Codie Sanchez has more than a dozen years experience at Wall Street firms, owns a portfolio of businesses, is a self-made millionaire, a podcast host and recently became a New York Times bestselling author with Main Street Millionaire, a book explaining how people can create their own wealth through ownership. But,her initial inspiration wasn’t to ‘get rich,’ and rather than a boardroom, her journey and ‘why’ began in the dusty border towns of Juarez, Mexico.
While at Arizona State University earning a journalism degree, Codie ventured into conflict reporting, unearthing harrowing stories that earned her the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Award. It was here, amid human suffering and stark inequality, that she first recognized a hard truth: financial empowerment is the key to changing lives.
That revelation spurred a hard pivot. Witnessing firsthand the devastating impact of financial illiteracy, she swapped telling stories from the trenches as a reporter to the often cold, male-heavy world of finance. In 2008, after attending several finance-focused conventions, Codie networked her way into her first finance job at Vanguard. She’d spend the next 15 years hopscotching companies and ascending through the ranks at renowned institutions like Goldman Sachs, State Street and First Trust, searching for a place where she felt was a fit. All the while, she had side hustles, investing in small companies. From laundromats to other companies, Codie began building a diverse portfolio that would later underpin her mission: to create one million financially free humans through business ownership.
In 2020, as the world grappled with a global pandemic, Codie brought her insights to a larger stage launching Contrarian Thinking—a free-thinking finance and media company. Today, with nearly a million readers across her newsletters, millions following her on social media and her podcast “The BigDeal,’ Codie is empowering everyday people to rewrite their own financial futures. We spent a day at her office in Austin to learn more.
You went to ASU and graduated with a journalism degree. What did you originally want to do with that? I wanted to be a conflict journalist. I wanted to go to war zones.
What made you jump to finance? I had a moment where I was covering a bunch of stories and I realized I didn't want to become jaded. I saw things that I'll never forget. We got really close with some people for a story called Generation Abandoned and won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for print journalism for that. When we went back I was really excited, thinking I'm going to go be Katie Couric or Walter Cronkite or whoever…But, I didn't know that journalism, where we're just covering things, was making change. I pretty quickly realized it was socioeconomics. It was just money, and that the people who have money have power and the people who don't have money get pushed around. That didn't sit well with me and I realized I needed to learn more about money. So that's what I did. I changed my major."
How did you end up on Wall Street? I got lucky. I think if you want to win a game, you go where the game is played. I didn't know anything about money. I didn't really know a lot of rich people. I didn't know anybody in finance. So, I went to a ton of conferences, ever summit, meetup and conference I could think of about finance. At a Latinas in Finance event I ended up sitting next to a recruiter for Vanguard and I asked her a lot of questions. At the end, she said I should apply. She said, ‘We sell securities,’ so I thought she was a security company. I had no idea. I did some research on them and ended up applying for their Accelerated Development Program, where you rotate around the company in an 18-month program. Somehow, I got in, and that kicked off my career in finance.
What did you enjoy the most about working at big Wall Street finance firms?There's something really incredible about being able to understand the only international language we all speak, which is money. If you don't speak a language, how do you go to the country and expect to interact there? I think that's how most of us are with money, we don't actually speak the language of money. We don't understand it and yet we expect it to come to us. What I liked about Wall Street is that's all they do, money is the ultimate God to Wall Street. It's not my God, but I was curious to see how other people worship it. It was interesting me to see so many people who had all the abundance in the world when it came to money. They didn't think that it was ridiculous to make millions or hundreds of millions of dollars.
And give finance its due, there are a lot of really intelligent people in finance and it's one of the few industries in which there's a scoreboard - you’re winning or you're losing. It's often a zero-sum game. If I buy a stock and it goes up, great, but somebody else sold the stock, not great. Technically I won, they lost. Zero-sum games are not my favorite games to play, but they're really useful for learning.
What did you dislike about it most?
I think it sucks a little piece of your soul out when you're so obsessed with money. It’s the ultimate game. There’s a quote in the Bible about money being the root of all evil. But, what the quote actually says is that the desire or the love of money is the root of all evil. I don't think money is inherently bad, but if you love money alone, I think it's bad for you. So, I really didn't like the humans very much and I wasn't a good enough human to not become that. I think I would have become that. I would have played the game as hard as possible and I would have been harsh and hard on the world and not trying to help people.
I learned there are so many ways to make money. You can make money doing anything, so why not do it by doing something you're proud of? I wasn't proud of that work, so I went through multiple companies, thinking it was the company, and then I thought it was the sector I was in. I was only a Goldman for about two years, Vanguard for two years, First Trust for five, State Street for two or three. I moved a lot searching for something. I finally realized it was that I didn't feel like there was a real value creation in the world. I think that it's really hard in this society today to be free unless you have some sort of wealth, you have to have some sort of baseline wealth to be free. However, you don't learn about finances in school, you don't actually learn how to create money in the world. I went to Georgetown for an MBA and I didn't even learn it there. Unless you go into finance and become a professional ,you’re likely not going to learn it in the real world, except if you run a business.
How did you jump from working on Wall Street to going out on your own?
I worked in Wall Street for over 15 years. I didn't want to leave. I was making a lot of money, I was scared and I never had a great startup idea. I didn't know how to replace my income, so I did it really quietly on the side. During almost all of my career in finance I was dabbling at something. I started buying small businesses on the side early.
Why did you start buying businesses with laundromats? I had a real estate guy who had commercial real estate with laundromats on them. He didn't have a ton of cash and I had some extra cash, so I said, ‘Why don't I buy this and you run it. If it works let's add a few more.’ So, we did that and then added car washes and then home services business. That was the first one where I could buy it for low six figures and theoretically make all our money back in two or three years.
How many businesses do you own now? I think we have more than 20 in Main Street Holding Company, which is our holding company. That's where we own more businesses outright, bigger chunks of the business, companies like Pinks and Biscout, and That One Painter. In our venture capital company I think we have 31 companies. We own a small piece of those, maybe less than 10 percent. My husband runs Main Street Holding Company and we have another person who runs the capital fund. I run Contrarian Thinking.
What do you look for when you buy a company?
It's kind of like buying your first house, your first deal is not going to be like your last deal. You baby step your way from studio to townhouse to large house to multi-family. In the beginning, I wanted something so simple Grandma could understand it and that couldn't bankrupt me; no matter how bad it got. So, in the beginning, I said if I can understand it, if I can explain it to grandma and if it can make me five figures a year, let's just buy it. Then I needed somebody that could operate it because I was working 60-70 hour weeks in finance.
Then you get to the problem of scale, which is why there will always be opportunity in the lower end of the market for the little guys, because you get to a certain point where it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to buy an individual laundromat, it has to have national scale for it to meet the size of our brand. So we bought Resibrands and That One Painter and Pinks, a large chunk of them, because they're across the country. We can grow them and can help scale that business. We're interested in need, not want companies, but we also believe that they should be branded. If I asked you to name a painting or landscaping or widow company, you probably can’t, home services and trade services businesses are completely unbranded. We believe that they should have a name and soul and brand recognition. That will happen in the next ten years.
If someone wanted to get into ownership, where should they start? You want to start with stuff where you have an unfair advantage over anybody else because you have domain expertise. What are your skills? Are you marketing? Are you sales? And are you in real estate? Then, what are you really into? What's your favorite part? You don't want to buy a business if it’s something that you hate. Then there’s your network. I think the best transactions happen with people you already know.
What led you to pick Austin when you moved here? I think the city's got something special. My husband Chris and I have lived all over the world and we wanted to come back to Texas. Chris was born in Houston and I had lived here for a period with First Trust. I lived in Dallas too, but Austin has my heart. I like that it's not that pretentious. I don't want wear stilettos to the grocery store, I want to be able to dress a little weird. I want to meet weird people and I want to be in a place where humans are building something.
Are you as disciplined in all areas of your life as you are at work?
Definitely not. I’m incredibly work-disciplined. I work a lot. I love working. I feel no shame for it and I prefer doing it above a lot of things, so I have to push myself to go enjoy life. I try to be pretty disciplined working out, eating healthy, etc., but if I'm an A+ in work, I'm like a B- in other areas. Chris and I always say so you get three things to focus on. Right now, for us, it's business, our family and very close friends.
What brings you the most joy from what you do? When we meet people out in the world and they says, ‘I love your stuff’ - that’s cool to me because it means it's not just about me, I'm just a conduit to somebody else learning something that allows them to change their life. That’s very egotistically rewarding for me. Getting to shake a hand of a human who says, ‘I did this because you said this, and here's what happened.’ The second is getting to battle-test ideas on the global stage. It’s so fascinating to me. I'm very curious and I want to learn constantly. I have a big platform where I get to say things, and sometimes they're wrong, and then people give me feedback and I get to go ask the smartest people the things that I want to know. That feels like getting paid to think for a living, which I find very lucky.
Your husband works with you. What are some pros and cons?
Yes, he runs the VC part of the company. He recently left the Department of Defense’s Innovation Unit where he was heading their commercial AI portfolio. He's a smarty. Now he’s with us and there’s nothing better than seeing your spouse in their area of genius. Competence is sexy, and it's rare. I feel privileged to get to see that. But, when two bodies are up against each other more often, that means there's going to be more points for potential friction, so I actually think it's harder working with your spouse, but just like anything in life, the hard things are usually the worthy things. I think we were sold a lie about nepotism and that working with your family doesn't work and don't hire your friends because it'll ruin relationships. Who are you supposed to work with? I was on a call with a group in our community last week and about 60 percent of them are husbands and wives who work together. I think that's coming back into society again, or we attract them.
Can you briefly explain your company Contrarian Thinking? Our mission is to create 1 million financially free humans. But, contrarian thinking itself is the idea that the highest thing you can do is question everything to find the truth. That’s how the company started. It was 2020 and things were weird. People weren't allowed to question things and I think that's really bad for society. A healthy level of skepticism is really important.
What’s the difference between your two newsletters? Contrarian Thinking is to break this idea that finances are limited, it's like, that's smart, rich friend of yours who tells you all of the secrets that nobody usually does. Main Street Minute is very tactical. It’s if you want to buy a business or you want to scale your business.
QUICK FIRE
Dream Podcast guest I have a lot. Chuck Palahniuk. He wrote a book called Consider This. I’d also like to have Laura Bush on. I think she’d be really interesting. And an Austin local I’m a big fan of is Kill Tony.
If you can have a superpower I’m increasingly attracted to some of the tenets of Zen Buddhism, so it would be to just enjoy the journey. Having real peace as you progress through life seems to be the highest form of enlightenment. I don't want laser eyes or the ability to predict the future, I want to enjoy every single moment and find bliss in it.
Favorite book Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an incredible book about Zen Buddhism told through a lens of a motorcycle tripm and Atlas Shrugged, not for the political tones that people talk about, but for the idea that there is such beauty in labor if you do the thing that you love to do.
What podcasts do you listen to? I actually listen to my own because I found it's almost not enough to listen to the things you want to learn once. I listen to Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom, Jay Shetty’s podcast and Joe Rogan.
Favorite Quote When I stand before God at the end of my days, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything you gave me.’ By Emma Bombeck. It's how Chris and I try to live our lives. But he's more Hunter S.Thompson’s “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, 'Wow! What a ride!”
I learned there are so many ways to make money. You can mkae money doing anything, so why not do it by doing something you're proud of?
I learned there are so many ways to make money. You can make money doing anything, so why not do it by doing something you're proud of?