Wrote a book about founders who can't let go of the companies they built, arguing on Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin that being indispensable is a dependency, not a work habit.
Sanchez is walking through what she calls the 12 profit levers, built from running about 1,600 small businesses through her system. Pricing comes first: before chasing leads or new customers, she says, most owners are simply charging too little.
Motley Fool Hidden Gems InvestingAround 04:14 into the episode
Codie Sanchez
…proven to make businesses profitable and cash flowing for decades and apply them to normal small businesses without having to take part of their company when we do it? And that is what owner be owned is, is a system I wish I had back when I thought it was really miserable to run one business too.
Rachel Warren
Yeah, talk us through some of those systems. You know, you're speaking with a small business owner. Their business is not profitable. They're trying to scale. What tends to be the issue there? And then what are the solutions that your system presents?
Codie Sanchez
…three things is holding you back from being as profitable as you want to be. And the first one is actually quite easy. You don't have to get another customer. You don't have to spend another dollar. It's just your pricing is probably wrong. This is not that sexy to talk about. Everybody wants to talk about leads and sales and offers. Okay, fine. If you're an incredible salesperson, do that. But for most small businesses, they're underpriced 30 to 300%. In those 1,600 businesses we've analyzed, you want to know how many were overpriced? Zero. There was not a single one. And this is cross-industry that was overpriced in their market based on like market-based pricing. So first is your prices are probably too low and you probably don't have enough high ticket prices. Number two is in your business right now, you're probably selling to the wrong persona. So, you're probably selling to somebody who is like you as opposed to your richest potential customer. And…
Rachel Warren
One of the things that struck me from your book was this idea that a highly successful quarter, but also a deeply burned out business owner can be identical on a standard PL statement. So, if you're an analyst or an investor, you're looking past that surface level revenue. How can you see if an…
Codie Sanchez
In our world, we say that to be the hero in your business is to be addicted to heroin. Because if you are the single key man risk in your business and everything surrounds you, you have probably a too low-paying job with a terrible boss you can't escape yourself. And so, the main thing you're…
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Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
Sanchez was arguing that entrepreneurs have trauma-bonded over how hard business is, when the real problem is that most small businesses aren't profitable enough for the difficulty to be worth it. It sits inside her wider pitch on the episode: don't start a business, buy one. She puts the SBA loan failure rate at under 13% over ten years against roughly 90% for startups.
…to a job maybe that you don't like or something that you are not sure you want to do. And 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.
Bob Safian
…book versus the first book. Like owning a business can trap you as easily as it frees you. And I know that founders I talk to, I'm sure you hear this all the time too. Like, if I known how hard it was, I never would have started this. You know, is it better sometimes not to know how hard it is?
Codie Sanchez
…only tell you when they win. In business, they only really like talking about the difficulty or hardships or when they've raised a bunch of outside venture capital. And so I think for most small business owners, yes, it's hard, but they kind of love the game. Like it's an addictive game to play. The problem is that they aren't profitable. Everything's more fun when you're making money. And so 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 U.S. And so we've got to figure out how to have profitable businesses because then the pain and difficulty is a lot easier to manage.
Bob Safian
What are the, I don't know, the mistakes or the traps that folks who are, you know, running their own businesses are running themselves into. It's not that they're not working hard. They're not working on. The right things?
Codie Sanchez
Yeah. If you look at the, you know, dispersion of returns, basically the top 10 to 20% of companies, they're like 30x more profitable than the lower companies. What we've seen is that most business owners, they don't run on systems. And even I see it in my business. I mean, I just had to let go of…
Bob Safian
By cowboy it, you mean sort of just like wing it. You just make the decision based on what you're feeling like.
Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
Sanchez came on to discuss her book about founders who cannot let go of the companies they built. She casts the pull of being indispensable as a dependency rather than a work habit, which is also how the episode frames the diagnostic question of whether you are addicted to your own business. The line opens the episode, ahead of a conversation about buying boring businesses.
Money Rehab with Nicole LapinAround 01:13 into the episode
Codie Sanchez
You don't need to be smart or brilliant or remember everything to run a really profitable business. You need named frameworks and systems that you can steal from other people in order to take their 10,000 hours and apply it to you.
Nicole Lapin
…sound cooler than launching a startup. She built contrarian thinking by shouting from the rooftops that boring businesses are the most overlooked path to wealth in America. Today she talks about the thesis of her new book, Own or Be Own, and how to tell if you're addicted to your own business.
Codie Sanchez
If you are a founder and you are trying to be a hero all the time, you will eventually do as Spider-Man says you'll become the villain. You want to be a hero because it tastes like heroin. It is the most addictive substance in the world to feel needed.
Nicole Lapin
We talk about how conventional rise and grind advice is complicated for pregnant women.
Codie Sanchez
There was many a day where I was laying on the floor of my little office and really just thinking, if I don't have the business established, I should not establish a baby. And that was because there weren't other women around me that I saw doing it.
Nicole Lapin
And the step-by-step playbook, if you're thinking about buying a boring business.
Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
