419: Meet The Woman Who Makes $50M With Boring Businesses w/ Codie Sanchez

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I have my friend Cody Sanchez on the show and Cody runs a $50 million company that specializes in what she calls boring businesses. And by boring business, think ice vending machines, laundromats, car washes, everyday businesses that make a ton of money but aren’t necessarily considered sexy. And you’ll learn in this episode to make good money.

00:27
your business does not have to be the next big thing. But before we begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I use for my e-commerce store. It depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who is shopping in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week.

00:57
Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers to pay on what they bought piece of cake and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Now, Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-B-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscope for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list.

01:25
And this is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce store, and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce stores and e-commerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned card at the push of a button.

01:51
Not only that, but it’s price well too, and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. And finally, I want to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it how it is in a raw and entertaining way.

02:21
So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:33
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. Today I’m happy to have Cody Sanchez on the show. Now, Cody is someone who I met at the eCommerce Fuel Conference in Norfolk and she was one of the keynote speakers. And I didn’t really know who she was at the time, but this woman walks out in leather pants, confidence dried, and the first thought that goes through my head is that this woman is a badass and then she proceeds to kill it on stage. Anyway, it turns out we have a lot of common friends, including podcast guests like Noah Kagan, Neville Madora, Sam Parr, and Drew Sinaki.

03:03
Cody is the founder of Contrarian Thinking and a co-founder of Unconventional Acquisitions where she helps people think outside the box when it comes to businesses and she specializes in boring businesses that cash flow like crazy. She is a reformed journalist turned institutional investor, a board member at a variety of companies, an investor, and she’s going to teach us today how to think critically and make money unconventionally. And with that, welcome to the show, Cody. How are you doing? Great intro. Thanks. I got to record that.

03:33
Hey, I was always curious, what does it mean to be a reformed journalist? Well, I used to be a journalist. And then I realized that I wanted to be part of the activity, not write about the activity. And so I consider myself a bit of a reformed journalist in that sense. And what about boring businesses? Like, how did you get into that? Yeah, well, boring businesses were interesting for me because, you know, I’ve been in private equity for a long time.

04:03
And private equity is essentially just investing in boring businesses. That’s all it is. And it’s done at scale and with other people’s money. But when I started doing it myself, I just realized, hey, I’m doing all of these really big LBOs, they’re called leverage buyouts for third parties. And we’re doing maybe billion dollar deals, maybe deals that are hundreds of millions of dollars. Why couldn’t I do the same thing, but much smaller? And since they make all of the money when we do the big deals, if I do the small deals, then I can capture.

04:33
all of that return. And so I started looking at what are businesses that most people don’t think are sexy, but cashflow on day one of you closing an acquisition. And those are the businesses I started looking at buying. Okay. You know, it’s funny, when I was growing up, I had a lot of Korean friends and whenever I went over their houses, they were really nice houses. And it seemed like they were killing it. And here’s the thing, they ran boring businesses like laundromats, dry cleaners, custom tailor businesses, and I’m

05:02
guessing that they did pretty well. Totally. Yeah. I I think, you know, if you actually look at communities and where people spend most of their money, it’s certainly, you know, their house, their rent, right? Their car, food, and then it’s local services. You know, it’s like getting your your house plumbing fixed because something goes wrong. Your air conditioner doing the landscaping in the front of your house, going out to local restaurants or entertainment venues, you know, having somebody wash your car.

05:32
It’s all of these little things we think about every day. Not all of us are using a tech stack of all of these companies that we think about from a Silicon Valley perspective. Sure, we use Uber, but most people actually probably don’t use Uber every single day or every single week. And in fact, what you do use every single day is like some of your local companies. And so I think we’ve skewed ourselves to believe that most of the riches are made from Silicon Valley companies.

05:59
And that is true for a select few, but for everyday humans who don’t have the idea to become the next Elon Musk and really just want to provide for their families and provide better services for the community around them. I think it’s really important actually that we remember that boring businesses, you know, keep our everyday lives rolling. And so you get to profit off of that if you invest in them, but you also get to benefit the community. So it’s, it’s an interesting two for one. So a boring business by your definition is something that doesn’t necessarily use tech or just an everyday service.

06:29
Yeah, I think of how boring businesses is businesses that you would never think as a young kid you want to grow up and do. So, you you might say one day I want to be an engineer or one day I want to be an air pilot. But you’re probably not going to grow up and say, I want to run a sprinkler company or, you know, I want to run a company that does lot landscaping across town. And so it’s a totally made up definition that basically is just saying anything that you wouldn’t think of as wanting to be a CEO.

06:59
you know, maybe there’s a way to make money in that space. And some of these businesses are tech enabled to be fair. Let me ask you this. So I sell handkerchiefs online. Is that considered a boring business? Yeah, well, except I think there’s this e-commerce component of it, which makes it a little bit sexier, right? So, you know, don’t know how you can make hanky sexy, but I think you can do it with, you know, you need to understand how to build websites well and have traffic and do paid ads, etc. A lot of these businesses

07:26
you know, our mom and pop businesses that have been in existence for, you know, 10, 20 years at times. So it’s certainly a boring business. But even so, I might think, you know, the manufacturer of the handkerchiefs locally, or the trucking company that locally routes them to locations, or the pack and ship where, you know, your employees go and, you know, send off your first round of handkerchiefs that are located around the corner.

07:54
So I need to come up with a better way to explain like what the real difference is between the two. But yes, even you run a sexy business. Okay, so how do you find these? I know you own a bunch of these. Let’s let’s just use some examples of the ones that you’ve personally owned or interacted with. So the way that most people go and find them to start is just like you buy a house. So you go to like Zillow or Redfin or whatever and you look for a house and there are sites that you can do that for buying boring businesses too, like ecommerce flipper.

08:24
you know, flip a biz by cell for sure. That’s like the entry level way to do it. You know, the way that I find deals now is typically a little bit more asymmetric. Like it’s not like, okay, step one, you do this. Step two, you do this. Which is why I think there’ll always be opportunity in it because there’s about 472 ways to find a business. And our group called Unconventional Acquisitions where we have a course that talks about how to buy boring businesses. We talk about 13 different ways.

08:53
but there’s many more than that. That’s just sort of to get the juices flowing. Some of my favorite ways to find businesses to buy is this. So one, I go out publicly and I do it across all my social media and I do it in every interaction where I say, I buy boring businesses like you and I talked about. And so I say, this is what I do. If people are looking to sell, if there’s somebody who’s retiring, maybe the mom or the patriarch or the matriarch is ready to move on, the kid doesn’t wanna take over the company. Those are the type of companies I like to buy. So I just word of mouth.

09:23
And then the second way that I do it a lot is I look through my personal P and L, like what are all the companies that I interact with every day and are any of them small enough that I could actually go and acquire one of those companies? Obviously I can’t do that with Google, but maybe I could do it with the local, you know, a ship center down the street from me that I go and ship out all the time. Why don’t I get to know the owner? What kills me is most people go.

09:47
Well, what if you don’t know any owners? And I can almost guarantee you that there is no human in the United States who knows zero business owners. It’s just like it’s not possible. If you are interacting at all outside of your house, you may know the owner of the gas station because you’re probably talking to him because he’s doing the checkout for you. And so just start talking to as many people that are owners as possible. know, I’ve actually gotten to this habit of whenever I walk into a small business, I’ll chat with the owner. And I’ll sometimes just ask him for numbers and

10:17
A lot of times they’re actually quite forthcoming with their business and stuff. It’s really interesting. That’s a great, great. It’s a good way to get comfortable with it, especially like I’d be curious like how you do it. But I basically just say something like, oh yeah, you know, I run a couple of small businesses too. How are you guys doing? Like here’s a couple of pain points in my business right now. You know, we do, you know, we do about $300,000 in this one business, but you know, labor is really tough. How about you guys? How big is this business? And then they’ll tell you, right?

10:43
That’s exactly how I do it. I always reveal a little tiny snippet of something. I always say that I run a business too. And you know, I have these problems too. Do you have them? It’s exactly the same technique. Yeah, because it’s disarming, right? When you reveal something about yourself first. Totally. And you know, running businesses isn’t isn’t easy. And so I think all of us like to hear from that’s why we go to events like the one where we met, because we want to hear from other business owners, what are they struggling with? What’s working? What’s not?

11:11
And I mean, I’ve sold the businesses based on conversations like that, because some businesses, I just don’t want to run anymore. They’re too small or they’re not working or whatever. And so, yeah, I think it’s like once you get the business bug, you want to talk about it. And so assume other owners do too. And even if you don’t own a business, I think you could talk about it like, oh, I’m obsessed with businesses. You know, I don’t own one right now, but I’ve actually been looking at a bunch and your business model seems really interesting. Like, how does it work? I assume it would work like this. And so you could do it without being an owner too.

11:40
Yeah, absolutely. So can you give me an idea of like how much capital is required and what it would cash flow just of one of your businesses? Just pick any one of them. I know you have like a bunch. Yeah. This is like a not that helpful range. But the answer is $0 to a billion because you can do deals of any size. You know, I was just talking to Drew Sanaki the other day, a mutual friend of ours, and he’s notorious for buying businesses for $0.

12:07
and he gives them a rev share, percentage of his future revenue or future profits that he will take by taking their business and growing them. And the reason somebody would do that obviously is because the business is losing money, let’s say, or they need his expertise. You can also buy a business for $0 if you do seller financing. So if the seller of the business is like, ah, I don’t want to run this anymore, nobody wants to buy it, but would you run the business and give me a percentage of future profits or revenue?

12:35
I think there’s actually a lot of businesses out there that you could buy for basically nothing, especially when you realize that it costs money to shut a business down. I I don’t know if you’ve ever had to do it. I’ve had to shut down businesses and like, it’s a couple grand, between like getting rid of all of your licenses, shutting down the LLCs, getting rid of the bank account, getting rid of your website or any other outstanding services. In some states, you can’t even…

13:03
like fire all of your employees right away, you have to do it on a graduated level, like in California, for instance. So there’s a lot of instances where business owners, it costs them more to shut down the business than it would for somebody else to take over it and just give them a percentage of future profits. That is very interesting. So when you’ve done your acquisitions, do you try to put down as little money as possible? What’s strategy? Yeah, almost always. Like, for example,

13:31
It really depends. If I’m buying a business that’s small and I don’t want the owner involved anymore, then I want to put down all the cash and I want them out. If I’m buying a business where I want the owner involved, I actually want to put down as little as cash as possible because I want to incentivize them to stay on with me. So it depends on the deal. If I’m a young gun and I’m taking over

13:56
somebody’s old website that’s really crappy and I don’t need anything for them and I know the whole thing that I want to do going forward. I might say, hey, take 50k now or, you know, whatever, a larger amount over a period, but I’d like you to be gone because I don’t really need anything for you. And I’m just going to run. Uh, and I know that I’d take the upfront hit because the long-term will be better if I’m unsure on the business, like I’m buying another website business. And let’s say that the business, I actually want the owner to stay around. might say,

14:26
Hey, I’ll give you $25,000 for the business right now, or $75,000 if you stick around for three years, $25,000 a year. And so it really depends on what you want out of the deal. The most important part about buying businesses is what do you want? Figuring out deal clarity, I think. So on TikTok, I’ve seen a bunch of your businesses. Like there was one, think, you were, the person was selling ice, right? And that’s like one dude.

14:52
who just has to go around and manage these machines, I guess in that case, the guy isn’t as important, right? It’s the machines. And I noticed a trend in the ones that you talk about, it all seems to be like machines doing most of the work, right? So I think that people get attracted most to the ones where machines do the work. So I think those two are most viral. Because, you know, everybody’s like, oh, I can have a laundromat and it makes $15,000 a month and I never have to be there. The truth is something in between, which is, you know,

15:21
vending machines, ice machines, laundromats, trucking businesses, whatever the case may be, there’s some component that either you or your operator has to be involved. I like talking about those types of businesses because I think they’re the gateway drug to ownership. So when I talk about an ice vending business, you’re like, that’s so simple, I understand it. And I, as a normal human, am not intimidated by the idea of running that business. I could probably figure that out.

15:49
And I actually think it’s really important that we democratize and make accessible business, not just starting businesses, but owning businesses. Because let me think about it. So many of problems we have today are because so many people believe things should be given to them and don’t believe they’re capable of going out and getting something. And so if they start realizing that ownership is accessible and there’s lots of paths to it, you don’t have to have millions of dollars, then they start.

16:16
believing more in themselves and less in, you know, government or others. And that’s actually the biggest part of my purpose is I talk about sort of getting money quick because it’s a Trojan horse into getting yourself free. And the more free humans we have, I think the better society we have. mean, I think we have similar philosophies, but what’s funny about this is that ice vending machine business actually does not sound attractive to me as an engineer because you got to go around and manage these machines that probably break down and then you got to

16:45
For some of the, like the laundromat, actually have to physically go and collect the money in the quarters and whatnot. Whereas e-commerce, which is what I do, everything’s on a machine. Like I don’t like humans. I mean, I don’t like interacting with humans, right? So the less interaction I have, the better. I’m just kind of curious why you chose that as like a gateway drug. I think that’s great that you know your deal clarity, right? Your deal clarity is I know how to operate on the internet. Like I know how to make a business run efficiently without me being involved at all. And I know how to leverage.

17:14
the internet to make my business more effective, right? But I think for a lot of people, that’s not a skill set that they have, right? Myself included, I was in finance for a long time and we couldn’t market. There’s no marketing on the internet in finance. Well, at least you’re not supposed to these days, people are crazy. But so I was an internet person and e-commerce business would have scared the hell out of me. But if you told me that I could go engage in this local business and I hire out somebody to run around to the ice machines and check on them and I give them a percentage,

17:44
of the revenue of the business and all I have to be responsible for is like signage and some minimal marketing and picking the right location and financing it. That actually didn’t intimidate me as much. But if I have to go, you know, in e-commerce, think maybe today more than ever, but not always you are competing against some really smart minds out there because you know, you have to beat Amazon, right? You have to beat the other drop shippers elsewhere. You have to be really good at branding.

18:12
Like you don’t have to be that great at branding to own a local business properly placed. I don’t think one’s better than the other though. I think they’re just different skill sets and you have to find which one’s best for you. Yeah, that’s true. I see the businesses that you deal with as very steady. They’re like rocks, right? Like you get it set up and they just probably cashflow forever. And there’s not much competition because it’s local, right? Right. Whereas Ecom is you have the potential to grow a lot bigger, but at same time it can be a lot more painful as well. Yeah.

18:41
with one little ad that I’d have there is I think about them like bonds versus stocks. So I have a lot of bonds in my business buying portfolio, which basically means I clip a coupon or like I give somebody a thousand dollars and I expect $10 a month back, right? And so that’s how I think about a lot of these businesses. I’m not trying to make a laundromat go from a hundred thousand dollars a year in profit to 3 million. That’d be really hard. I am trying to maybe own a few of those. So I just have that cashflow coming in consistently. And then for like one or two businesses,

19:11
I make a big bet. Like, contrary in thinking, my media company is a big bet. That’s an equity or stock bet, which is I put in this money today, and I even put in more money into it with the hopes that it continues to cash flow sort of asymmetrically or like my return really accelerates, and I can make a lot more money. And so I think you should have bonds and stocks in your portfolio. And that’s sort of how I think of it. Nice. I guess the bonds in my portfolio is like real estate, right? Do you consider that like a bond? Okay. I do. The only thing I don’t like about real estate is

19:41
Unless you’re doing, you know, pretty big multifamily bought a long time ago or doing Airbnb or maybe industrial or commercial, it’s hard to cashflow enough off of the money you have to put down and especially as rates rise. So I optimize for cashflow, but I think real estate is really good for depreciation, taxes and long-term appreciation that’s less speculative than buying a business is for sure.

20:10
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now, what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

20:38
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copywriting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

21:08
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. So a lot of the listeners of my podcast, some of them are on the sidelines. They’re trying to decide what to do. And I know right now it’s kind of a hard environment. There’s inflation. What are some ways where people can maybe not necessarily start a business or maybe leverage what they have to make some money? Yeah.

21:37
Well, I always say buy instead of start because especially in a recessionary environment where you might not have a ton of capital, why would you spend a bunch of money with the hopes to earn in the future? Unless you have a cool idea, I’d say like use leverage right now, which means get loans in order to buy a business. And the reason I think that is because interest rates, I do believe will continue to rise. We’ll see. Inflation looks like it’s going to continue to rise. So if you lock in smart,

22:07
well-done debt in order to finance a business. Inflation sort of eats away at your debt because your interest rate gets locked in if you do the structure correctly. And then on a go-forward basis, you can also increase your prices in a way that it’s hard to increase your prices, let’s say, if you have renters, because you only probably get to do that once a year, right? And so I like the idea of buying businesses actually. And I think a lot of businesses go on sale during recessionary periods.

22:35
And you don’t have to have a ton of your own money. can use SBA loans or seller financing to do it. So I really like that. I do think side hustles can be super interesting as well. All I would say is in this sort of environment, you want to do one that, you know, we have a blog post. I think it’s coming out next week or the week after about how to do, um, how to basically turn your liabilities into assets from a car standpoint. So like how to do Turo well, or how to do, you know, how to take your Airbnb properties and add a car to them.

23:03
or like, could you do with other assets like your pool or your bikes or your surfboards in order for those assets to cashflow for you? I think some of that makes sense, but that will only really get you so far before you have to take more risk. I think what people don’t realize is they start a business or they buy a business or they start a side hustle because they don’t want to take much risk on it. Meaning they don’t want to put in their own capital or too much time, but your return is only going to be, mean, how much money can you make off of?

23:31
one car in a year on Turo. Like maybe you could make $20,000 in total, maybe you can even make $50,000 revenue, but your profit margin is going to be pretty low. So you’d have to have a lot of them for it to work. And so, you know, I think that’s okay. Take a little swing to start, take a little bite, and then sort of stair step your way up from a risk standpoint. mean, I guess that’d be the gateway drug, right? You start out with just renting out your own car on Turo, and then maybe you buy like 10 cars.

24:00
or at least 10 cars with that money and scale it from there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, or start with your own car on Turo. Then maybe you ask a few neighbors if they want you to put theirs on Turo too. Then you go buy your first car. Then you leverage the proceeds to buy the second, third, fourth, fifth. Then we’ve gotten enough scale, you realize, huh, this model isn’t actually entirely scalable and I’m running around dropping cars off everywhere. So I’m going to sell this business to somebody else.

24:27
And then I’m going to go take that money and I might buy a used car lot instead, right? Or I might buy a web exchange that does something with cars selling back and forth because that actually has a better return profile. So I think the other thing is people spend a ton of time saying like, which type of business? Oh no, I don’t know where to start. it’s like, I mean, I spend some time thinking about that, but then start. And if it doesn’t work for you, then sell the business because assets are transferable and move on to a new endeavor.

24:56
Actually, I really like your approach and I’m just thinking back to, I was an engineer for 17 years, very risk averse. And the way I started was I went on Craigslist and everyone was selling their computers for cheap. So I would buy them and then I would just strip out the parts and sell them for profit. And that actually got me thinking, hey, I could probably do this. It only scaled to like $1,500 a month. But after that, I was like, okay, maybe I can do this e-commerce thing.

25:22
So I agree. you just need to find something to start that might not be scalable at all. In fact, it doesn’t matter if it’s scalable in the beginning, right? Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. Yeah, I’ve been noodling around with the right way to explain this concept. But basically, I think you nailed that. It’s like do the unscalable things first. And then only then will you realize what is scalable. And you can sell the former to buy the latter. And I think if you can do that again and again and again,

25:50
That’s where you start to make, you know, six, seven, eight, nine figures because you understand, you know, nothing is good or bad except by comparison. So $1,500 a month, I bet a lot of people listening are like, that’d be awesome. And then once you start making 1,500 and you see how much work you’re going in for 1,500, you’re like, ah, it actually needs to be 15,000. And then you get there and it has to be 150 and then you get there and it’s got to be 1.5. And so the cool part is, is as you grow, it’s all just a, it’s like a rhythm that you get to understand.

26:19
So what’s funny about that Craigslist story is I would be picking up merchandise from these really sketchy locations. was this one time I went to this really bad neighborhood. I was like wearing my Stanford sweatshirt, glasses and whatnot. And this guy out of the back of a van, no joke, was selling hard drives and like the wires were cut off. He didn’t even bother disconnecting them. He was like, hey, you want to get these hard drives or not? I was so terrified that I just bought them all and then I left. I didn’t even test them. Anyway. That’s hysterical. But you know, I think those stories are important to share too because everybody thinks that like,

26:48
were some geniuses that have it all figured out. It’s like, no, we just kept doing it and failed a few times and kept going on it regardless. And then eventually it’s kind of hard. Mathematically, it’s just like the law of averages. If you keep going, you’ll figure something out eventually. Yeah, totally. I did want to talk about one line that I think was in your media kit that struck my eye. was 20th century equals one income stream, 21st century, seven to 10. If you as a human are not decentralized, you’re F’d. I don’t pass on this podcast. I Good for you.

27:18
So what can you kind of elaborate on that statement? Yeah, so two things. One, I think you make your money by earning it and then you grow your money by investing it. So I think it’s really important that people don’t try to do 47 things at once. I think it’s really important that you have focus in like one of those bets that you think could be that asymmetric return. But where people go wrong, I think, is they listen to those who have accumulated a lot of wealth who have survivorship bias.

27:46
So like have a friend Alex Hormozi who’s like, you should just do one thing every time you start another business, it’s a horcrux. Basically it like splits part of your soul. And part of me agrees with that. But part of me also thinks that he thinks that way because he had really one main business and he kept staying on it and he won. But what if that one business that he kept staying on failed? Then what did he have? He had all of his eggs in one basket and he probably would have been sleeping on a floor. And so it just depends on how much risk you wanna take. In my mind, I want…

28:15
multiple different avenues because I just don’t want to be able to fail that hard, which maybe means that I’m not like Alex who sold his first business or who sold his business for 40 or $50 million or something for part of it at like 30 or 31. But maybe what it does mean is I’m exactly where I am, which is I have a lot of income streams. I’ve never had like a big, huge, hey, here’s $50 million for one chunk, but I’ve had a lot of six and seven figure exits over the years that mean that I’ve lived really comfortably for a long time.

28:45
And I don’t lose that much sleep at night ever because I have a lot of like lures out in the lake, you so something’s kind of always biting. And I think there’s a right and wrong way to do it for sure. But for most people, I don’t think they’re obsessed with one thing with work. I don’t think there are that many people who are like Elon Musk and are willing to put in the pain that comes with obsessing about, let’s say Tesla for as long as he did.

29:12
I think most people just want to live a really nice life and that’s okay. And in order to do that, I think you need to diversify. guess I have my own opinions on this. I think in Alex’s case, he was in control of everything. Whereas some of these businesses at e-commerce feel, I don’t know if you got a chance to talk to some people, some people are like a hundred percent Amazon. And that to me, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night because it’s controlled by someone else, right? But I am just like you, like I have probably 10 or 11 income sources. That makes me feel more comfortable, but

29:42
I remember in the beginning, I only really had time to focus on one, maybe max two things. So were you always like that, diversified, or did you ever focus on just one thing? You know, I always had one main thing. I think that’s important. But I always had a side piece too, for sure. piece. Yeah. If your knew about this. Yeah, he wouldn’t like that. I always had, you know, one other thing on the side that I was working on too.

30:08
And maybe that’s just because I love working and I get pretty obsessive, but it’s hard for me to work on one thing forever exclusively. And so, I don’t know. I do think it’s a super power to be able to be obsessively focused on one thing all the time. I just don’t have that super power. Um, so I’d have a main thing and then I’d have an extra thing. Now, what I wouldn’t do is start three things at once. You know, that’s not a good way to go, but I like get to a point in one business where I’d be obsessed on it for like a year, two years. Then the business would start to like.

30:36
become in a range where you need to manage it as opposed to like figure it out. As soon as it hit management level, I hate that part. And so at that part, I need to bring in an operator to sort of run it because I really liked the growth stage of the business. And so I figured that out about myself. Now there are plenty of people, the more lucrative part of my opinion is the growth stage. Like, you know, it’s motoring, you’re going along, all you’re doing is like tweaking the wheels basically and watching it continue to climb. And so I think it’s important that you

31:06
keep some equity in it once you’ve gotten it to let’s say the first 1 million, 5 million, 10 million dollars. Whereas a lot of people, you know, if you’re like me and probably like you, we really like to start things and then it’s hard to make. I guess for me, it’s I like to start things and then like my wife does the operations, which is perfect. That’s what she likes. I hate operations. And for my other stuff, like I have a business partner who helps handle operations. Yeah, it’s really good offsetting.

31:33
I mean, that’s the old, I always think the words are kind of gross, but the visionary and the integrator. And I think when I call myself a visionary, I kind of want to vomit, but there is this thing about the person who sort of comes up with the crazy ideas, takes the risk, moves them forward, and then you need sort of the adult in the room that’s like, okay, here’s how we now take action on these consistently to move them forward.

32:01
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

32:30
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

32:41
I’m definitely not the adult in the room. Well, you know, I want to switch gears because I would say maybe two years ago, I didn’t see you much online, but now you’re like in my TikTok feed, like all day. Not that I spend all, well, sometimes I spend a lot of time on TikTok, but you’ve grown your account like crazy. And if you were to create contrary in thinking, I’m just kind of curious what launched that, like which traffic source did you focus on? I know TikTok is definitely one of them.

33:06
Yeah, TikTok’s new. So we’ve only been on TikTok for like the last four months, I’d say five months, something like that. OK, well, you’re killing it then. Oh, thanks. But TikTok’s been great. Yeah, I love it as a growth driver. Originally, I was really focused on stealing other people’s audiences for the newsletter. So, you know, our newsletter, ContrarianThinking.co, is a free newsletter each and every week. I’m pretty laser focused on growing that email list. You know, we want to be at 300,000 subscribers by the end of the year. We’re at like 120,000, something like that right now.

33:35
And so the reason I was so laser focused on that is because it’s your only owned audience as it’s not rented like the other social media platforms. But when I was first starting out, we grew a lot of that through like Facebook groups. So going into Facebook groups and sort of commenting and adding value and then dropping a link, you know, to our newsletter or to one of our blog posts and seeing if people wanted to sign up. We grew a lot of it through other social platforms like Reddit in the beginning was really helpful. Twitter was really helpful to grow audiences there.

34:03
I was never very good at SEO or going viral online generally. And so I had to kind of go to other areas where people were like-minded, drop our content in there and hope that we were able to grasp people. How do you get away with dropping links in groups? Like what’s your method? Because I would probably ban you. I mean, maybe, maybe not now, but. Yeah. So I think you have to be incredibly value added. you know, when we, I think, so there’s an article on contrarianthinking.co. If you go in and you search,

34:32
how to get your first 10,000 newsletter subscribers in 30 days. I basically said, in 30 days, I wanna grow to 10,000 people. How could I do it? I’m gonna document the process and see if I can hit it. And we ended up hitting it. And one of the reasons we did is Facebook groups like Trends, who’s like my friend, Sam Parr’s company, you’re yours too. So anyway, so in their group, I would comment in there like, hey, I just talked to this girl who grew her, who bought some land in Joshua Tree for $10,000.

35:01
and then put it on hip camp and rent it out for $50 a night for like 10 different spots on her couple acres. And now she’s making like, you know, $13,000 a month or something on it. I thought the store was really interested, but I was wondering like how I might do this and this and this differently. Like, what do you guys think? And then, you know, if this is helpful for you, I’m happy to drop like the link to the blog post I did on it. And so it would be no blog post in it, super valuable. A bunch of people would be asking for it. Then I dropped the blog post, right? And so-

35:30
you basically, I would have people and so then the moderators, what are the moderators gonna do? Like, no, you guys can’t have this thing that you’re asking for. And so that would be the way that I would do it. And if nobody really bit on the article and it wasn’t a vent or the segment that I wrote, then I wouldn’t drop the blog post. So that way, if you’re only giving people something that they actually want. That’s an interesting strategy. Yeah. And then you’re not linking to like an email signup form really, right? It’s literally a

36:00
blog post that probably has an email sign-in form in there. That’s right. And I could do way better with optimization of that. Like we should have like the big thing that’s like, hey, there’s the league magnet to how to do exactly this. We’re trying to mess around with stuff like that. What I’ve always been really good at, I haven’t always been. What I’m pretty good at is viral content. Like I can come up with stuff that I think is naturally interesting to me and right in a way where I’m pretty sure other people are going to be interested. What I’ve never been as good at is

36:28
Oh, how do we hook up the funnels and how do we have the lead magnets? And then how do we flow it back through this whole system? And then how do we convert them up to here in X and Y and Z? You know, I was a former journalist and then that’s what I would do is I would focus more on organic viral content if you can obsess on that. And then there’s a lot of people you can hire for the backend that can help you with the optimization. It’s funny. We have opposite strengths. My strength is like the technical backend stuff. Interesting. Viral content is a little bit harder. I’ve gotten it. I’ve like forced myself to learn it over the years, but yeah.

36:57
Unfortunately, I’m not a reformed journalist. I’m not sure I want to go into journalism, but I imagine those skills really helped you. They did. They did. Well, if you ever want to riff on it, I’m happy to talk the viral part and you can help me talk the conversion part. All right. Well, so let’s wrap up here. So let’s say you’re listening and you want to get into business somehow. What are just like one or two places that you might look just to get started? Yeah. Well, one…

37:22
There’s two things. I’ll talk about my own sites because I think those are the most valuable. I’m slightly biased because I created them. But unconventionalacquisitions.com, that’s where we talk business buying in particular. There’s a free blog on there. There’s also paid resources if you want to take a course or join the mastermind. Contrarianthinking.co, I think there’s a hundred and something articles on there, one every week. Everything on there is free. You can check it out. The other thing that I might ponder for people is just, I think there’s something on unconventional acquisitions that’s called like

37:52
our free nine day challenge. And it’s basically nine days of getting you to think about how it would look if you were to buy a business. And so I sort of believe that most things are like a muscle. You just need to practice them until you get to a point where you’re like, oh, this isn’t as intimidating as I think it is, which is how I felt about e-commerce. And now I feel more comfortable with it. It’s just because of muscle memory.

38:17
And so I think that resource is really, really helpful. And then everything we put out on social, hopefully most of the stuff on social, would say is, to give you awareness of what’s happening and some quick tactics and tools, but you really need to dive into either like our YouTube or the newsletters in order to go deeper. Maybe for somebody like you, it’ll just trigger like, Oh yeah, we should buy this company and we should do this. But for most people, they need like the next step down from it. Right.

38:44
Yeah, and I would say like you do a really good job on your TikToks of getting people excited about boring stuff. Good. Yeah. And then I guess from there, at least the path, let me tell you the path I took. So I saw these TikTok videos and then I clicked on your bio and that led me to contrary and thinking and then I was like, oh, okay, wait, she’s going to be at e-commerce fuel. need to talk to this woman. I love it. Well, that’s perfect. Because then, I mean, that’s how I think other people get owners in their wheelhouse too.

39:11
is you go to these events and you reach out to people proactively and then in person you shoot your shot. And it’s always so much easier to connect there. And especially when you’re somebody like you giving value also as opposed to just asking somebody to be your mentor. That’s not very interesting. Oh yeah, that’s the worst way to do it. I must say, Cody, mean, like when I first saw you, was like, maybe this woman’s a little intimidating, but what the hell, go say hi. It’s probably the leather pants. But then you were really down to earth and awesome. So I appreciate you come on the show.

39:40
And I know you got to go. So contrary in thinking, I’ll link all that stuff in the show notes and thank so much for coming on the show. Yay. Thanks. Come hit me up next time you come into Austin. Sounds good. All right. Bye everybody. Take care.

39:55
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now, Cody is an amazing woman. There’s a lot of truth into everything she says and her content makes me think outside of the box, which is great. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 419. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

40:24
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post-purchase flow, a went back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now I talk about how I these tools in my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own ecommerce store,

40:54
Head on over to MyWifeCoderJob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.