#120 The Best Investment Advice No One Listens To

0:00If you want to make your first or next million fast, you do not obsess over savings. I mean, the rich, they actually think completely different than us. They have better decision-making, and it's not always sexy or sophisticated, but it is a secret. So today, we're going to give you their secret in this market today. Welcome back to The Big Deal Podcast. I'm Cody Sanchez. Let's dive in. I literally only have three investments I worry about. That's it. My business, mutual funds, and equity and private businesses. I don't do single stocks. I don't mess around with gold. I don't try to speculate on Bitcoin.

0:34And I do not need the hottest stock tip from your actually broke nephew who is day trading on Robinhood. I do not worry about missing out on deals at all. Let me teach you the smartest things I know about investing in less than 25 minutes. Lessons I learned at Goldman Sachs, State Street, Vanguard, so you can steal my homework and escape all the misery that went into working in those three companies. If you're emotional about your money, you're going to lose, full stop. And in investing, there are no called strikes. You don't have to swing at everything. You don't need to be right often. You just need to be right where it matters.

1:08That's what Buffett said, greatest investor of our time. So since taking control of Berkshire Hathaway, if you don't know Buffett's backstory in 1965, he basically doubled his money continuously. And at roughly a 20 % rate per year, he would count compound. So that is twice the S &P 500. Over time, that difference, it ain't small. It's actually everything. That's probably how Buffett turned his few pennies into roughly 5.5 million percent return. The S &P, about 39 ,000 percent. So same country, same markets, totally different mindset and way to go about it. Now let's look at where we're going in 2026.

1:47AI stocks are trading at record valuations. NVIDIA alone is now worth more than all major U.S. and Canadian banks combined. Debt, government and personal is exploding, people are borrowing not just to invest, but to live. Inflation has made a lot of people's lifestyles really expensive, including mine. So credit filled the gap. I was just on the line today with one of our members at Contrarian Thinking. He owns a restaurant. His food costs have gone up 300 % in the last 18 months. And on top of that, the market is more concentrated than ever in just like a few big companies. So of course, investors, anybody trying to make money, we don't feel great.

2:23And you probably shouldn't. One of the clearest warning signs right now is leverage, so debt. That means more stocks are being bought with other people's money, borrowed money, than at almost any point in modern history. Margin debt, which is especially scary, that's where you can buy things on somebody else's balance sheet, has outpaced the growth of the whole market for decades, meaning a lot of the stuff that's happening with today's huge valuation is actually built on borrowed cash, money people don't even have. Now, Buffett, he don't like it. He's warned about this repeatedly. He's pretty blunt, actually.

2:59He's like, anything can happen in markets, which is why you never borrow money against securities. I agree. I think fuck stocks, actually. Leverage doesn't magnify you. It magnifies all your mistakes. So when too much debt floods the market, prices stop reflecting reality. They get artificially inflated and then volatility, so upside, downside movement increases. and we're seeing that right now. When I was at Wall Street, you would measure something called the VIX and it's Wall Street's, you could call it a fear gauge and it basically signals how investors feel, good, bad, scared, freaked out.

3:32And right now, that thing is spiking, meaning people are freaked out. So what does Buffett and the smartest investors in the world, what do they do when things get overheated? Well, let me tell you what he doesn't do, stare at stock prices at all. He ignores them. He looks at businesses. One of his first rules is so simple. If you're just looking at the price, you're not investing, you're speculating. Real investing, it actually starts with the business itself, how it makes money, how durable it is, is what he would say. And whether it'll still matter 10 years from now, like a lot of these AI startups, they're going to be like, gone, right?

4:05Every overheated market follows the same script. People stop buying businesses and start flipping tickers. They don't care about what the company is worth. They care what somebody else might pay for it tomorrow. It's called the next idiot theory. And that's how bubbles form. I think we're in one right now. And if you haven't studied the underlying businesses that you're looking at, you have no idea whether a stock is expensive or cheap. Sorry, I'm going to stop talking about stocks here in a second. My takeaway is simply this. Most people, especially if they're talking to you right now, are giving you a lot of opinions.

4:35You don't need more opinions on things to invest in. You don't need a next hot deal. You need fewer decisions. And the edge really in investing isn't speed. It's things you don't fucking do or restraint. So the best investors win by not being active all the time, being selective. They think, they learn. And when they act, they act with conviction. So I want to think about it this way. The thing is wealthy people think differently. The wealthiest people in the world, they get their riches, not from trading their time for money, but by becoming either fractional, so part of, or sole owners of cash flowing businesses.

5:07You know, it's not going to be your Elons or your Jeff Bezos's, although in many ways those do too. These are business owners like the Koch brothers, some of the richest family in the world off of things like toilet paper, Wayne Hazinga, garbage trucks. And what you might not know is there is a groundswell of people quietly building their wealth by finding, buying, investing in Main Street reliable businesses. No glitz, all cash flow. because I want you to remember one of my favorite quotes from Sam Altman, although he kind of does look like a lizard. He scares me slightly. He is also the founder of ChatGPT.

5:40He says, the biggest economic misunderstanding of my childhood was that people get rich from high salaries. Though there are some exceptions, almost no one in the history of the Forbes list has gotten there with a salary. You get rich by owning things. So then the question is like, how do you do that? Well, you learn how to buy parts of businesses privately. You don't even have to leave your job to do it. In fact, I didn't. Building ownership isn't one skill. Scott Adams would say, rest in peace, that it is a broad stack of skills. You need to know how to find the right opportunities or even see them.

6:12You got to know how to look at the numbers and see if they make sense. You got to figure out how to get the money to buy it or whether you should put your money in. And then you got to negotiate terms. And if you own the business outright, you operate it. If you don't, you don't worry about that. And then eventually, the cool part is like you'll sell down the road, potentially getting a big exit after you're done with this business. And so like, this is an essential skill today. If you're in a W-2, inflation is eating away at your wages while AI is eating away at your role. You know, negotiating equity, profit sharing, ownership stakes, you got to do it.

6:46It's really important. And if you're looking to buy your first business, you need to learn how to do all of these things. And you need to know that often the growth comes from not within, but from acquiring competitors in your business, from doing deals with other people in complementary businesses. Buffett would say, volatility is not risk. Risk is not knowing what you're doing, which you're like, no shit. The truth is like, we don't have to worry so much about the market when we're in private markets, because the businesses that we're investing in, they're not day trading assets. And here's why this matters so much right now today.

7:24Look at the job market. It's like musical chairs. Even if you still got a chair, these aren't your grandpa's sturdy oak rockers, right? They're$2.99 folding chairs from Alibaba, which I can tell you firsthand, that's not a good thing. One algorithm change, one AI update, one earnings miss, and they collapse. So how do you diversify your income streams? You own lots of things. I think we are in an asset ownership race with AI right now in a way that we don't even realize. Buying businesses and owning parts of businesses will be like getting on the last lifeboat out of the Titanic. You will either be the person who owns the farm or you'll be the donkey that the farmer told, don't worry, that tractor is not gonna take your job.

8:05Donkeys are just gonna be in charge of the tractors and the tractors are gonna do all the work and the donkeys are gonna hang out. Except for a lot of us, it is going to take over. I was on Wall Street and I was watching all my peers chase fractional shares of massive corporations they didn't control. Meanwhile, I saw these guys over here called Private Equity, really smart guys, and they were snapping up small, profitable local businesses because they realized what I didn't at the time was that nothing beats cash flow. If you go invest in the stock market, do you ever get a huge check from your stock market investments each week?

8:37No. So that realization led me to change a lot of my life. I invested. I built up cash flow. My cash flow replaced my income. I would have kept that job forever, except my boss was a dick. I don't know if you can ever relate. So I quit my job. I started buying more unsexy businesses. My first was a laundromat. And I started stacking ownership because it doesn't have to be glamorous, even though we see it that way. You just stop asking for permission to get ahead and you make the moves that will actually get you ahead. And that shift changed everything in my life. That's actually why I started Mainstream Millionaire Live.

9:11It's a way to affordably give you a concentrated education in deal-making that took me decades to get. So it's three days, virtual event, where you'll learn how to buy businesses, how to get part of businesses. And you'll steal basically the things they teach you at Harvard Business School, Wharton, and Stanford, but you'll do it three days with live deep dives, fireside chats, workshops, where we actually do deals live. And I love it because day one is all about deal sourcing. How do you find businesses to buy and invest in? How do you even invest in private market? Day two is financing and negotiation.

9:45So how do you get the right deal on that business or that deal that you're going to do? And day three is ownership and scaling. How do you grow that business to its full potential? And what you get are not, you know, it's not rah-rah. This isn't just, you know, here to make you feel good. It's to actually do deals live. In three days, you'll know more than most people in finance do about doing deals. Will it make you an expert overnight? No. But could you go and do partial deals afterwards? Yeah. In fact, a bunch of people have. because the purpose of this event is you leave ready to become an owner.

10:16Okay, what would Buffett say about all this? Well, Buffett would also say build durable advantages. So he talks about the key to having a durable advantage is you as a human or you as a business owner, you need moats. So that might mean like brands, cost advantages, skills, assets that you own, networks that you have. These are things that protect you and your profits for decades. Okay, there's this woman called Nuit Long, and she had been in big tech for most of her career, but she eventually realized relying on one paycheck felt risky to her. She didn't have a business background, but she started exploring these small businesses she could buy.

10:52And eventually she landed on pack and ship stores. Simple, physical, not that expensive. Money flows up front. It's not going away anytime soon. If anything, it's growing. So she didn't want to run the stores herself. She partnered with a friend and a spouse. They split the responsibilities according to what they were good at. So Nguyen and her partner were finance, systems, tech, pricing. Their business partner ran operations, staffing, and customer work. So that collaboration led them to scale without her needing to quit her W-2. They've bought six pack-and-ship stores across Texas, building a seven-figure portfolio while she used her salary to do it.

11:29So here are the big takeaways from her journey. Learn before you buy. Early on, they also missed like great deals because they didn't know what to look for. We call this turning on your reticular activating system. It's your ability to see things around you in a different way. Paying for expert guidance and mentoring, that accelerated her ability to spot winners. So your first investment is always going to be knowledge. Also, what's wild is one good business can teach you what 10 bad ones can't initially. Nuit and her partners had decided to build a pack and ship store from scratch. Nightmare.

11:58I told her not to do it. So they bought a profitable one on top of it, tapped into the knowledge of the sellers, which actually made their startup more profitable. Also, I would say like one of the biggest lessons overall is don't wait for perfect timing. We call this the 50 % rule. If you're 50 % certain on something, can you get to 51 % and then make the jump? So after that first acquisition, Nuit did not move slow. Over the span of one year, she actually bought more and more. And her mentality was simple. You don't take a break from opportunities just to focus on operations unless you absolutely have to.

12:31And I think that's right. And so when opportunity knocks, the question is like, how do you answer every time? The other thing that's cool is when you buy businesses, people sell for reasons way beyond just profit. Her and her partners figured this out because we were working through some of her deals. And she was like, if I understood the seller motive more beyond just price, then I can pay less. So the seller sometimes just wants to stop. They want upside. They might want their legacy to continue. you. They might need to trust you. That's what you have to realize about doing a deal. It's not always the person who has the most cash that wins.

13:03One of the other things I think she's told me is being an owner can make you better at your W-2 job. So instead of distracting, since her business is actually run by her partners, not her, it's sharpened her skills. Now she really thinks like an owner. She has what we call owner mentality. The other thing that's really important though is when you own the business, you got to stay in your own lane. So Nuit and her partners actually divided the tasks like we talked about. And that meant that nobody was a bottleneck to the business. So she could actually continue to grow and scale because there were clear lanes.

13:34One could do daily operations. One could do, you know, focusing on new ideas. One could manage staff and customers. I think one of the smartest decisions that she did early on was that she wasn't quitting her W-2. She worked for a big, huge company. It wasn't a startup where she had to do a million hours a week and she didn't really like her job. And so from the beginning, that constraint was important because it forced her to focus on businesses that she could do while she stayed in. I love this story because it's so real. Warren Buffett advice is really important, but this is advice from a person who's just like you and me, who was really scared about the riskiness of pegging her financial future to this one AI tech company income stream.

14:16And then we go back to Charlie Munger, who if you don't know, that's Warren Buffett's partner. Charlie was obsessed on simple business models and I am too. I mean, he would say things like, take a simple idea and take it seriously. Most people dismiss simple businesses because they look boring, but Munger actually made all his billions in the boring. You know, it's not just Munger. Like I have a good friend, Donald, who came and spoke at MSM Live and he said something really insightful, like the commas and zeros don't matter. He's dealt with restructuring at the federal government level. So that's$37 trillion of debt, which like, ah.

14:47And then he's done deals as small as a couple hundred thousand dollars. And it doesn't matter. It's all the same. In other words, whether you're negotiating this huge media takeover or trying to put a couple K into a small business, the outcomes are the same. They're just percentage wise different. Or as Donald put it, there are a lot of great markets that you may not want to be in. There are a lot of great companies that aren't great deals. There are a lot of great deals that aren't great deals for you. But size isn't the thing that matters. That's also what men say, isn't it? Number eight, Munger on why easy businesses win.

15:18Munger would say something like, I like businesses where you don't have to be a genius to run them. If a business requires you to be brilliant to survive, it's actually a pretty shitty business. You wanna have businesses that can tolerate your risks. I think risks get broken down into three buckets. In fact, at MSM Live, Donald was talking about this. Product risk, market risk, and execution risk. When you present a deal to somebody like Donald, One of our members presented a land and boat tour company.

16:11Hilton for this day.

16:40podcast. Terms and conditions apply. And it was located on a remote island. On the surface, it kind of aligned with what they wanted to do. But underneath, it had a lot of risks. Like you have to have had a captain's license required. That's execution risk. It had really high insurance premiums. That's a product risk. Had revenue tied to cruise ship traffic. That's a market risk. And on top of all of those, Ferrari risk, which is the bright, shiny object risk that creeps into deals of all sizes. You say that you want a 400K Ferrari and finally have enough money to buy one, but if somebody offered you that exact same 400K Ferrari, identical performance, identical build, but removed the Ferrari logo and sold it to you for 200K, would you still want it just as much?

17:24If yes, great. But if that gives you even one moment of pause, think long and hard about why you're buying it because all we care about is the cash flow here at the business, It's not trying to be sexy. Buffett obsesses on one word more than any other. You guys probably know it. You can tell me in the comments if you do. Incentives. Munger would say, never ever think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives. Any deal, no matter how big or small, is really just a discussion around incentives. You've got a set of incentives. They've got a set of incentives. If you don't understand what theirs are, it's really hard to negotiate a price and term for a deal.

17:58We'll see when you come live to the event, most deal breakthroughs come from identifying the incentives of a person across the table from you and removing the blockers. Let's say one of our members was presenting a deal for a local ambulatory surgery center. And so the seller's incentives were kind of interesting. The seller was launching a new business, wanted to focus on that. So the buyer needed to make it clear that they'll have more time to focus on it if they sell. You know, the seller wanted cash from the sale to fund that new business. So the buyer should structure the offer with a little bit of cash earlier if everything checks out.

18:31The seller wanted the deal closed this year to offset the capital gains with losses. So the buyer makes it clear they're going to move fast. So if you spot those levers, the buyer can structure a deal that's more likely to close. And if you understand the drivers of price and terms and the incentives, you win. And so if you remember that boat tour business we talked about, the seller actually told me later that he had an offer even better than the other guy, but he didn't take it because he wants to hit the beach, retire, and love freedom. And the other buyer had a bunch of terms that meant he would have to stay there.

19:03So you have to actually act on those incentives by negotiating the way the seller wants, not always the way that you do. And one of the things we always got to remember in life, the faster you move, the more money you make. So this is what I would tell the seller too. It's hard to find a buyer for right now, but it's going to be even harder to find a buyer for later. So you got to really take the opportunities in front of you as fast as you humanly can. And so I think the question will be, will someone else want to buy it from you? If so, we got to move quickly. If no, you got to take a break.

19:34And because the world is getting crazier and it's getting crazy fast. And in order to win, we have to do a few things very well, very fast. My belief is that this is the year for you to get ownership, even partial ownership. And I am obsessed on how do I get people like you into the game before all of these businesses get eaten up by private equity, before AI takes this asset ownership thing out of the equation. And that's why I hope you come to Main Street Millionaire Live. There's a lot of info here, so I'm just going to leave you with two takeaways. In life, if you can expand your luck surface area, meaning you can expand the opportunity for luck to come knock on your door, you can do it by being around other people who want the same things you do, You can do it by being unreasonable and taking action when most people weren't.

20:21And you can do it by actually realizing that if you start to invest in the life you want, you end up getting lucky because the assets start going on sale. And you know what's cool? If you already know what you want to buy and you know what you want to invest in, when things go on sale, you actually know that you were looking for them all along. So come to Main Street Millionaire Live. Don't stress too much about this market going crazy. as long as you're moving fast, taking action and getting into the ownership game, I think we're still going to beat the robots. Okay. If you liked this episode and you want to learn more about asset ownership, about investing, I got another episode for you.

20:53It's episode number 61. It's the seven worst businesses to buy or start. I'm going to help you get into this game of ownership. Also, if you guys like this episode, share it with somebody else. That's the only way the show grows. And we all want our friends to be like rich and hanging out and assets together, don't we? You know, I think it's more fun. We are sitting on a generational wealth creation event. If you're here, this means you're a builder. As we're going through these next three days, I want you to know that the American dream starts with you guys by our little Main Street revolution.

21:25And then I just want to give you guys permission to take a leap of faith. If I knew then what I know now, I would probably do bigger deals. It's given us an extra layer of security that we never would have had. I am so excited to introduce you to some ordinary people doing extraordinary things. We have to really take the time to make a meaningful connection. It's the fact that there is a lack of connection and the person just wants to be seen, heard and understood. Thanks for taking the question. Are there extra things that need to be done when trying to ping off bad debt? Great question. I buy businesses so simple, even your grandmother understands them.

22:09That's the game. It's you and me versus the problem. We're going to try to solve this together. I know how to build trust in a very advanced way. How does buying a business fit into the vision for your life? Today my goal is to teach you some fundamental skills that you can use to accelerate your business. If you make a promise in the mirror, know that your word is freaking iron to you. These people on Wall Street, they want to keep the normal people out of the game.

22:38Main Street millionaires are all around this world, and it starts with each and every one of you. What are you waiting for? Your path to ownership starts now. Get your ticket to join us on Main Street. Join us today. Thought Sweetgreen was just salads? Think again. There's a new way to do Sweetgreen. Wrapped and ready, these handheld wraps pack bold flavor and 40-plus grams of protein into something hearty, satisfying, and built for life on the go. From craveable sauces to satisfying textures, they're designed to keep you going without slowing you down. So put that fork down. Try the new wraps today in app or at order.sweetgreen.com.