Rapid Response: Stop creating businesses. Buy one instead, with Codie Sanchez

0:00Unless we're telling somebody to go dive with great white sharks, in which case they might get eaten, let's like, nobody's going to die from trying to start a business or buy a business and it not working out. You're going to learn. You're going to go through difficulty. It might be really hard. You might fail. But you probably won't stand at your grave at the end of the day and say, thank God I took no risk. I stayed in a job I hated and I never actually went and stood out at the front of anything. That's Cody Sanchez, founder and CEO of finance and media company Contrarian Thinking. With stock market valuations high and the job market tight, Cody argues in her new book, Own or Be Owned, that taking control of your financial future right now requires investing in yourself.

0:47Her impassioned plea for building or buying your own small business includes hardcore data about what turns risk into opportunity. And her advice translates even if you do work for someone else, decrying what she calls cowboying in business as a key pitfall. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

1:14Hey, listeners, Bob Safian here. Before we get into today's episode, I want to introduce you to Eli Wallen, founder and CEO of Engine. Engine is a sponsor of the show, which is something we're very grateful for. Welcome, Eli. Thanks so much for having me, Bob. How is AI impacting how people book, manage, and finance travel today? And how far along the progress curve are we? It's still very, very early. The larger corporations, the bigger businesses, they really have not had a lot of opportunity to adopt AI yet in a meaningful way, kind of primarily because of the legacy systems that are still trying to catch up.

1:52I would say on the consumer side, you've seen more, seen people at least book trips, but for the most part, it's still quite nascent. A lot of times these are big ticket items and relying on just an LLM to do that blindly and just kind of take your hands off and just let the agent run and book. I think there's too much nuance. There's too much change potentially can come up. As you're building engine and the engine experience, do you assume your customers will be AI agents? Like is a service for AI agents different than one for humans? How do you navigate that? Our customers can connect and start to, you know, glean insights and understand what's going on with their travel program from their LLM directly.

2:35But I don't think the industry has quite yet caught up to maybe the expectations of what buyers have to where the capabilities of the technology is today. So what makes Engine distinctive among the tech tools that people could use for their travel planning? You know, we were not cut from the travel cloth, so to speak. So I think the way that we built this, for the last eight years, we've been working on the infrastructure and kind of the underlying network of suppliers and content and rates and all of these things that put us in a very strong position today, which is a modern infrastructure platform that AI can sit on top of travel management, travel policies, approvals.

3:14This was all kind of what makes the most sense versus what was done before. And I think it's given us the ability to create something more modern that people are looking for versus trying to repeat kind of the past structure of some of those more legacy platforms. Eli, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing more about what makes Engine unique. It was a pleasure. Really appreciate it. And now on to today's show. I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Cody Sanchez, founder and CEO of finance and media company Contrary in Thinking. Cody, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me. Thrilled to be here.

3:50You were last a guest in 2024 talking about your book, Main Street Millionaire. You've now got a new book coming with a more aggressive title, Own or Be Owned. It sounds like an ultimatum. Is that the choice we face today? Yeah. You know, we actually thought a lot about this title because it is aggressive. It's really aggressive to say that if you don't own things, then somebody else is in charge of you. You know, there are many connotations to that. But what I've realized as an owner is, first of all, you can own things and be owned by it. I think we've now worked with somewhere around 15 ,000 small business owners.

4:31Most of them are owned by those businesses. Most of them do not have an exit. And most small businesses are not profitable. So the last book I did, the whole point was go and buy a profitable small business so we don't get owned by Wall Street and everything looks like Walmart. aren't. And then once we realized this, wow, we had taught thousands of people how to buy a business. And I always say, congratulations. And I'm sorry, because this part kind of sucks. So now it was like, how do we get them to run profitable businesses that you don't hate, that don't make you miserable every day? And just to be clear, can you work for someone else and not be owned?

5:06Oh, yeah. I mean, the cool part about this book is I don't think everybody should be an owner. I think everybody should own some parts of companies. Sure, you can do it through equities, but I think as an employee in a company, you can get shares of the company. You can do rev share splits. You can do profit sharing. If you understand how businesses make money, you can figure out how to negotiate your cut of it. So no, I think there's many days. You catch me on the wrong day, Bob. I might say, I'll come work for you, you know? I mean, the last time we talked, you said that our country might be less of a tragedy if we all owned a piece of it, that we would care more about making it better.

5:47And so owning a piece, it could be owning your own business. It could be owning shares in the stock market. It could be owning a home. Like, is all ownership equally, what's the right word, motivational? Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't have any data to support this. So that would be, I'm not sure exactly quantifiably, but the difference with owning part of a business that you are a part of is you have some control over the outcome. You know, if you own a stock, you're making a bet on somebody else's ability to continue to build. If you own a house, you're betting on the housing market. And then you have to move if you want to realize any of those gains.

6:22When you own part of the business that you work in or part of businesses that you work alongside, you can actually affect the outcome. And that is really inspiring because it makes you want to work harder. Just because I own Apple, my day-to-day has no impact on what Apple is going to do. If you own part of your business that you're integrating, well, you're not going to burn down the house that you were trying to build. And so I think about that sort of all around our world. And can we just get little parts of these businesses too if we don't want to take on the big risk of owning the whole thing?

6:53And when you're, I don't know, when you're deciding where to invest your money, I guess, and your time, but really your money, like you would prioritize a business over, say, owning your own home over individual stocks, although people have made a ton of money on stocks lately. Yeah. You know, you have to have a lot of money to make money in the stock market. It's an incredible wealth accelerator once you have capital to invest. Ownership in a business is one of the very few things where you can actually trade your time for long-term dollars. I have a bias that I think more people should bet on themselves.

7:31They'll figure out what they're capable of and then also be able to make more because of it. It's also the only investment that even if you lose, you win because you can take some experience from it. If you YOLO into Robinhood, okay, maybe you learn to not buy at the top or to not buy in market hype cycles, but what is your real learning experience? And I think in businesses, you get that. As far as owning a home or not, I think that's usually an emotional purchase, which I totally understand. Like it feels special to own it. Because it's such a core part of like the American dream. You sort of feel like it doesn't really need to be.

8:08Yeah, it's really just another liability that you have to pay for every single month. And that holds you to a job maybe that you don't like or something that you are not sure you want to do. And so when you have a lot of money, great, own houses. And I know that sounds elitist. But when you don't have a lot of money, I would bet on yourself all day and increase your cashflow so nobody can own you. You alluded to this when you talked about sort of the motivation for this book versus the first book. Like owning a business can trap you as easily as it frees you. And I know the founders I talk to, I'm sure you hear this all the time too.

8:43Like if I known how hard it was, I never would have started this. You know, is it better sometimes not to know how hard it is? Well, one, I think that we have all gotten sort of trauma bonded over entrepreneurship. It doesn't sound very fun if I come on here and say, actually, business is going pretty good. We're making a lot of money. I'm having a good time. Things are going well. It's kind of gross. And so it's almost like the reverse of the casino. In the casino, they only tell you when they win. In business, they only really like talking about the difficulty or hardships or when they've raised a bunch of outside venture capital.

9:19And so I think for most small business owners, yes, it's hard, but they kind of love the game. Like it's an addictive game to play. The problem is that they aren't profitable. Everything's more fun when you're making money. And so if the average small business owner makes$65 ,000 a year, well, that's less than minimum wage in California and less than even the median income in the US. And so we've got to figure out how to have profitable businesses because then the pain and difficulty is a lot easier to manage. What are the, I don't know, the mistakes or the traps that folks who are, you know, running their own businesses are running themselves into?

9:57It's not that they're not working hard. They're not working on the right things. Yeah. If you look at the, you know, dispersion of returns, basically the top 10 to 20 % of companies, they're like 30x more profitable than the lower companies. What we've seen is that most business owners, they don't run on systems. And even I see it in my business. I mean, I just had to let go of two employees. And the reason why, these are execs, serious people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, because I couldn't get them to use a system. They wanted to cowboy it because cowboying it as a business owner feels good.

10:33By cowboy it, you mean sort of just like wing it. You just make the decision based on what you're feeling like. Exactly. Like if you don't run on a system, you are not going to consistently be profitable. You won't have the data to back it. You won't know why your decisions worked or didn't. And that's why private equity companies eat a lot of normal businesses lunch. What we call the 12 profit levers, the system that we've run for years goes all the way from what you price to the people you sell to, to the people you hire, to the products you sell, to how you pitch, to how you promote. Every single aspect of your business needs to be systematized.

11:08It's not that hard, actually. The only hard part is, is that it's more fun to wing it and riff on things. And that's probably what made you an entrepreneur to start with. But do you want to make money? Or, you know, do you want to riff? And I guess in this environment where so much feels like it's changing, I can see some of the resistance to systematizing being, well, that makes me rigid. I'm not going to be creative enough. I'm not going to be agile enough. Having a system doesn't necessarily mean not being agile and changing things. It's really important you say that. You know how you go to business books and you're like, well, I guess if I was Elon Musk and then I read his biography and I did exactly what Elon did, I would win.

11:51But sadly, I'm not as smart as the guy. I'm not as rich as the guy. Or as lucky too, right? Or as lucky. Yeah. Or as prone to misery. I don't want to sleep on factory floors for weeks. I'm glad he does. That's great. I don't want to. And so what we realized in this book, you have to have three things to have a system that works. One, we have something called the owner score. It tells you what kind of owner you are, what your proclivities are. For instance, artists or founders, they price like 30 to 40 % lower than an archetype that is a closer or a ball hog. And so your first input is what are you?

12:26What kind of owner are you? Your second input is in your business today, how do you score versus the market on your 12 Ps? We have like a data set of 30 ,000 businesses. And then the third input is once you have all that data, how are you looking at it every 90 days to make sure you're addressing the system again and again? And none of this is new. These are all theories that have existed forever in private equity. We're just applying it to small business owners in a way that they never got access to before. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like the kinds of rigor that more established, bigger businesses have used for a while, like it doesn't seem like rocket science.

13:02It was just too complicated to do before, like it's cheaper now. Yeah. Well, it was really complicated. It was expensive. You know, if you wanted to go before and get advisory services on how to run your business more profitably, you could go to McKinsey or Bain, but you're going to have to pay$500 ,000 for an advisory thing. And they're basically just going to tell you the stuff to cut costs and that you want to hear, even though they're really smart guys. No shame to their game. And so what we realized is we're like, well, what about for the small businesses? They don't have the HVAC or the roofing company or the ad agency.

13:36They don't need to come up with some crazy new innovation. They need to respond to their customers faster. They need to incentivize their employees correctly. They need to price more intelligently and probably higher. Like it actually is not rocket science. But when you're in your business, there's so much on your to-do list. And so every day you're just treading water as a business owner. And I'm hoping to try to stop that. And do you find in your data that like our small business owners, like, are they going to AI bots and asking them advice about what should I do or where the next market is?

14:12And like, is that useful or is that a different kind of trap? Gosh, if you had asked me 12 months ago, I would have said, this is incredible. This is going to be a game changer. Now what we've realized is most of the advice is so generative and aggregate. It's not actually helpful. And then it will usually tend to tell you things that you want to hear about your business. It doesn't tell you the difficulties. And so you really have to stress test it. So I actually have started to say, don't give me aggregate data. I want only data on home services businesses located in the Southwest. And what do they price at?

14:49And where's that data set from? And so if my search is that, if my prompt is that specific, I can get more valuable information. You can, but the problem is they don't have access to that data usually. And they'll make it up and you won't know that they've made it up because they always give you an answer. They never say, I don't know. Exactly. And the vice is super problematic because you'll say, well, should I be spending more on advertising or marketing? Okay. Well, it's really hard for you to feed it enough data for it to give you a smart response on that. But if you talk to a business owner who's been doing this for 10 years in your industry and you have the data set on everybody else, you can just say, well, we do something called a P &L review.

15:32You look at the P &L and you're like, hey guy, you're spending 2 % of your revenue on advertising and market, and the industry average is 15%. You actually have a positive return on ad spend here. Let's up this. This is a very easy thing to do. But AI isn't going to get there because you won't even know the answers to ask it or the questions to ask it. And for your business, like the McKinsey's of the world make money because they can charge so much for their advice. How do you make money? Because you have to charge a lot less to much smaller businesses. It's way harder. I think about this daily.

16:11We're a mission-driven company. We always have been. Our belief is that you should be able to learn how to buy small businesses and build them and that we want to do that at scale for everyone. You know, if I was even advising my business, our issues are always, we should increase our prices, but we don't. So that means we have to be super effective and we also have to find other ways to make money, which means we've got to invest in businesses and have those businesses ROI to us on top of it. And if we didn't do that, I don't think we could do this at scale at this price point because the market just naturally is going to move you to more expensive options.

16:48Right. It's a better business to go to the bigger companies that you can charge more for, but then it's moving you away from your mission. Yeah, exactly. There's three types of businesses I talk about in the book, lifestyle, scale, and exit. Most small business owners, they just want a$10 million a year roofing business, which is an incredible business. This is a scale business. I don't make a ton of money from this personally. Most of the money goes back in the business. It's not an exit business where we're preparing for profits. If you know who you are, you know what you want, you know what your business scores, and you know how to run a system on top of it, you're probably more likely to succeed.

17:21As opposed to trying to do everything. Exactly. Most of them want to do all three. that doesn't work. Or sometimes you do one and sometimes you do the other and that's being a cowboy. Right. Yeah, exactly. And then I have to fire you, which is not fun. If you want to work for Cody, don't be a cowboy and don't try to do everything, which is a trap a lot of entrepreneurs and business leaders fall into. So is it better to start your own business or buy an existing one? And are hands-on trades really worth considering in an AI world? We'll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

18:04When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity, when to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years building. Creative planning, where wealth works together. Learn more at creativeplanning.com slash masters of scale. Before we get to the rest of our conversation today, I want to spend a moment sharing with you about the Masters of Scale Summit, which returns to San Francisco this October 20th to 22nd.

18:47So many of us feel overwhelmed right now. It feels like so much of the world is careening and we don't have power, we don't have agency. That's the thing about the Masters of Scale Summit. It's really designed to remind us that we do have agency, agency to lead, agency to design, to build the relationships and the partnerships that empower us and to make the change that we want to see. We program a stage, we curate an audience, we set a schedule that builds in time for these relationships to be made and to grow, so that by the time you leave Summit, you are fired out of a cannon, ready to run through walls to do better in the world with the agency that you actually have.

19:28I hope to see you there. Visit mastersofscale.com slash summit.

19:38Hey, listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from the Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find. Just search Rapid Response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Before the break, Cody Sanchez of Contrarian Thinking talked about why owning your own business should be everyone's goal.

20:24Now she talks about the advantages of buying an existing business over starting your own, the trap of thinking AI can make a business better, and which fields offer the best opportunity right now. Let's jump back in. You launched a business earlier this year, BizScout, to help people buy existing small businesses rather than creating ones from scratch. So how do you know if that kind of option is a good option for you? You can go to BizScout and you can go to our calculators page. and they'll give you a valuation analysis and talk to one of our representatisms and they'll tell you, yeah, your business is like totally sellable or here's how you should prep to sell it.

21:10Because a lot of small businesses don't know how to value what they have. Well, yeah, I didn't. I mean, before I was in finance, I would have had no idea. And also, how are you going to get the reps of that? You're only going to sell your business once probably. So there's no reason to become an expert at that. But then the second is how do you know if a business is good to buy or not. It's kind of cool. On BizScout now, we have something called Scout Sites. Do you remember like, well, like Zestimate, Zestimate about like what a house is worth? So Scout Sites is the same thing. It's trained on the, you know, tens of thousands of businesses.

21:40It's never really existed for small businesses at scale. Obviously, you have to do more due diligence on top of that, but there's for the first time ever, you can be like, whoa, these guys are crazy. This is totally out of market. It's only rated, you know, a 30, which would be an F as opposed to an 87, aka B plus. But if I'm, you know, I want to have a roofing business or I want to open a bakery, like how do I decide whether maybe I should go on here and see if there's a small business for me, like for me to buy versus me starting one on my own? Is that about how much money I have to begin with or where I am in my career?

22:15Like, how do I make that decision? I don't think unless you have a burning demand to like start a business. You can't sleep for the want of starting a business. The data says don't do it just for the money. It, you know, it'll take three to four years to be profitable. You have a 90 % failure rate inside of 10 years. And most small business owners only make 46 to 65-ish thousand dollars a year. Yeah, boy, that sounds like, why would I do this at all? Well, that's my point. I wouldn't do that. I think if you're crazy enough to want to start a business, you won't ask for advice. You'll just go do it.

22:49And then if you really want the profits for it, go buy one because you have a higher likelihood of knowing if it's going to succeed or not. And I'm not saying there's not risk to acquisitions. Obviously, you have to take a loan out typically or do seller financing. But the SBA's failure rate right now is like less than 13%. So you go get a loan on a small business, it gets SBA approved. You have a 13 % failure rate over a 10-year period, as opposed to in startups and 90 % failure rate. So I just kind of go back to the math. And that's why I talk to so many people about buying a business, even though people don't always like that I talk about that.

23:27Why is that? Well, one, people are always going to dislike you for succeeding at the thing that they were not able to succeed at. People will hate you for having less and doing more with it. And so if somebody has gone through something incredibly traumatizing, like buying a business and failing at it, all they see are other people that will fail too. And I'm not sure how that is helpful at all. Like, unless we're telling somebody to go dive with great white sharks, in which case they might get eaten, let's like, nobody's going to die from trying to start a business or buy a business and it not working out.

24:06You're going to learn, you're going to go through difficulty. It might be really hard. You might fail, but you probably won't stand at your grave at the end of the day and say, thank God I took no risk. I stayed in a job I hated, and I never actually went and stood out at the front of anything. I think that's totally irrational. So it won't be easy, but I do think often it's worth it. And then I always like to say to people, oh yeah, okay, it was so hard and so terrible, and I shouldn't tell people that they could buy a business. Do you work for yourself still? Oh, you do. Okay, they can't do it, but you can.