to do well.
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C
The number one reason was, you know, in finance, and you probably know this from your time there, I just looked down the hall and I, I didn't like who I saw at the end of it sitting in the corner office. You know, I saw multiple marriages going sideways. I saw kind of an obsession with materialism. I saw sort of a zero sum game. I saw no building of anything and mostly just arbitraging somebody else's loss or win. And I kind of thought, is this the type of life that I want? We're not actually building anything here. And, and you could argue, and you know, I did at the time that hey, we build investments that allow people to sort of passively grow their wealth over time and beat inflation. And that is true, but in this instance I felt like it had become more predatory and it just wasn't a fit for me. And the lifestyle in like sort of higher finance at that time was, I wonder if it's still like this. You would know in Manhattan, but I mean, it was, it was like, you know, there's strip clubs and second wives and Lamborghinis and Ferraris in the garages. And I just find all of that to be completely uninteresting. And so I remember explicitly looking at the CEO of one of the companies, then he was like, you know, well, this could be you. Like, is this what you want next? And I was like, not if it's like you. So I left and started investing in my own companies, building my own companies up until finally I realized there's actually a way to make a lot of money in private equity without taking advantage.
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A
And what was the first business you invested in outside that sort of traditional Wall street sphere? What was the first one?
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C
Well, the very. Like, I invested in a bunch of sort of businesses while I was still in finance. There was one called Selling Self. It was a Latin American sort of cross border consulting agency. I, I invested in another one called Threads Refined, which is a fashion styling marketplace. But the one that I consider sort of my real first, because it was a boring business straight out was a laundromat. And I did that with a partner who kind of knew more about it. I knew nothing about that industry. And I think that's a good way to start. By the way I invested, I put up the capital, which was not much money for me at the time. So whatever that is for you, I put up a reasonable amount of money with somebody who had already played the game in that space. I had a controlling interest in it, but a lot of oversight of it. And he was a good operator. And so we did a couple more deals together before we sold it. And so I think that is one way to start is like, how can you take these tiny bets, sort of like you would for your first house or your first apartment. You don't start with the mansion. You might start with like a studio that you buy, and then it's the townhouse and then it's the house. And so that's how I finally got to this big portfolio was stair stepping my way, as opposed to traditionally raising capital and going and doing a big, you know, private equity fund.
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A
And Cody, if you could do it all again, any, any battle wounds, any scars from that journey, you say to people, just don't do it. Save yourself the trouble.
- [28:42]
C
Yes. I mean, how long you got? But I think I, I think that's another reason I'm pretty passionate about teaching the people that we advise and, and consult with is we say, steal my scars, get my homework. Because, because that first $500,000 loss is real. And one of the benefits I got was I was a pretty institutional investor, so I got to learn on other people's dimes for a decade before I really put real, real capital on the line. And so there's three lessons, I think. One, you need what I call an Investment committee, we call that in finance. But in, in our world, you can have your investment committee, you could have your deal room. You need a group of people around a table, you need wet blankets who are going to tell you that's a terrible deal. And you need some risk takers who say we should do that. The, the second thing that you need, if you don't have it, you'll lose money, and I certainly did, is you need an industry expert. So, like, don't do a deal unless you have somebody else in that industry that can help you pick it apart. That's why we have something called our subject matter experts. Sort of the same in private equity. You'd sort of parachute them in to look at a deal. Right. And then the final thing that you need if you're going to do a deal, in my opinion, is you need a deal team. So you've got to get comfortable with your attorney and your accountant so that they can help you do the right kind of deal deal. And you can make a lot of money or lose a lot of money by the way you structure the deal from a tax perspective. So the way that we've built our, if you want to call it academy or school, is really with that idea, can we steal private equities? Three things they have that allow them to make way more money than we do and not lose millions like I have many times.
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A
Cody Sanchez, founder and CEO of Contrarian Thinking. Please come back. You've got a lot going on. You've got so much wisdom to share. And for folks, do check out Big Deal, which is Cody's podcast. Do check out Cody's book, There's Main Street Millionaire. I think you have a new book out as well, Cody. Is that right?
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C
About to. It's not out yet, but this year it will be. Or this upcoming year.
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A
Got it. So we'll keep our eyes out for that, we'll read it and then hopefully you'll come back and talk to us about some of the new insights you share in that. Thanks for joining.
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C
Thank you.
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A
Well, huge thanks to Cody Sanchez for joining us. And since we all want financial literacy to start young, I just wanted to flag that. Cody has recently launched a holiday workbook designed to teach, teach kids how to be entrepreneurial. Also, I've got to hand it to Cody. Just fantastic energy. We love to actually try and get our guests here in studio as much as possible because there's just such a different conversation when you're in person. It's why John and I film in studio every day. But just even there, coming in over zoom just is great energy, great conversation. So we're very, very appreciative for that. Well, the markets have closed. We're heading into the weekend. And it's the right moment, John, to ask if anything caught your eye.
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B
I want to introduce a new segment on the show. I'm calling a stock about which we talked. Where is it now?
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A
Good use of about which. There's nothing like good grammar to get the juices blooming.
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C
Thank you.
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B
I was also trying to get stock and talk to Ryan. Today's inaugural stock Rent the Runway, the designer clothing subscription service. We discussed how the company is losing market share to Nuuly, the closed rental arm of Urban Outfitters. And now RTR had a rough Runway ahead. Well, shares are up over 100% over the last month.
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A
Yeah. John was so cheeky. You are so cheeky to pick this one because you know that I'm such a Eeyore about this one. Well, yes, the company announced earnings last week. And one of the highlights that the market sat up and paid attention to is the fact that the business had a recapitalization that reduced debt from 319 million to 120 million. So basically 200 million bucks wiped in terms of the debt that was hanging over this business. There was also a little bit of a cash infusion that came from the private equity firms Nexus and Story 3 that were sitting behind this restructuring, giving the business the chance to use its money to invest in growth versus just paying down its debt and using it for interest payments. There's a little bit more money thrown in there to help with working capital. Look here. Here is why I think it's very cheeky that you put this one in here. First of all, that announcement about the recap actually came out after the last earnings, so it wasn't captured or focused on in the last earnings call. But this has been news that's been out there for a while. I think the market's only really just paying attention because it's actually sort of, you know, bolted on to the earnings.
- [32:50]
C
And.
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And although I'm very, very glad, I love the founder story here, I really love what this company did in terms of proving that it was possible to get people to rent clothing, which at the time that this company was founded, I think it was 08 or 09, was not an obvious construct, but it just hasn't gotten its unit economics to work. So I look at this, unfortunately as a stay of execution. I think the private equity firms supporting this business did not want to go through the headache of a restructuring. They wanted to keep some optionality to salvage something here. And the way that they chose to do it was try sort of get rid of some of this debt, convert it into equity and as a result give this company what I think is his last shot. I think if it cannot get it right now, I do not see patience on this continuing. So I'm GLAD it's up 100% over the last month. It also had some operating green shoots. There's been a real focus on trying to get the profitability up, a real focus on returning to growth, which Rent the Runway has struggled with. But newly, slightly different positioning, newly slightly less luxury actually. But frankly showing it can work. But it can work if you've got more physical locations, I. E. Urban outfitter stores that you can go and pluck your inventory from as opposed to Rent the Runway having this massive sort of postage cost and mailing cost because they don't have that network of stores ultimately acting like a distributed network of warehouses. So I'm really glad you brought this up because it is fun to go back and see how some of these theses are playing out or not. At the moment you'd say it's up 100. I've been wrong to be such a downer on it, but I just think it's on borrowed time. So we are to keep watching this one and we would love actually to get your feedback on stocks that we've perhaps talked about here on the show. And you want to get an update, you want to know, where is it now? So right on in. That's it for today's Brew Markets Daily.
- [34:37]
B
Brew Markets Daily is hosted by Anne Barry and produced by John Carteau, Tarka Delatif and Emily Milian. Our technical director is Lonnie Fiskus and the president of Morning Brew Inc. Is Devin Emery. We'd love to hear from you if you have any feedback or one of those companies you want to hear a follow up on on email us at.
- [34:50]
A
BrewMarketShoworning Bukom Wake up on Monday with the Morning Brew newsletter and tune in to Neil and Toby on Morning Brew Daily. We will see you back here on Monday. Have a fantastic weekend. Monday, same time, same place.
- [35:08]
C
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A
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Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us.
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C
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