Codie Sanchez

Codie Sanchez has built an audience of millions around an idea that sounds almost old-fashioned in an era obsessed with startups: sometimes the smartest business is one that already exists. Laundromats, home services and other everyday companies have become central to the former Wall Street investor’s case for creating wealth through ownership.

In 2026, she is pushing that idea further. On September 18th, Sanchez launched her second book, Own or Be Owned: Build a Business So Good It Doesn’t Need You, shifting the conversation from buying a company to building one that can operate without consuming its founder’s life. 

© Chelsea Guglielmino

The release also came with something more tangible. Through a partnership with business-formation platform Bizee, four entrepreneurs are set to receive $25,000 each, putting $100,000 directly behind people trying to turn an idea into a company.

It is a long way from where Sanchez began professionally. After graduating early from Arizona State University with a journalism degree, she reported from Ciudad Juárez on human trafficking and received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for her work. Finance came next. She joined Vanguard in 2008 and later worked at Goldman Sachs, State Street and First Trust, spending years inside an industry where access to capital and investment knowledge was often concentrated among a relatively small group.

For Sanchez, who has spoken openly about being Latina and navigating spaces where she sometimes felt underestimated, that experience eventually informed a very different kind of career. She founded Contrarian Thinking in 2020 with the goal of teaching more people how to build financial independence through business ownership.

© IG: Codie Sanchez

By 2025, that mission was growing beyond media and education. BizScout, the business-buying marketplace connected to the Contrarian Thinking ecosystem, had reached more than 60,000 users and 600,000 deal lookups while developing tools designed to make acquisitions easier to understand. Sanchez’s first book, Main Street Millionaire, had also become a New York Times bestseller.

The new book brings her argument into its next phase. Buying the business is only the beginning; the larger challenge is creating something durable enough to give its owner more freedom, not less. Pairing that message with $100,000 for emerging entrepreneurs makes the 2026 launch particularly fitting. Sanchez has spent years telling people to think like owners. Now she is helping four of them get the capital they need to begin.