Codie Sanchez is lying down on the floor of her office and her team is trying to act natural. They don’t realize it’s early in her pregnancy and she’s been battling waves of nausea for weeks now.
Sanchez had revealed the big news on social media just before our interview and she laughs as she recalls the memory. The Founder and CEO of Contrarian Thinking and author of the New York Times bestseller Main Street Millionaire is able to see the funny side now.
“I’m sure they had a lot of questions about why I was laying down in my office,” she says. “It was quite the look.”
Of course, lying down on the job isn’t typical for the entrepreneur who has spent most of her career in motion. But then again, it soon becomes clear that little about the last few years of her life has followed any sort of typical script.
“We’re stealing the secrets from private equity.”
Fittingly, her latest book is penned around the argument that it shouldn’t have to.
Called Own or Be Owned: How to Buy Back Your Freedom from the Business You Built, it’s the manual most CEOs and founders never received, offering a smarter way to build wealth and reclaim precious time.
And its premise sits at the center of everything Sanchez, former Wall Street investor turned self-made millionaire, has come to represent: the entrepreneurial dream sold to a generation – hustle, scale, exit, repeat – is often a trap dressed up as freedom.
“So many business owners feel owned by their business,” she says.
“I call it owner dependency, this slow leak that leads to business failure, owner burnout and the inability to scale or cash in on the freedom you hoped for when you started the business.”
Activating owner mode
After years building her own successful companies and helping more than 18,000 owners and entrepreneurs do the same, Sanchez has become convinced that the misery commonly associated with entrepreneurship is not inevitable.
“You can run a beautiful, small, profitable, consistent business and actually really enjoy your life if you so choose,” she says.
At the core of Sanchez’s latest book is the ‘Owner Operating System’ – what Sanchez refers to as ‘Owner Mode’ – a practical framework for keeping a business running and thriving without the owner’s constant presence.
Drawing on the same playbook behind her laundromats, car washes and roofing companies, she shows owners how to build something that generates cash whether they show up or not, and finally gives them the leverage they thought ownership would deliver.
“We’re stealing the secrets from private equity,” Sanchez reveals. “They can manage a portfolio of 30, 60, 100 companies and still enjoy a work–life balance.”
Sanchez’s first book, Main Street Millionaire, encouraged aspiring entrepreneurs to acquire existing profitable businesses rather than start from zero. The idea emerged after her own realization that she was not naturally drawn to building companies from scratch.
“I’ve never been a very good ‘zero to one’ person,” she insists. “I like to buy businesses.”
During her years in private equity, Sanchez watched firms repeatedly acquire established businesses, improve them and generate returns. This led her to question why individuals couldn’t apply the same approach themselves.
At the same time, she remembers the opportunity becoming increasingly urgent. Baby boomer owners were retiring in droves, leading many viable businesses to face closure – not because they weren’t good businesses, but simply because they had nobody ready to take over.
“You can’t make million-dollar decisions alone.”
Contrarian Thinking, her investment firm and media company founded in 2020, initially focused on helping people buy those companies. But acquisition only solved the first challenge.
“We helped about 5,000 people buy a business,” she recalls. “And I would always say, ‘Congratulations and I’m sorry,’ because buying it was the easy part. Then they had to run it.”
New owners, she quickly learned, often behaved as though their businesses were entirely unique. They thought they had to solve every operational problem independently.
“They were trying to recreate the wheel every single day,” Sanchez points out, revealing that early on in her journey, she also did the same.
“I thought, well I have this snowflake of a business, and it’s not like any other business, so I have to figure this all out. It’s on me.”
Pulling the right levers
Experience taught her otherwise. Across industries, the same fundamental levers repeatedly determine whether a company grows. Sanchez groups them into what she calls the 12 profit levers, encompassing areas such as pricing, product, consumer personas, people and processes; it helps diagnose and solve the most painful problems in any business.
“If we can find the one or two levers in your business that are wrong, it doesn’t have to be a giant guessing game with stress,” she explains. “You can just work the lever you need.”
Pricing is among the most frequently neglected. Sanchez says Contrarian Thinking’s research found that approximately 97 percent of small businesses were underpriced by up to 300 percent.
And more than 60 percent didn’t offer multiple pricing options that would allow customers to purchase more services or spend more.
“Everybody focuses on leads and marketing and social media – half the time, that’s not the problem at all,” she says. “Just create multiple pricing options to allow people to pay you consistently or more aggressively if they want more services or have more capital to spend.
“Use this system and you don’t even have to add another customer – and you could increase your revenue.”
“One of the reasons you win or lose in business comes down to one question: Can you build a team that’s better than you?”
The distinction between creating a company and scaling one became clear to Sanchez as her businesses crossed different revenue thresholds.
“Your first million, you’re in build mode,” she says. “You’re typically in survival and you don’t know what you’re doing yet.
“But after you hit a million dollars in revenue, you realize that what got you there won’t get you to US$10 million in revenue.”
Growth requires different people, structures and decision-making processes. A founder may begin hiring an executive assistant, followed by a chief of staff or head of operations before eventually requiring a COO or president, she explains.
At each stage, however, the founder must accept that personal effort can no longer carry the business.
“You can’t make million-dollar decisions alone,” Sanchez says.
This lesson is especially difficult for owners whose earlier success was built on their willingness to outwork everyone around them. Sanchez describes herself as a ‘workhorse’ – one of several owner archetypes identified through Contrarian Thinking’s research.
“The workhorse is basically like, ‘I’ll do all the work. Nobody else can do it better than I can,’” she explains.
“I kind of wear that as a badge of honor, which is great until it’s not and you realize you can’t scale doing everything by yourself.”
Other owners can fall into the ‘people pleaser’ category, keeping customers happy but charging too little to achieve meaningful profitability. Then there are some, she explains, who remain relentlessly optimistic, continually investing in employees or initiatives long after the evidence suggests they should stop.
A CEO’s real job
Sanchez jokingly calls the framework ‘the business horoscope’. Its purpose, she says, is not to label tendencies as inherently good or bad, but to help owners understand the characteristics that fuel their success – and that may, eventually, limit it.
She argues that once leaders recognize these patterns, they can then surround themselves with people who provide balance.
“One of the reasons you win or lose in business comes down to one question: Can you build a team that’s better than you?” Sanchez says.
“That’s the real job of a CEO in my mind.”
Culture becomes essential as leaders cannot personally oversee every decision.
“Before I was a CEO, I used to think culture didn’t matter, and it was ‘fluffy,’” she admits. “Now, I’ve realized it’s the only thing that matters because you can’t be everywhere and you don’t want to run a business where you have to micromanage everyone.”
“On average, all the people that you look up to have just failed – and won – more than you have.”
At Contrarian Thinking, culture is reinforced through systems. Sanchez applies a ‘rule of three’ – anything completed more than three times and involving more than three steps should be documented as a process.
The company’s 13-statement creed makes its expectations equally explicit. Its opening line reads: “Those who say it’s impossible should get out of the way of those of us who are actually doing it.”
The language deliberately attracts people suited to a fast, demanding environment while discouraging those who are not.
“It’s much better to find the people who are already what you want,” Sanchez says.
Her straightforward approach is the result of decades of experience, which naturally included some failures – some having cost her millions.
“On average, all the people that you look up to have just failed – and won – more than you have,” Sanchez says.
One of her most consequential lessons came after following the familiar leadership advice to hire excellent people and get out of their way.
“I did that,” she says. “I got out of their way. But then they didn’t report financials correctly and almost bankrupted one of the businesses.
“The only reason I found out was that I happened to go for a loan at the bank and they told me there was no money in the account.”
The experience exposed the danger within oversimplified business advice. Delegation remains necessary, but trust must always be supported.
Rapid growth, she says, can also present challenges. As companies evolve, employees who were right for one phase might not be for the next. Sanchez admits that even she has repeatedly waited too long to make difficult personnel decisions in the past.
“It’s hard to let people go,” she says. “It sucks as an owner. Yet, if you hang on to these people forever, you will likely fail as a company and fail your team.”
Playing the game
Her capacity to continue through setbacks comes from treating business as a game she genuinely enjoys – including both its wins and losses.
“You learn to love the game and to love the wins and the losses,” she says, grinning. “When you figure out how to play the game, it’s actually quite fun.”
And when burnout inevitably strikes, Sanchez sees it as an operational signal. For example, when she begins losing enthusiasm, it usually means she’s taken responsibility for work that should belong to someone else.
“You have to find what you’re good at inside your business,” she stresses. “Every time I start to feel like I’m a little burned out or I don’t want to keep going, it just means I’m doing something inside of my business that I shouldn’t be.
“Like, ‘Oh, Codie, why are you on so many Zoom calls?’ We don’t need to do that. Let’s outsource.”
“You learn to love the game and to love the wins and the losses.”
Shifting the conversation back to ownership, Sanchez argues that it remains one of the most reliable paths to long-term wealth. But that doesn’t mean everyone needs to become a CEO or founder.
Employees can also think like owners, understand what creates value and negotiate a share of the results they generate. In fact, her advice to those not yet ready to acquire a company is to go work for exceptional owners and study how they think.
“Go apply the ‘owner mode’ to somebody else’s business and watch how fast you climb without taking on any of the risk a business owner does,” Sanchez encourages.
She also advises people to be skeptical of promises that wealth can be built entirely through effortless passive income.
“Overall, the biggest misconception is that you can invest your way to wealth and you can do it passively,” she says. “I don’t believe any of that.”
On one extreme, people have been told that entrepreneurship demands misery. At the other, they have been promised sudden riches through speculative investments, viral content or startup fame. The irony is not lost on her.
But, Sanchez believes the more realistic opportunity is often a profitable, unglamorous company that gives its owner control over their life.
“I just want a nice profitable business that’s consistent and allows me to go to my kid’s soccer game,” she says. “One that allows me to go on vacation with my friends.”
Small but mighty
That’s the deeper purpose of ownership. It’s not simply an avenue to wealth or a route to magazine covers and fancy cars. It’s a way to choose who you work with, how you spend your time and what kind of impact your success creates.
Sanchez and her husband have known each other since they were eleven years old and have now worked alongside one another for roughly four years – he runs the firm’s capital and investment side, she runs the operating business and its public-facing brand.
Her father also works within the business, and her mother has in the past. The company’s vendor policy reflects a similar loyalty. Employees aren’t reimbursed for spending with major chains, only with other small, local businesses.
“Any chance you can give business to another small business owner, I’m in,” she says.
“Any chance you can give business to another small business owner, I’m in.”
As for what’s next, Sanchez’s ambitions have shifted from a number to something closer to a landscape.
Having already helped create what she estimates to be tens of thousands of new business owners, her hope now is for small, independently owned businesses to survive long enough that towns stop looking identical to one another.
It’s a long game, and not always a glamorous one. But as she prepares to add the new title of ‘parent’ to CEO, founder and author, Sanchez seems entirely at peace with which parts of the story are actually hers to tell.
“When people approach me in public, they’re never like, ‘Oh my God, I’m a huge fan,’” she says.
“They’re always like, ‘Wow, thank you – this helped my business grow.’”
It’s not about her, she says. It’s their story.
“That strokes my ego,” Sanchez says. “That keeps me going.”
