GoKawiilThis story appears in the September 2026 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
When Codie Sanchez looks back on her earliest social media content, she does what many of us do when examining our internet past: She cringes.
“Some of the first videos we made, I’m like, My God. There’s money floating around in the air behind me, it makes me want to die,” Sanchez says. “But like any new business owner, you get talked into things that aren’t you.”
Despite those questionable early choices, Sanchez has since become an internet force. She’s collected a combined 15 million social media followers and authored the best-selling book Main Street Millionaire, largely by promoting the same message: You, too, can become an entrepreneur — and the path to success goes through small business ownership. It’s an insight drawn from her own background, which her fans know well: Sanchez began her career in finance, then started buying what she calls “boring businesses” like laundromats, car washes, and roofing companies. She realized that these are overlooked assets, because they already have established consumer bases, are straightforward to operate, and are surprisingly easy to acquire, because their owners are often aging out and have nobody else to sell the business to.
As she figured out how to scale these businesses, she developed systems to buy and operate them, and then built an online movement of people who follow her path. Today, more than 10 years since she purchased her first laundromat, Sanchez has refined both her voice and her purpose: She is direct, honest, and supportive, with a cut-through-the-bullshit energy. And she now fronts a much larger enterprise called Contrarian Thinking, which operates in investment, advisory, and media services. But it took time to find her niche. Even influencers can get distracted by internet noise, and Sanchez admits that she spent too much time trying to follow other people’s paths to success.
This, she says, is now the mistake she wants to help others avoid.
Throughout her career, Sanchez has watched many people fall into a particular trap: They treat business advice as if it’s a one-size-fits-all solution — as if anyone’s path to success, or anyone’s book, or anyone’s philosophy can be followed directly and fully and will lead to the same results. But that’s just not true, she says. Businesses may not be unique, but the people running them certainly are. And too much business advice treats everyone the same.
“Most business-builders’ bookshelves are full of all the business-building books,” Sanchez says. “But if you can’t find your unfair advantages and you don’t know your weaknesses, you’re just going to spend a lifetime trying to apply other people’s formulas. If you try to mimic Alex Hormozi, who’s an incredible marketer and salesperson, but you are inherently more of a product person and a lifestyle builder, you’re going to build a disaster, not a business.”
After years of scaling her voice to reach millions, Sanchez has developed a counterintuitive obsession: She wants business advice to get more personal. Entrepreneurs keep looking for the “right” path, but she wants them to start by looking deeper into themselves first — to recognize their own strengths and define their own goals, and then build a plan that’s best suited to their unique abilities and needs.
“My belief is that you should have businesses that you own, that are profitable, and that you actually like to run,” she says.
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