About

Frequently Asked Questions

Contrarians question everything, so of course you’ve ended up on the FAQ! We’ve got answers to some of your burning questions here. If you don’t find what you’re looking for here, feel free to reach out.

General

Contrarian Thinking is much more than just a newsletter. We’re a bootstrapped startup based in Austin, Texas with 15+ full-time employees and 25+ freelancers. We’re one of the fastest-growing finance and business media companies in the world with over 600,000+ subscribers on our newsletter and 6,000,000+ followers on our social platforms. For more information, visit our About page and read our origin story.

In the Contrarian Thinking newsletter, we challenge the status quo to achieve what most believe is impossible. We believe now more than ever, the world needs contrarian thinkers.

The dreamers, the doers, those so free of mind, body, and bank account that they can’t be swayed.

Our topics will span building new income streams, generational wealth, investing, conscious capitalism, boring businesses, and learning from strivers who think BIG.

Give it a try and sign up – it’s free. We send one out every Thursday.

The Boring Business Brief newsletter is specific to providing the tactics and tools needed to acquire your first business.

We break down deals our Mastermind members have recently closed and teach you the basics of ownership. Find out for yourself and subscribe now and join 150,000+ other aspiring owners learning how to take their first steps. Shipped to your inbox every Tuesday.

Yes, we do. For sponsorship details, visit this page.

We do not. But if you have a cool story you want to share about becoming a “boring business” owner, email us at [email protected]. We might feature it in one of our newsletters.

We currently do not have a formal affiliate program. But if you’re interested in doing something together (and have a large, relevant audience), please email [email protected].

Yes, if you feel like we aren’t delivering on what we promised. We stand behind our content, our community, and what we teach. We only want people joining if they are 100% committed to learning about investing and will trust our process. If you need help, please email our support team.

Yes, we offer limited discounts. If you and your spouse or business partner want to join the Mastermind together, email our support team for available options.

If you’re active military or a veteran, first, thank you for your service. Second, we’ll extend 25% off any of our courses or Mastermind to you or your spouse. Simply email our support team with a picture of your military ID and what course or community you’re interested in joining.

We don’t typically offer other discounts or do “flash sales” outside what is listed here. So, the best time to join will always be yesterday, but today is as good a day as any.

Please schedule a call with a Program Advisor so we can discuss your goals first to see if one of our programs is a good fit. If it is, we do offer a few payment options.

Possibly! To learn about what it’s like to be on the Contrarian Crew and see our currently open roles, visit the careers page.

About Codie Sanchez

Codie Sanchez is the founder of Contrarian Thinking. She runs her own holding company of 25+ SMBs below $10m EBITDA focused on acquiring “boring businesses” or local, service-based businesses like car washes, laundromats, property management, and many more. For more info on Codie, visit our about page and read our origin story, or check out our recent media.

Codie owns a portfolio of companies, all of which have their own operators or CEOs and need minimal input from Codie on a day-to-day basis.

This is what she teaches in our courses and preaches in our Mastermind: acquire your first business, then hire a great operator so you can be in the role of investor and owner. Then scale this with your own holding company and additional acquisitions. It’s simple, but not easy.

No. She only has 1 account on each platform. You can follow her official personal accounts here:

Please report any accounts impersonating Codie on those platforms.

Ain’t nobody got time for that! The best way to absorb Codie’s knowledge and expertise is to join our Community.

Course: Investor Operating System

Yes. This course is intended for people who are looking for new ways to think about investing and creating real wealth. We cover money mindsets, speaking the language of money, and how to become a dealmaker to increase your income. This is NOT a day trading or other “get rich quick in the stock market” course.

Yes, as long as you live in a country with a free market economy. We can’t speak for every country’s laws, but the structure we provide will still be helpful to you.

The course is self-paced. Once you complete one lesson, you can move on to the next. There are about 5 hours of total video, plus additional content, tools, and resources. So it can be completed in one sitting, or over several weeks, up to you.

Course: Build Your Newsletter Into a Business

If you have something to say, and an audience that could be interested in reading about it, you have a potential media asset that can attract the attention of thousands of people. We’re all about creating owners, and a newsletter is one of the best ways to “own” your audience’s attention and ensure you have a direct connection with them on a regular basis.

Actionable steps include:

How to identify your most engaged audience
90-day action plan to get your first 10,000 subscribers
How to leverage and repurpose a single piece of content in 10 formats
Creating a traction flywheel
Landing page conversion hacks
When and how to monetize your content for high earnings
And a lot more

Yes. It doesn’t matter if you’re in business, finance, fashion, fitness or gardening. The content is agnostic and can be applied to any industry, niche or interest.

The course is self-paced. Once you complete one lesson, you can move on to the next. There are about 15 hours of total video, plus additional content and resources. It’s the exact framework we used to attract over 200,000+ subscribers in the first 2 years of our newsletter.

Course: Small Biz Buying Course

Simple – if you just want the information and resources, buy the course.

Plenty of people have been able to learn the ins and outs of business acquisition and become owners. However, most people want more than just the information.

That’s where the Community comes in. If you want a full year of expert guidance and accountability, in addition to weekly support calls, deal review calls, and an active and growing online community supported by expert facilitators, that’s where you want to be. The Community is where most future business owners people end up.

Buying a business (especially your first) can be a long and challenging process. If you’re fully committed to buying a business within the next year, we typically recommend joining the Mastermind.

For everyone else, we recommend the course. You can upgrade to the Community in the future when you’re ready (and we’ll credit 100% of your course purchase towards the Community).

More than half of the people that join the course or the Community are traditionally employed. Most are well-paid and highly skilled, but they are either burnt out in their jobs or tired of building someone else’s wealth or both. This course will teach you how to leave (or supplement) your full-time job so you can stop side hustling once and for all.

Yes, the course from where we all started–from the beginning. We even have a module to help you determine what type of business to buy (since there are literally millions to choose from).

Don’t worry if you don’t know much about the industry or have had no previous experience – we’ll guide you through it all.

The key difference is the approach we take in this course vs. every other course I’ve bought. Our Small Biz Buying Course takes you down one very specific path. We don’t dump you into 15 hours of videos to listen to and then leave you to choose what to do and when to do it. We give you every step of the process, show you what to do, why to do it, how to do it, and give you templates and exercises to do each thing.

Then we give you the next step. That produces momentum, gives you small quick wins, and keeps you motivated and excited to keep going. All of which give you confidence and increase your chances of reaching your goal.

It’s the same process we use to buy our own businesses, so we know it works (even during recessions).

Another key difference is we specifically teach you how to buy the best off-market deals and use seller financing to creatively negotiate the most profitable deal possible.

Other courses don’t teach this, or don’t teach it well, and expect you to use a broker (who works for the seller, not the buyer) and go into debt to buy a business (not ideal).

We want you to get the best business, with the best deal, using no money of your own (or as little as possible).

Yes, absolutely. If you have the ability to buy a small business in your country, these concepts apply.

While some things are specific to the U.S., like SBA loans, there are a number of similar programs through local banks and through local governments that provide small business loans. We have a bunch of information on our course about those options. So the structure and framework we provide will still be beneficial to you.

Yes! There are updates coming, and all updates are always free.

Think of a blog post as being a distilled chapter from a book and the Small Biz Buying Course as being an entire graduate-level college class. (But much more fun to attend.)

The course goes into much more detail, with use cases, examples, checklists, and video tutorials on every single strategy.

Blogs are flat. Singularly focused on tactics. The course is dynamic and specifically engineered to help you buy your first business with easily repeatable strategies so you can continue to acquire more (if that’s what you want to do).

Yes. And we’ll credit your cost towards the Community.

In fact, it’s the best way to get into the Community in the future. Because we know you’ve already got skin in the game and are doing the work, you’ll skip the waitlist (which we typically have).

Absolutely. It does every day.

This system has worked for actors, marketers, engineers, analysts and just about everyone else. You don’t have to be a business expert. Far from it.

In fact, it’s probably better that you’re not. That way you’ll be more open to following our proven process.

All of the strategies taught are built on universal business and dealmaking principles and are not industry-specific.

At the end of the day, that’s a question you have to answer.

However, I can tell you that the strategies in this course are the same ones I use to buy businesses, and what hundreds of other people have used to buy their businesses and generate millions in revenues and profits.

Of course, I can’t guarantee you’ll do the same. There are zero guarantees in life.

But it sure is a lot easier to acquire a business that is already making 6 or 7 figures than trying to start one from 0.

Let’s say you do join the course, spend $2,000 and acquire a business using seller financing or an SBA 7a loan (both strategies we teach in the course) so you have to put zero or very little of your own money down.

And let’s say – being conservative here – you buy a company that then profits you only $5,000 per month. That’s $60k a year in your pocket.

Is it worth it for you? I think so. But everyone has different financial goals. What’s yours?

The course is self-paced. Once you complete one lesson, you can move on to the next. We recommend that you take about 4 weeks to complete it, but you can go faster. There are about 20 hours of total video, in 9 units. It goes by faster than you think.

It depends. Are you still hungry?

If so, yes! We’ve had existing entrepreneurs and business owners take our course to help them acquire additional businesses to add to their portfolios or complement their existing businesses.

Contrarian Community

The Contrarian Community is a private group for people who want to learn the art of dealmaking and business acquisitions. It also includes our full Small Biz Buying course, all tools and resources, 6-8 live calls each month, and access to our invitation-only events (around the USA).

If you’re interested in joining our community, you should be focused on making your first acquisition within 1 year and have a minimum of $25,000 to invest (excluding the cost of the community). Schedule a call with one of our Program Advisors, and they can help you determine if this is the best opportunity for you.

It’s everything you need to go from “I know nothing about business acquisition” to becoming a successful business owner, investor and entrepreneur. We are constantly adding to and improving our community, but as of November 1, 2023, it includes:

Private community
This is where the magic happens. We’ve had members do deals together, become best friends, and tap the community for expert guidance and accountability. Members are experts in eComm, landscaping, real estate, laundromats, hotels, bakeries, professional service firms and beyond. Forget about the small talk – we’re on Slack getting it done.

Weekly live calls (every Monday)
Our weekly group calls are where we review your potential deals, hear about businesses members just closed on, and we invite other top dealmakers to come and speak with us. These range from SBA loan experts to business attorneys, merger and acquisition specialists, roll-up guys, and more. It’s a ton of knowledge and a lot of fun.

Bi-weekly deal review calls
Our expert facilitators help review real member calls twice a month (and 24/7 on Slack). This is one of the best ways to see us break down your or other members’ deals and see if they’re worth pulling the trigger on. It’s also a great way to hear what’s happening in adjacent industries and in markets around the world.

All-access course
It’s like an MBA you can actually use. You’ll work through 9 units at your own pace and learn everything you need to buy your first business – from finding the right businesses to go after, to savvy negotiation and financing tactics, to your first 90 days in charge.

50+ additional resources (and we’re frequently adding more)

Personal profit and loss sheet
Business buying calendar
Deal clarity worksheet
Business buying checklist
NDA template
3 M model worksheet
LOI template
Due diligence checklist
Term sheet
13-week cashflow template

As of May 1, 2024, we have 1,100+ members across the world, primarily concentrated in North America.

Most of our members are looking to make their first acquisition and actively working toward it. We also have many people who are already business owners but want to expand their businesses and build empires.

You’ll be surrounded by people from all areas of life, in all stages of the journey, who are just as ambitious as you. Everyone in the Mastermind community is working toward common goals: owning their own businesses, their time, their finances and their lives.

The Contrarian Community membership is 1 year, with the option to renew if certain conditions are met. Remember — business buying and operations is a long-term game, not a one and done!

Is anything in life guaranteed? Let us be really clear here – we cannot make any guarantees of success or earnings (read our earnings disclaimer if you’d like). But in plain English, you are responsible for your own results. Not us.

We can provide the recipe, but you have to go out and source your own ingredients and cook the meal. We’ll be Gordon Ramsey in the kitchen yelling at you if you’re about to make a mistake. Then high-fiving and celebrating you when you close on your first business.