Codie Sanchez on money and Latino ownership: ‘We already have the entrepreneurial instinct’

I started out as a public school kid, with no money. No idea how to actually “make it.”

I went to Arizona State to study journalism because I wanted to tell stories that mattered. A grant from Howard Buffett got me off campus and down to the U.S.–Mexico border, where I reported during the cartel wars. Wild in retrospect. I wrote about human trafficking, drug smuggling, and women disappearing into a system that barely noticed they were gone. I saw bodies hanging from overpasses and missing posters littering the streets.

That work changed the way I saw money. Money wasn’t just about houses or vacations. It decided who had protection, who had options, and who could end up dead in the desert and no one cared.

I got jaded. So I went where money was understood. I worked at Vanguard, Goldman Sachs, State Street, and First Trust. I learned how capital moved, how deals got done, and how the people making the decisions thought. Eventually, I realized I didn’t only want to advise or invest in businesses. I wanted to own them. I think ownership = freedom.

It wasn’t a straight line. Straight lines are mostly something people invent after the fact.

Yes. One day - I looked down the hallway at the people ahead of me and thought, I don’t want their lives. They had money. They also were miserable. Divorced and showing off Ferrari’s and second wives. I was doing well, but I was climbing a ladder to a place I didn’t want to end up.

But I had no idea what to do next. Later, when I was working in private equity, a few of the men around me started talking about deals they owned on the side. One had invested in a marina. I asked how he’d bought a marina, because in my mind you either bought the whole thing or you didn’t.

He hadn’t. He’d written a small check, watched how the business performed, and invested more later.

That was the crack in the wall. I had treated ownership like a locked room for rich people. It turned out everybody started small and with a few shekels, so I threw mine in too.

With my paycheck. Very glamorous. My first step wasn't buying an entire company. I invested a small amount alongside people who knew more than I did. I watched and asked annoying questions.

When I bought my first laundromat, I used income from my W-2 job for the down payment and structured part of the purchase with the seller. The business helped pay for itself over time.

Seller financing gets mangled online into “free business.” It isn't free. You owe the money, and now you owe it to the person who used to own the joint. But it can make a good acquisition possible without requiring you to show up with the full purchase price in cash.

I started smaller than my ego wanted. Brilliant in retrospect.

I wish somebody had told me this sooner, you ain’t never gonna get funding from a VC. Only 2 of 2,000 companies do. Your first source of capital is your business itself.

That’s what the 12 levers in Own or Be Owned are for: Pricing, Persona, Problem, Product, Profit, Pitch, People, Promote, Process, Predicament, Path, and Protect. Fix the price. Stop selling the wrong product to the wrong person. Hunt the bottleneck. Clean up the process. Protect the cash. Pay yourself first. Then let the profit fund the next hire, the next machine, the next location.

Most owners think they have a capital problem. Sometimes they do. Often, the business is just running faster to stay in place. That is no bueno. And you’re not alone everyone falls into this.

Revenue is not money. Ya can’t eat “potential.” Cash is king. And if you’re three weeks from zero and don’t know it, nothing else you’re working on matters. Or as Wu Tang Clan said, “Cash Rules Everything Around Me.”

PROFITS. My entire new book Own or Be Owned is about how to take a “boring” or normal business and make it make you money. Inside your business, there are 12 profit levers that can completely change the financial trajectory of your business forever. 

The problem is that most small business owners have no idea how to use the levers, where to find them, or what they even are. If you can figure out in your business where your biggest unlock is, you’ll never have to ask other people for money. You’ll just find it inside your business, just like I have.

The first lesson is that I bought myself a job before I bought myself a business, and nearly everyone does that once. I was in the weeds fixing machines and chasing an employee who did not show up. Shoot me. The fix was not working harder. The fix was running a real operating system that diagnoses, scores, strategizes and then reviews your 12 profit levers every single quarter.

That feeling of being the bottleneck in the thing you supposedly own is why I wrote Own or Be Owned. The subtitle is build a business so good it doesn’t need you, and I mean that literally, because I had built the opposite and I didn't have a name for it at the time. So we surveyed 15,000+ business owners to find out how common it was and how it actually shows up, and we turned the answers into an Owners Score. Honestly this is such a hack… go to www.ownerscore.com; it’s like the horoscope and personality test you didn’t even know you needed in your business.

I didn’t have anybody giving me a handout early on. No trust fund or rich husband, unfortunately. Nobody looked like me. I was the only Latina in my group so many times, I can barely count. That was annoying at some points, but what I realized is that if I was hanging out with a bunch of rich white people… they talked different. They talked about deals they did. Investments made. How much cash they lost or won? I realized it was incredibly dumb how little Latinos talk about money, focus on getting more of it, and share the inside secrets about their wins and losses.

I grew up thinking that meant you were a greedy, bad person if you talked about it all the time. As I got older, I realized that’s the lie that’s been keeping us poor. Rich people talk about money. Business owners use systems. Real ballers run their business like private equity does. They do not cowboy it.

We already have the entrepreneurial instinct. What we do not have is the conversation.

There is a way men in finance talk to each other that I did not know existed until I was standing in the room. They talk about how they structured their taxes, and they talk about club deals, which just means a few of them put money together around the nineteenth hole and now one of them owns part of a car wash. That is never published anywhere. You have to be there to hear it.

So the first change is access to those rooms, which means we build our own and bring people in instead of pulling the ladder up behind us. The second is capital, because Latino owners are still turned down at higher rates with comparable numbers, and we have to stop assuming the answer is no before we ask. The third is language, because you cannot buy a thing you have never heard anyone describe. 

It started because I got pushed. My dad says you either listen to the universe or the universe gives you a shove. He was right. I got shoved a few times. I got told I was unemployable. I got told that if I wanted to go run things my way, I needed to find a new company. I got told that if I wasn't going to row in their direction, I needed to get a new boat. That's all actually fair. They did me a giant favor, and that giant favor led to contrarian thinking reaching millions of people because I got kicked out of the corporate club.

I think the biggest thing that has made all the difference with our businesses is that we focus on one thing: profit. Most people in business do not know how to make real money and keep it in their businesses, and we have always had to run ours profitably.

Everything I teach is about how to make sure your business actually makes you money. If you just want to grow a business fast and burn money, that is probably not for you. If you want profits, I'm your girl, and that's why millions of people listen to us.

Give the information for free, make people pay for the implementation.

I want to serve 99.9% of people entirely for free. We do around 130 million views a month, and in a given year we work with roughly 5,000 people on the advisory and investment side. I think this only works because I’m willing to give 10X more than we ever take.

Business owners and people who want to scale businesses come to us and realize, “Man, if this free stuff is so good, can you imagine what it's like to actually work with them one-on-one?” They’re right. Our business owners grow faster than almost any cohort, and that's because we’re really good at what we do.

We document it like crazy. We have tech and systems that are usually only for the Fortune 1000, but we give them away to people who make hundreds of thousands or millions inside their businesses.