Stop creating businesses. Buy one instead.

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CODIE SANCHEZ: Unless we’re telling somebody to go dive with great white sharks, in which case they might get eaten, nobody’s going to die from trying to start a business or buy a business and having it not work 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 at the front of anything.”

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Codie Sanchez, founder and CEO of finance and media company Contrarian Thinking. With stock market valuations high and the job market tight, Codie argues in her new book, Own or Be Owned, that taking control of your financial future right now requires investing in yourself. Her 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.

Hey, listeners, Bob Safian here. Before we get into today’s episode, I want to introduce you to Elia Wallen, founder and CEO of Engine. Engine is a sponsor of the show, which is something we’re very grateful for. Welcome, Eli.

ELIA WALLEN: Thanks so much for having me, Bob.

SAFIAN: How is AI impacting how people book, manage, and finance travel today, and how far along the progress curve are we?

WALLEN: It’s still very, very early. The larger corporations, the bigger businesses, really have not had a lot of opportunity to adopt AI yet in a meaningful way, primarily because of the legacy systems that are still trying to catch up. I would say on the consumer side, you’ve seen more. You’ve 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 take your hands off and let the agent run and book, I think there’s too much nuance. There’s too much change potentially that can come up.

SAFIAN: As you’re building Engine and the Engine experience, do you assume your customers will be AI agents? Is a service for AI agents different than one for humans? How do you navigate that?

WALLEN: Our customers can connect and start to glean insights and understand what’s going on with their travel program from their LLM directly, but I don’t think the industry has quite yet caught up to the expectations of what buyers have, compared with the capabilities of the technology today.

SAFIAN: So what makes Engine distinctive among the tech tools that people could use for their travel planning?

WALLEN: 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 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 — this was all built around 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 the past structure of some of those more legacy platforms.

SAFIAN: Elia, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing more about what makes Engine unique.

SANCHEZ: It was a pleasure. Really appreciate it.

SAFIAN: And now on to today’s show. I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Codie Sanchez, founder and CEO of finance and media company Contrarian Thinking. Codie, welcome back to the show.

SANCHEZ: Thank you for having me. Thrilled to be here.

Copy LinkWhy ownership beats passive investing

SAFIAN: You 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?

SANCHEZ: Yeah, 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. 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 them. I think we’ve now worked with somewhere around 15,000 small business owners. Most 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. Then what we realized is, 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, how do we get them to run profitable businesses that you don’t hate, that don’t make you miserable every day?

SAFIAN: And just to be clear, can you work for someone else and not be owned?

SANCHEZ: Oh, yeah. 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 are many days — catch me on the wrong day, Bob — when I might say, “I’ll come work for you.”

SAFIAN: 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. So owning a piece of it could be owning your own business. It could be owning shares in the stock market. It could be owning a home. Is all ownership equally — what’s the right word — motivational?

SANCHEZ: Yeah. I don’t have any data to support this, so I’m not sure exactly, quantifiably. But the difference with owning part of a business that you are a part of is that you have some control over the outcome.

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. When 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 helping build, you’re not going to burn down the house you were trying to build.

So I think about that sort of all around our world, and whether we can just get little parts of these businesses too if we don’t want to take on the big risk of owning the whole thing.

Copy LinkHow betting on yourself pays more

SAFIAN: When you’re deciding where to invest your money and your time, but really your money, would you prioritize a business over, say, owning your own home or individual stocks? Although people have made a ton of money on stocks lately.

SANCHEZ: Yeah, 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. They’ll figure out what they’re capable of and also be able to make more because of it. It’s also the only investment where, even if you lose, you win, because you can take some experience from it.

If you YOLO into Robinhood, OK, maybe you learn not to buy at the top or not to buy in market hype cycles, but what is your real learning experience? 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. It feels special to own it.

SAFIAN: Because it’s such a core part of the American dream. You sort of feel like it doesn’t really need to be.

SANCHEZ: Yeah. 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. 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 cash flow so nobody can own you.

SAFIAN: You alluded to this when you talked about the motivation for this book versus the first book. Owning a business can trap you as easily as it frees you. I know the founders I talk to, and I’m sure you hear this all the time, say, “If I’d known how hard it was, I never would have started this.” Is it better sometimes not to know how hard it is?

SANCHEZ: Well, first, 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. So it’s almost like the reverse of the casino. In the casino, they only tell you when they win. In business, they really only like talking about the difficulty or hardships, or when they’ve raised a bunch of outside venture capital. So I think for most small business owners, yes, it’s hard, but they kind of love the game. It’s an addictive game to play.

The problem is that they aren’t profitable. Everything’s more fun when you’re making money. 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. So we’ve got to figure out how to have profitable businesses, because then the pain and difficulty are a lot easier to manage.

Copy LinkSystems matter more than hustle

SAFIAN: What are the mistakes or the traps that folks who are running their own businesses are falling into? It’s not that they’re not working hard. They’re not working on the right things?

SANCHEZ: Yeah. If you look at the dispersion of returns, basically the top 10 to 20 percent of companies are 30 times more profitable than the lower companies. What we’ve seen is that most business owners don’t run on systems, and even I see it in my business. 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, was because I couldn’t get them to use a system. They wanted to cowboy it, because cowboying it as a business owner feels good.

SAFIAN: By cowboy it, you mean sort of just wing it. You make the decision based on what you’re feeling.

SANCHEZ: Exactly. 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 up. 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. It’s not that hard, actually. The only hard part is that it’s more fun to wing it and riff on things.

That’s probably what made you an entrepreneur to start with. But do you want to make money or do you want to riff?

SAFIAN: 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.

SANCHEZ: It’s really important that 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.” But sadly, I’m not as smart as the guy, I’m not as rich as the guy, so…

SAFIAN: Or as lucky, too, right?

SANCHEZ: 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.

What we realized in this book is that 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 price 30 to 40 percent lower than an archetype that is a closer or a ball hog. So your first input is: What are you? What 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 a data set of 30,000 businesses.

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? None of this is new. These are all theories that have existed forever in private equity. We’re just applying them to small business owners in a way they never got access to before.

SAFIAN: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like the kinds of rigor that more established, bigger businesses have used for a while. It doesn’t seem like rocket science. Was it just too complicated to do before? Is it cheaper now?

SANCHEZ: Yeah, well, it was really complicated. It was expensive. If you wanted to 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 engagement, and they’re basically just going to tell you the stuff to cut costs and what you want to hear, even though they’re really smart guys. No shame to their game. What we realized was, what about small businesses? The HVAC company or the roofing company or the ad agency doesn’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. It actually is not rocket science, but when you’re in your business, there’s so much on your to-do list. Every day, you’re just treading water as a business owner, and I’m hoping to stop that.

SAFIAN: And do you find in your data that small business owners are going to AI bots and asking them for advice?

SANCHEZ: Oh, yeah.

SAFIAN: About what they should do or where the next market is? And is that useful, or is that a different kind of trap?

SANCHEZ: 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. It also tends to tell you things you want to hear about your business. It doesn’t tell you the difficulties. So you really have to stress-test it. I’ve actually started to say, “Don’t give me aggregate data. I want only data on home services businesses located in the Southwest. What do they price at, and where is that data set from?”

SAFIAN: And so if my search, if my prompt, is that specific, I can get more valuable information?

SANCHEZ: You can, but the problem is they usually don’t have access to that data.

SAFIAN: And they’ll make it up, and you won’t know that they’ve made it up.

SANCHEZ: That’s the problem.

SAFIAN: Because they always give you an answer. They never say, “I don’t know,” right?

SANCHEZ: Exactly. And a lot of the advice is super problematic because you’ll say, “Well, should I be spending more on advertising or marketing?” 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.” You look at the P&L, and you’re like, “Hey, you’re spending 2 percent of your revenue on advertising and marketing, and the industry average is 15 percent. You actually have a positive return on ad spend here. Let’s increase this. This is a very easy thing to do.” But AI isn’t going to get there because you won’t even know the questions to ask it.

SAFIAN: And for your business, the McKinseys 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.

SANCHEZ: It’s way harder. I think about this daily. We’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. If I were even advising my own business, our issue is always that 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 return ROI to us on top of it. If we didn’t do that, I don’t think we could do this at scale at this price point, because the market is naturally going to move you to more expensive options.

SAFIAN: Right. It’s a better business to go to the bigger companies that you can charge more, but then it’s moving you away from your mission.

SANCHEZ: Yeah, exactly. There’s three types of businesses I talk about in the book: lifestyle, scale, and exit. Most small business owners 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 into 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.

SAFIAN: As opposed to trying to do everything.

SANCHEZ: Exactly.

SAFIAN: Yeah.

SANCHEZ: Most of them want to do all three. That doesn’t work.

SAFIAN: Or sometimes you do one, and sometimes you do the other, and that’s being a cowboy.

SANCHEZ: Right. Yeah, exactly. And then I have to fire you, which is not fun.

SAFIAN: If you want to work for Codie, 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.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Codie Sanchez of Contrarian Thinking talked about why owning your own business should be everyone’s goal. Now 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.

Copy LinkWhy buying beats starting for most owners

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 one for you?

SANCHEZ: You can go to BizScout, go to our calculators page, and they’ll give you a valuation analysis. Talk to one of our representatives, and they’ll tell you, “Yeah, your business is totally sellable,” or, “Here’s how you should prep to sell it.”

SAFIAN: Because a lot of small businesses don’t know how to value what they have.

SANCHEZ: Well, yeah. I didn’t. Before I was in finance, I would have had no idea. And also, how are you going to get the reps at 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 question 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 Zestimate, about what a house is worth?

SAFIAN: Yes.

SANCHEZ: So Scout Sites is the same thing. It’s trained on tens of thousands of businesses. It’s never really existed for small businesses at scale. Obviously, you have to do more due diligence on top of that, but for the first time ever, you can be like, “Whoa, these guys are crazy. This is totally out of market. It’s only rated a 30, which would be an F, as opposed to an 87, aka a B+.”

SAFIAN: But if I want to have a roofing business, or I want to open a bakery, how do I decide whether maybe I should go on here and see if there’s a small business for me to buy versus me starting one of my own? Is that about how much money I have to begin with, or where I am in my career? How do I make that decision?

SANCHEZ: I don’t think, unless you have a burning desire to start a business, you can’t sleep for wanting to start a business, the data says don’t do it just for the money. 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.

SAFIAN: Yeah. Boy, that sounds like, “Why would I do this at all?”

SANCHEZ: 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. And if you really want the profits from 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 no 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 less than 13%. So you go get a loan on a small business, it gets SBA-approved, and you have a 13% failure rate over a 10-year period, as opposed to start-ups, with a 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.

SAFIAN: Why is that?

SANCHEZ: Well, one, people are always going to dislike you for succeeding at the thing they were not able to succeed at. People will hate you for having less and doing more with it. So if somebody has gone through something incredibly traumatizing, like buying a business and failing at it, all they see are other people who will fail, too. And I’m not sure how that is helpful at all. Unless we’re telling somebody to go dive with great white sharks, in which case they might get eaten, nobody’s going to die from trying to start a business or buy a business and having it not work 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 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, OK. 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? OK. They can’t do it, but you can? Come on. We’re not that special. I’m not that special. So I think that’s why, sadly.

SAFIAN: Now, there’s this risk, of course, of putting so much of yourself into it, and so there’s this trend about fractional ownership, sort of co-owning a business. Are you in favor of that or wary of the complications of having to share that way?

SANCHEZ: Yeah. Well, it’s how I started, so I can’t be too against it. I didn’t have the balls, quite honestly, to jump into a full-on acquisition. I was a little too freaked out to take that full-on risk.

So I wanted to own part of a business, and I did it with partners in the beginning, and then again and again and again. We actually created something at the Contrarian Academy where you can get partnered up with other people. So if you want to be an operator of a business but you need investors or capital, you can come together. If you want to be an operator of a business and bring cash, and you want another operator to bring cash to the business, you can come together. There are a lot of best practices we share about how not to totally regret the person you do this with and how to make sure the terms are useful. You’re going to make mistakes, and you probably will have some regrets. But anytime you diversify risk, there’s just less likelihood for you to go bankrupt, which I kind of like for the first deal. Like, Bob owned part of a donut shop down the street, got a little rev share from it, and saw how he liked that before he dove into the whole thing. I’m totally fine with it.

Copy LinkHow to use AI without chasing hype

SAFIAN: I asked you about AI a little bit earlier, and I’m curious how new tech affects new business owners. We’ve seen Sam Altman saying he expects a solo unicorn to emerge — one person building a billion-dollar enterprise using AI. Do you feel like we’re going to see a boom in one-person businesses that way? Or does that fall into the scaling versus the lifestyle categories that you have?

SANCHEZ: Yeah, I think there will be some crazy outliers. Those people probably would have built really big businesses without AI, too, so I don’t think it turns a normal person into a superhero. That’d be cool. I think it is an accelerator for what is already inside of you, one way or the other, which is actually a pretty dangerous game. In my mind, I don’t want to compete with the Elon Musks or the Sam Altmans or the Bill Gateses. Those guys are super technical. They’ve got billions of dollars in funding. I think the better play is, let’s go compete with the handyman down the street who’s 65, and then I can add just a little bit of AI on top of it. I can add a little bit of tech on top of it, and maybe some cool branding, and I can win. That is just a better game to play, in my opinion, than trying to play Russian roulette with a bunch of tech nerds who are really smart, obsessed with this, and probably don’t do anything else. I don’t think that’s the game I want to try to play.

SAFIAN: It’s interesting, as I’m listening to you, your book will outline for me the steps and the questions I should ask to be able to identify and get my business to run better, but a lot of it is also emotional about yourself. It’s about being clear about what you want and what your goals are because that dictates your business strategy.

SANCHEZ: Yeah. Isn’t it crazy, though, that there are so few business books that do that? I can give somebody advice until I am blue in the face, but if that is not their unique skill set, it’s not going to work for their business. And then the secondary level that’s kind of cool is, let’s say you’re an employee, you’re not an owner. I would make my boss take this. I’d be like, “I want to know what your weakness or strength is. I want to know what mine is because if I know how to hire, then I know how to work around these other types of people. I’m going to get more equity and upside in this business.” And so at the end of each chapter, there’s basically a portion where it’s like, “OK, owner, you do this, and then hustler, you do this.”

SAFIAN: You make it sound like it’s so simple. Like, it’s basic. It’s all out there. You just have to put it together, but I guess discipline is never simple.

SANCHEZ: There’s always a shiny new object to chase. What we found when we bring our owners in — we do these events once a month, and we bring business owners in — they’re like, “Well, what am I doing with AI?” Bob, perfect example: there’s this HVAC company, commercial, based in Florida. And the guy is like, “Well, I’m working on this AI integration, and it’s going here, and it’s been pretty incredible.” And I just said, “Can I have your phone number for your business?” I call the business. It’s Friday. It’s 10:15 in the morning. I call the business. Nobody answers. There is, I kid you not, an AI special jingle the guy made. It’s really cute, and then it goes to voicemail. And I’m like, “Guy, forget the AI. What is this voicemail? Get an answering service.”

SAFIAN: Right.

SANCHEZ: “You just lost a commercial client potentially. What are we doing?” And so sometimes when you’re the business owner, you have too many things going on. You need somebody to go, “That right there is where the money is. Just do that, and then you can layer the cute stuff on top of it later.” So our methodology overall is like, you’re kind of overcomplicating it, and that’s OK. We all do it. Let’s go back to boring. It actually works really well.

Copy LinkDo small business owners need a personal brand?

SAFIAN: You personally have had a lot of success within the creator economy.

You have millions of followers across platforms. Is building a personal brand now sort of an economic necessity for everyone, for every business?

SANCHEZ: No, I do not think most small businesses should build a personal brand at all. I did it by accident during COVID because I was stuck at home, and I started with a newsletter, and I liked writing, and then I had fun creating, and I was like, “Oh, this is fun.” If I just wanted to optimize for making money, I would not do this. There are cool parts to it. Don’t get me wrong. There are very cool parts. I get to have lovely conversations with you. I get to go on Good Morning America. That’s very ego-satisfying, for sure, but most small businesses don’t make money off their personal brands. I mean, if you knew what most of the YouTubers actually make, the sprinkler guy down the road makes 5x. They don’t make that much money, and it’s really hard to stay relevant forever.

SAFIAN: Yes.

SANCHEZ: It won’t be too far in the future where people won’t care at all about me anymore, and that’s OK because I have these other businesses. But you don’t want to create a business of you.

SAFIAN: Yeah, no, relevance is an exhausting and difficult track to stay on.

SANCHEZ: And you’ve got to have a thick skin, too.

Copy LinkWhere small business opportunity is rising

SAFIAN: We’ve seen growing media coverage around hands-on jobs that can’t be displaced by AI.

SANCHEZ: Yeah.

SAFIAN: When you’re considering a small business right now, are those the kind of industries you should be leaning toward?

SANCHEZ: If I had to look at the top industries right now, I would say, first of all, anything in manufacturing. There’s a ton of grants and a ton of opportunity to reshore back to the U.S. right now. Home services have a massive shortage. Then I would go to more of the skilled trades. You do have to go to some sort of trade school, but the pay is actually quite high. People will say, “Well, a plumber is never going to make $300,000 a year. He might make $125,000 a year,” but that misses the point. As a skilled tradesman, your ability to then go buy a plumbing business is so much higher than anybody else’s.

SAFIAN: The world seems pretty chaotic right now: political uncertainty, trade war with Canada, oil prices. It might make people feel like now is not the time to take on new risks, that we need to just focus on what we control right in front of us and stay here and not change anything. What do you say to that impulse?

SANCHEZ: The world has actually never been better in most ways. I always ask, is it a feeling or is that the math? And the math says, writ large, we live longer, we’re wealthier on average than we’ve ever been before, and we have more opportunities than we’ve ever had before. If you live in a developed country, even though in some ways it is harder — houses are more expensive, groceries might be more expensive — some of those not-so-small things are harder. It’s also never been simpler in a lot of ways to get wealthy. So I would say, don’t ever let market economics or somebody else labeling you a victim, or the time as not being right, stop you from making it your time right now. Because people will win in every market. It’s just, are you going to decide to be one of them or not?

SAFIAN: Yeah. And time is the one thing we don’t have an unlimited amount of, right?

SANCHEZ: Why would you ever let somebody tell you that you can’t just because it is hard right now or chaotic? Yes, and you’re probably more capable than you’ve given yourself credit for. You’re not going to listen to the people who tell you that it’s possible for somebody else but not for you. No, I don’t believe that.

SAFIAN: Well, Codie, this was great. Thanks so much for doing it.

SANCHEZ: Thank you guys for taking the time and covering it. I really appreciate it.

SAFIAN: I love Codie’s optimism amid all the tumult in today’s world. I’ll confess I can get distracted by all the troubling headlines, and it’s good to be reminded of the positives. It’s also good to remember that the only time given to us is right now, so why not make the most of it? I do think a sense of ownership changes how you view the world and how you view your work. For me, I don’t necessarily need to be the quote-unquote owner of a business to have that feeling, but I appreciate that everyone is different. As for buying a business or starting a business, Codie’s underlying message is to craft your ownership and your career based on your own proclivities and goals. Are you looking for a lifestyle, an exit, a scale journey? Are you a cowboy? Success starts by being honest with ourselves.