Contrarian Thinking founder, Codie Sanchez, gets a lot of crap for having all these different businesses: 26 to be exact.
Whereas, you got all these billionaires, who recommend you stick to one thing and do it better than anybody else.
“Here’s the thing for me,” Codie explains. “I love doing one thing, until I get good at it. But I only love it till then.”
“And as soon as I get competent, and then highly competent, then I’m in search of the newness,” she admits.
“I don’t know if you know,” Codie continues, “but that perpetual little itch for the unknown, the chasing of the squirrel? We’re actually wired for that. It makes us happy. It’s how we get a dopamine hit.”
“It even turns out there’s studies that show that newness is good for us,” she says.
“So I don’t like this whole idea about ‘the one thing.’ In fact, I like focusing on many things.”
“But you have to make sure that the one thing that you’re doing at the time actually works well and keeps working after you delegate it to someone else.”
So the question then becomes: How do you build an empire and manage it effectively?
The answer’s actually easier than you might think.
Codie stole it from somebody else. There’s 3 steps:
- Decentralized management
- R&D, or rip-off and duplicate
- Don’t drown in data
Decentralized management, with a small team, Codie learned from Warren Buffett.
“Hire the best possible people, let them do the work and then watch the costs,” Codie summarizes.
“That’s the key to running multiple businesses,” she says.
“Put the right people in charge, let ’em report to you and keep your expenses tight.”
As for rip-off and duplicate, just look at other successful businesses and steal their models.
And then don’t drown in data, right?
Codie likes the KISS method. Keep it stupid simple.
She has her team members create scorecards that track output, activity and performance.
Okay, so that’s Codie’s jargon-y explanation of how she “runs” 26 different businesses at once.
How she got her start, like how she made her first $1 million or so, was the old-fashioned way.
After graduating from ASU, she climbed the corporate ladder at places like Vanguard, Goldman Sachs, State Street Global Advisors, and then a private company called First Trust.
Codie figured, if I wanna learn money, I should probably work at places that “do” money, right?
And then she always negotiated for higher pay.
“So I liked the work, I was being highly compensated, I brought in a bunch of business, I made more money, but I was working too much,” Codie recalls.
“So I wanted to be out doing things, closing deals, not sitting on the phone, making PowerPoint decks and filling out spreadsheets.”
“And I was at a point where I would need to make a jump to VP to keep moving up, which I wasn’t really qualified for, so I took all the money I had saved up (which was about $100k) and I put it into the markets.”
“And that ended up being a really good bet,” she says.
“I started investing when the S&P was at like $800 or $900 a share, back in 2007, 2008. It’s now at like $3,900.”
“So that was at least a 4x growth.”
“So now I’m sitting on, let’s say, $400,000.”
“I also bought some Goldman stock, which also 4x’d.”
“The takeaway is, I chased the highest learning, biggest reward, and I never ever settled,” she recaps.
From there, obviously, Codie transitioned to influencer and serial entrepreneur.
She sells a handful of courses and coaching programs that can get pretty pricey.
The internet has lots of wild guesses about her net worth, but I wouldn’t give any of ’em much weight.