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Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
Codie Sanchez: How to Get Rich Buying a Business No One Wants | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
00:57:25
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- [00:03]
Jackie
Yeah, fam.
- [00:04]
Sponsor Voice
As you may know, I'm a total fashionista. I love clothing. It is my favorite way to express myself. I love putting together outfits. It is one of my favorite hobbies. Fashion. I just love it. And when it comes to buying my clothes, there's really only one place I shop.
- [00:19]
Jackie
For the last three or four years.
- [00:20]
Sponsor Voice
I literally have bought all of my clothes from Revolve. Whether it's buying a gown for a wedding, work clothes, going out, dancing clothes, bikinis for vacations, vacation outfits. All of my clothes are from Revolve. And Revolve is so amazing because they've got so many brands. They've got 1200 different brands from really established labels to up and coming brands. And I just love discovering these new brands, trying these clothes. It's always so high quality. Their shipping is just so fast. They've got overnight shipping, two day shipping. It's one of the best high quality stores that I know of that actually provides quick shipping. So if you need something in a pinch, Revolve is definitely your go to. Whether it's a weekend away or a big night out or a style refresh, your dream wardrobe is just one click away. Head to Revolve.com Profiting and shop MyEdit to take 15% off your first order. With code profiting. That's fast two day shipping, easy returns. It's literally the only place you need to shop from. It's the only place that I shop from. That's Revolve.com profiting to shop my favorites and get 15% off your first order or with code profiting. This offer ends November 9th. So happy shopping and get to it. Hey young and profiters. You know how everyone's obsessed with building the next big startup, grinding 247 and hoping it takes off. In this yap classic episode, we challenge that entire narrative. My good friend Cody Sanchez believes that real wealth often comes from buying simple, overlooked businesses that quietly make money every single day. Coty is a legendary investor and founder of Contrarian Thinking. She's built a multi million dollar empire by acquiring boring businesses like laundromats, car washes or vending routes and then turning them into steady cash machines. In this conversation, Cody broke down how to spot undervalued businesses, finance deals creatively even if you don't have a ton of cash and 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 Cody Sanchez.
- [02:38]
Jackie
Cody, thank you so much for being here today on Young and Profiting Podcast. Welcome to the show.
- [02:42]
Cody Sanchez
Thanks. I'm excited to be here finally.
- [02:44]
Jackie
You were 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 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. 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 that field?
- [03:23]
Cody Sanchez
Idealism, really. You know, you're young and you want to save the world, but you haven't even figured out your own life. And I think that was me. And so 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 going to be the one to fix it. 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 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. And so at that time I was in school, I graduated about a year early from Harvard of the west, really, AKA Arizona State. And I was looking for what my purpose was going to be in life and I needed to make some money because 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 avoid 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 going to become very jaded, very young.
- [04:55]
Jackie
So then from my understanding, you went into the finance world. You ended up working at Vanguard Golden Sachs. You, 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?
- [05:16]
Cody Sanchez
It's amazing how fast 12 years flashes, which is something only old people say, which apparently I'm nearing. But the beautiful part about working in corporate America is you learn on somebody else's dime that I'm a huge advocate for failing, often without the ability to bankrupt yourself. These days there's so much entrepreneurship porn about how you have to sleep on somebody's couch and you've got to do it the hard way. And if you weren't homeless for a minute, you're never going to 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.
- [06:11]
Jackie
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 area in the world in terms of how you're investing as an everyday person now, is that right?
- [06:31]
Cody Sanchez
Absolutely. I mean, I was a young idiot, just like the rest of us. 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 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 three to six 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. One of the companies I was at, Vanguard, they told us, who knows if that's true, that they spent about a hundred thousand dollars on the training of 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, 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. 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 and L is. And that's actually all hard to learn while you're on the rocket ship.
- [08:14]
Jackie
I completely agree with you and I've seen that for myself. So we both started in corporate and for me I was 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?
- [08:48]
Cody Sanchez
Yeah, I mean, I've had my, I've had my ass grabbed more times than I could count. Finance for sure. That was 12 years ago. So could you imagine like 20 or 30? I mean, it must have just been no wonder those women are kind of hard. I remember when I was coming up and there were a few, very few women above me in finance, you know, I was always like, oh, I don't want to turn into her. She seems kind of Mean and mad. And I kind of get why, actually, because there was always sort of. There was allowed to be. It wasn't a real rule, but it was kind of there. 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 savannah 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 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 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. Oh, God, there it is. But on the same vein, 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 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 the fact that for a long time, men have been in charge of. Of much. 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.
- [10:50]
Jackie
I love that perspective. 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 supportive in the corporate world as well. Okay, so let's talk about Contrarian Thinking. I really want to 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 in terms of gaining financial freedom through freedom through this approach?
- [11:26]
Cody Sanchez
It started in 2020 when what I really wanted to do is I wanted humans to question any of the narratives that were being thrown at them 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. And my understanding and a baseline from starting in Latin America was the difference between me last name Sanchez and all these other last name Sanchez is, was really that I had some economic freedom. I was born like lower middle class in the US and so 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 as 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 three areas of our life. And that is a life's pursuit that I think is worthy.
- [13:27]
Jackie
Interesting. And then in terms of contrarian investing, from my understanding, 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 what you mean by contrarian investments?
- [13:47]
Cody Sanchez
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 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 what I 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 next GPT launch and the, you know, my new startup that's raised $50 million from these venture capitalists, this is, this is the altar of wit 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 two out of 10 have to hit a hundred X to wipe out the fact that the other eight largely lost. And so I was like, huh, if that's the truth, then we have eight founders in that mix that spent on average three to 10 years hating their life, sleeping on floors, 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 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, and that business has been in existence for more than three years, in some cases 20 years. And you know that that business has done X for the past three or 20 years, the likelihood of it can to continue to do X for the next three 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 that you can succeed. And so that's the way we think about contrarian investing right now. I think the trade is in these boring everyday businesses, but it's really finding that difference between the noise and the narrative.
- [16:12]
Jackie
I am so excited for this conversation, Cody, because even as me, I'm an entrepreneur. My 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 going to be really excited about this topic because nobody's really talking about this, even though it's bubbling up with you sort of leading the charge, honestly, so.
- [16:41]
Cody Sanchez
Okay, can I interrupt for one second? Of course. There's two words you said there that I'm so particular on these days. Passive income. 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 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. And you've seen them too. 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're 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 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 some time, always involved, basically, no matter what. But you could stack lots of them because 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 and operate or run. So it only takes you a few hours a week, but there will be an upfront cost. All right, that's. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. That's my rant on passive income.
- [18:30]
Jackie
I appreciate you differentiating that and 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 is 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.
- [19:01]
Cody Sanchez
Totally. You know, my father said something that always sticks with me, which he was like, 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 your living room on your couch in the absolute darkness and wondered, how are you going to figure any of this out? And until you've had that moment where you. You just are not sure, you are living in a cloud of uncertainty, and that 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 like, can we ready people for that? But tell them that it's so worth it. Just like you're gonna feel sore after you do a workout, but you're gonna be glad you did it.
- [19:59]
Jackie
I totally agree with you, Cody.
- [20:04]
Sponsor Voice
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- [21:46]
Jackie
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Jackie
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Sponsor Voice
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- [24:16]
Jackie
So let's talk about this idea of having multiple income streams. I've been running this podcast for five 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 Hormozy on Layla, her mosey. 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 suggest you have multiple income streams. Do you want to give your perspective on what you think about this topic?
- [24:56]
Cody Sanchez
Yeah. Well, I'm friends with Alex and Layla, so I love them. I think there's multiple things. One, I just 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, they were like, I have a $250,000 job, I'm working at a company, but I really want to focus on 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. 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'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 8020 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 three more weeks this summer with my kids, or I just want to go on one more vacation than 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 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? Is 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.
- [27:35]
Jackie
Exactly. We talk about that a lot on this show. Like defining your rich life. We had Ramit Sadie on, and he was talking about defining your rich life, what that means to you. Okay. Unconventional acquisitions. So you have this program, and by the end of it, you hope that these people have 12 different income streams after one 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 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?
- [28:17]
Cody Sanchez
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 want to exit your company, or supplements your expenses. And so I want to 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 at my job, but I never have to. I can have my fuck you fund that's funded from something else. 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. And we screen people because not everybody should do this. And so we screen them to kind of make sure.
- [29:05]
Jackie
Are you.
- [29:06]
Cody Sanchez
Are you sure you're ready for this? And what I 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 going to add a wash and fold service and then I'm going to 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, but you're being really smart in acquiring your new profit centers. That's something I wish I learned earlier because I always thought you had to grow organically. Like, I've got to go and I've got to 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 again and again. But the only caveat I would say there is that I do think you need to focus on skills early as opposed to income. So I have a model that says learn, earn, invest. Most people go, I want to invest. I want to 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 one year trial 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 two things, then I want you to use that money and I want you to invest it in something or invest your time or expertise. That's kind of how I push people to start thinking about diversification of revenue lines.
- [31:08]
Jackie
That seems like a really, really smart framework. Something that I want to 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?
- [31:21]
Cody Sanchez
I was counting them the other day. I think there's six 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 want to buy a business with $0, you can buy a business basically by using seller financing. So you can say, hey, I'd really love to buy your podcast. You don't want to 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 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. But if 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 can do that same thing with profit share. You could be like, I'm not going to 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, what about if you are a business right now and 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 Cody's got some money. I hear Alex and Layla are flush with cash. So I'm going to go ask them for some money. I'm going to buy your business. They're going to take a part of it, I'm going to 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 under with COVID What if I reached out to my other podcast friends that aren't going to 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 going to let them have 10% of those products for the next three years and the rest goes to me and I'll run it all, don't worry about it. And so we could do it. We could do an asset purchase. And so when the people come into the group, what I say to them is it really depends on what type of purchase you're going to do. You could buy a business tomorrow with very little risk. If you do a revenue share, a profit share, an asset sale, there's no skin in the game. And if you go bankrupt or the company fails or anything, you're not going to go bankrupt, you're going to be fine. Now, if you're going to 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 going to go under. 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. And if you have some excess cash so that no deal can ever go sideways enough and ruin what your momentum you already have, you could buy a business. But I'm really conservative again because 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.
- [34:51]
Jackie
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, four other really smart people helping me build my company. And I go so much further with my team members. So it's like a win win for both parties.
- [35:18]
Cody Sanchez
Exactly. And then what you want them 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 what's really fun is for somebody like you, you also have a different type of purchase you can do, which is audience. So lots of people like you do sponsorship deals or ad deals and that's great. 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 want to do distributing equity deal with you. I'm not going to take any cash up front or I'm going to take a decreased cash rate. And instead, I don't know, I love this, this notebook company. And so notebook company, I want to put you as the sponsor for all of our podcasts or for some of our podcasts. And that would typically cost you a hundred thousand dollars in ad spend. Instead of that, you're going to give me a hundred thousand dollars 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.
- [36:34]
Jackie
Oh, that's really creative. And I have a podcast network, so I will definitely keep that in mind. Can you give us 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?
- [36:50]
Cody Sanchez
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. 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 going to 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 Alex and Layla about how do we do more transactions without a bunch of cash up front? Then technically you don't have to have cash. You could just do a deal using sweat equity, Rev share, or the fact There are these 11 million small businesses and they're looking for homes like these people need to sell. 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. 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 he listened to one of my things. And then on our next Monday call, because we do a call every Monday, he got on and he's like, you know, I went to my boss, essentially, and I sat him down and I said, hey, I don't know if you were ever thinking about this, but if you ever were going to retire from the business or think about selling the business, 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 of. 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. Like, 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, two days a week, but I don't want to work five. You could just use the profits from the business to buy it from me. 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 want to just shut it, because it's my baby, too.
- [39:23]
Jackie
Yeah. Seller financing is something that we really don't think about often. So it's very interesting. And something else to your point right now is finding a highly motivated 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.
- [39:41]
Cody Sanchez
It's so true. I think you never sell anyone of 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. 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 five years or less. 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 you're still excited. And there's all this room for growth. And you have a cool curve, the opposite. And what we're looking for is somebody who's probably over 50. They've run the business for five years or more. The business has very marginal growth, 3 to 5% growth a year. They've been running this business in an area that's pretty commoditized. You know, think roofing companies, landscaping, accounting. 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 disaster. They call them like the five D's of, of selling. And if one of those is happening, then you are primed and ready as a motivated seller.
- [41:07]
Jackie
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?
- [41:16]
Cody Sanchez
I think there's three things you need to get 80% of the way to a deal and the devil is in the 20%. But if you want to get 80% of the way to figuring out what a business is worth, and maybe should you buy it, you need these three 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 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 and 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 it really did. So you want to match those two up. And then the third thing 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 matters. So let's do an example of like a car wash. Your lease really matters. Or the cost of the real estate really matters because that's one of your biggest expenses. The utilities really matter because electricity and water are one of your biggest expenses. So you want to find out what is the other 20% that is going to drive 80% of the success of your purchase.
- [42:35]
Jackie
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?
- [42:48]
Cody Sanchez
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 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. And so I like really simple businesses because then it's easy for me to understand. I think most deals go wrong because 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. 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 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.
- [44:09]
Jackie
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
- [44:15]
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- [47:48]
Jackie
Something else that I've heard you say before is you've got to 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 I believe in buying.
- [48:08]
Cody Sanchez
Companies based on realities, not hopes and dreams. That's the difference really if you think about it. Private Equity vs 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. That means the investor is not going to 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 because I anticipated that and I just cash flow on that bad boy for some amount of time. And that's really the difference between the two.
- [49:01]
Jackie
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?
- [49:09]
Cody Sanchez
I always call it the fax machine test. Every time I see a fax machine, I get all tingly. Because 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 boarded up 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 nothing systematized. Right. You know, a lot of these guys have their tax returns in paper folders scatter 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 three M's, which basically talks about. It talks about markets, marketing, and 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, you're a baby, you're a toddler. 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 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. What are all the different markets we're not serving that we could get revenue lines on? 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.
- [51:27]
Jackie
This information is so good. So I want to 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. Because I, I personally want to learn more.
- [51:39]
Cody Sanchez
Well, if you can spell unconventional acquisitions, which is actually harder than you think, there's a lot of I's in that. Then you can go to unconventional acquisitions.com and there's a free blog I think everybody should get on. It's called the Boring Business Brief. And every week we basically break down a different idea of business to buy a deal. Done, lessons learned, that one's really good. And then if you also go to ContrarianThinking Co recession, there's a really good piece that we have. I think you download it. It's basically all the ways to make money on buying businesses, starting businesses in a recession. Both of those, I think are really useful.
- [52:16]
Jackie
Amazing. So we'll stick those links in the show notes, guys. All right, so I want to do a quick fire segment. We've got about 10 minutes left of the interview and I do want to get some of your like day to day conventional wisdom at the end. So right now I want to do a quick fire segment. I'm going to 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.
- [52:43]
Cody Sanchez
Laundromat. Well, how about this? I bought my first laundromat for 100k, made me 67k a year. Then ended up buying two more laundromats, rolling those up. And we sold that for close to a million bucks. You can buy a laundromat typically for less than $100,000, all the way up to a million dollars. 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 deal, but a good one for a person who's just like, I want to do this for the first time ever without a big huge.
- [53:22]
Jackie
Business and what are the cons of a laundromat? Like, what do we have to look out for?
- [53:26]
Cody Sanchez
The biggest con, I think is that you can't typically make like tens of millions of dollars with a laundromat. You can make a couple hundred k to maybe a million or two. The second con is the customer that you're serving can be challenging. You've been to laundromats before. They're typically not in the nicest neighborhoods. You typically have, you know, machinery that can get broken into. I haven't really had any vandalized, but that can happen. So your customer segment is not Tiffany's. This is a different customer segment. So you have to be thoughtful on that. And then the other thing about laundromats that's just worth noting is 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 get an appraisal.
- [54:15]
Jackie
Got it. Okay, so the next one is vending machines. So I'd love to understand the pros and the cons of buying this type of business.
- [54:23]
Cody Sanchez
Vending machines are great because they're very, is very cheap business to start or buy. 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 vending, the problem with vending machines is that you can't sell very much out of one location. So they're not very efficient. 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 one. So there are some companies that have scaled vending machines, but not very many. And then the third issue with vending machine businesses I think is it's basically like a mini real estate place. 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 and there's a bunch of technology now that 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.
- [55:48]
Jackie
So interesting. Okay, the last one is car washes. What are the pros and cons?
- [55:54]
Cody Sanchez
So if I had to look at these three in order, I'd say vending machine, easiest business, least cost, probably the least profitable. These are all averages. Second business would be laundromats. Medium cost, medium expenses, medium revenue. The car washes most expensive, potentially the highest revenue of the three. And so the good part about car wash is 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, you can add multiple bays to them. You can offer 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 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 got. You just look at the location, location, location. Do you have at least 10,000 cars that drive by per day? That's called your car count. Do you also understand your utilities and water bill? Because that'll be really big for a car wash. And also, are there any taxes? Sometimes they levy taxes on those types of of businesses. But I've owned all three and I think all three have a place, maybe not for everybody, but to start.
- [57:21]
Jackie
And I have to ask you, are there any boring businesses that you want to mention that are getting you really excited right now?
- [57:27]
Cody Sanchez
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 reoccurring revenue component of them. So every single month you pay somebody to do your books. I like that. I also like businesses and professional services that do things like insurance, again, reoccurring 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 its own language. 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 reoccurring revenue or what I was going to say is cap X, which means capital expenditures, AKA the cost to build a car wash, 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.
- [58:29]
Jackie
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, and other channels. 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?
- [58:54]
Cody Sanchez
So I've found that the most critical person to you will be that person you see in the mirror every day. And most people try to compete based on follower count or a bank account. And I think the only account that actually matters is the one that stares right back at you. 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 I thought maybe this is a good way to do it. People do it a lot for working out, but I don't see very many people hold themselves accountable to what do they do with their time, their most precious commodity? And that's my idea.
- [59:51]
Jackie
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?
- [59:59]
Cody Sanchez
So there's a saying among pilots that basically, for every one 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 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 one 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 yes, that actually is what happens. And so when I realized that 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 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 going to course correct slightly for every degree that you get off.
- [61:07]
Jackie
Young and profits. This was an amazing episode with Cody Sanchez. Cody, thank you so much for joining us here on yap. I really appreciated all your knowledge about contrarian investing, 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 and profits can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?
- [61:33]
Cody Sanchez
You know what it actually is? The piece of advice I would give is that you don't actually need advice. You need to figure out your to do list. 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.
- [61:59]
Jackie
I think that's brilliant. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can be beyond financial.
- [62:04]
Cody Sanchez
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. So when you're still young and you have this option, be really careful who you tie your life to. 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, 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.
- [62:41]
Jackie
I love that. Well, Cody, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?
- [62:46]
Cody Sanchez
Contrarianthinking co join the newsletter that's hands down the best place. And then I'm Cody 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.
- [62:58]
Sponsor Voice
Amazing.
- [62:59]
Jackie
Thank you so much.
- [63:00]
Cody Sanchez
Thank you. This is fun. Sa.