Codie A. Sanchez

Investing millions in Main St businesses & teaching you how to own the rest | HoldCo, VC fund, Founder

On a mission to create financially free and free-thinking humans.I founded a advisory and investment company called Contrarian Thinking that helps owners buy and scale businesses.Our newsletter has over 1M+ weekly readers, here → contrarianthinking.biz/liOur community has taught 9,000+ members biz buying, biz growing, and doing deals. We value experience over degrees.Betting on yourself over building someone else's dream.Main Street over Wall Street.My mission is less suits, more boots. Meaning: we the people holding the power… and the purse strings.🔗Join 1M+ others who get our free newsletter: contrarianthinking.biz/li🔗YouTube: @CodieSanchezCT🔗Instagram: @codiesanchez🔗Twitter: @Codie_Sanchez🔗Weekly business-buying newsletter Main Street Minute: contrarianthinking.biz/minute-li

Founder

We help free minds and build bank accounts.

The best advice that no one follows:

- Wake up at 5:45am.
- Marriage done well is a huge superpower.
- Trust God.
- Be careful what you read, it becomes the way you think.
- No going out on a school night.
- If you have to drink to hang out with someone, you probably shouldn't be buds.

Feel free to share if you agree ♻️

Investing millions in Main St businesses & teaching you how to own the rest | HoldCo, VC, Founder | NYT best-selling author

I have no energy for hate. Love you, wish you well, or hope you heal. That's it.

You will make 10x more money if you present ideas like this to your clients or leaders.

Underrated superpower:

Just dumb enough to believe in yourself, just smart enough to execute.

You don’t have anxiety because you think you CAN’T do it.

You have anxiety because deep down you know you CAN be doing bigger things.

People overestimate business plans and “genius.” They underestimate irrational inability to quit.

Dumber people than you have done it.

Let's get after it 💥

Follow for more & repost if you need this to be your new mantra.

You don’t get lucky.

You make your luck.

There are 3 ways to increase your odds of luck:

1. Do, repeatedly. Try, then iterate.
2. Be consistent. Resist the urge to give up.
3. Gain knowledge. Invest in yourself.

Knowledge without action is worthless. So is acting without knowing what you’re doing.

Say you want to buy a business.

You could get the best advice in the world from the smartest people in acquisitions… But if you don’t act, you’ll never buy one.

OR

Your could have all the drive in the world, the right mindset… But ruin yourself financially because you didn’t learn the right tactics.

13 other unreasonably simple habits to change your life:

1. Waking up at 5:45am solves 99.9% of daily issues.

2. Grab your to-do list. Do the thing you want to do least, first.

3. Stop all 60 min meetings, make them 45 minutes. Tighter meetings, more time.

4. No social media, email, or text when you wake up. Write something, read something, or create something before you get sucked in.

5. Do the $1,000/hr Test. Group work in 3 buckets based on return: $10, $100, $1,000. Offload one low ROI task per day.

6. Change one meeting a week to a walking call. Watch how excited the other meeting member becomes.

7. Add a How vs Won't check-in. When you say, "that WON'T work." Instead ask, "How could that work?"

8. Be the dumbest one in your friend group, then move on when you’re not. As they say, if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

9. Take a picture of your net worth. What gets measured gets managed. Check finances daily.

10. Always the stairs, never the elevator. Pick the hard option. See how much stronger you are than you think.

11. Never write to-dos in stone. You're 10x more productive if you reprioritize daily.

12. Meditate. 10 minutes a day. For a twofer - do it in the sauna. Sometimes hacking culture gets it right.

13. Get intimidated. Everything you want is on the other side of fear. Do something every day that scares you a little bit.

Life is the small things repeated daily.

Change one daily habit, and beautiful things start to happen...

So pick one.

↓↓↓

Also...build the habit of getting ownership, not income. 

Come to MSM Live to learn how: https://lnkd.in/gf6hPHdF

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Harsh truth:

Running a company is simply a game of prioritizing problems.

Here’s how to become the Chief Problem Solver in your business:

Want to know Elon Musk's "secret" to running Tesla, SpaceX, and 3+ other billion-dollar companies?

According to Marc Andreessen, it's simple:

"He shows up every week, identifies the biggest problem, fixes it, and does that 52 weeks in a row."

Most companies hide from problems:

• They reframe them as "challenges"
• They create layers of abstraction
• They delegate them into oblivion

But problems aren't biohazards—they're your biggest opportunities.

Bigger the problem? Bigger the potential.

There’s a reason SpaceX is able to send a 400-foot skyscraper into the sky knowing it might explode.

Because they want to know exactly what breaks, when, and why.

Every failure incapacitates dozens of future problems.

This approach works because running a company is simply prioritizing problems.

Your earnings directly reflect what you solve...

Big problems pay better.

Another great example of this is Brad Jacobs.

He built 7 billion-dollar companies in logistics, waste, and warehousing - industries most people find boring until they see his bank account.

Here’s how he evaluates risk vs reward on different deal sizes:

• Small, low-risk deals: exist but limited reward
• Small, high-risk deals: limited reward with high risk (avoid)
• Big, low-risk deals: unicorns (don't exist)
• Big, high-risk deals with solvable problems: "the bingo quadrant"

One of my favorite lines from his book is:

"If you want to win, you have to rearrange your brain to lean into those big, hairy problems and figure out how to cut off the hair and de-risk."

This is exactly what your job is as a CEO.

It’s simple: hire the smartest people in the world... and solve the problems they can't figure out.

That's it. That's the whole job.

Not avoiding problems, but identifying and selecting the right ones to solve.

Becoming a Chief Problem Solver requires you to create your own weekly problem-solving loop:

1. Identify your single biggest constraint
2. Focus all resources on solving it
3. Measure the result
4. Repeat next week

1 problem. 1 solution. 52 weeks in a row.

The best entrepreneurs don't just "think differently" about problems. They actively build muscles for problem identification and execution.

Then they do it again and again.
Fair warning though, this isn't glamorous work. It means:

• Living inside friction
• Facing uncomfortable truths
• Fixing things no one else wants to touch

But it's where all the leverage is.

If your business is stuck, your unlock is often solving ONE big problem.

Maybe you know exactly what it is, but don't know how to solve it. Or maybe you're not sure what the problem is yet...

P.S. If you want to see how we think about solving these problems for our own businesses, you might want to check this out: https://lnkd.in/enaBvipE

A reminder to myself and you this Saturday...

It’s really just you against the mirror. You vs you. No one else can win at a game of one. I know it’s hard not to get distracted, race horses wear blinders for a reason. Your lane you’re game. LFG.

Underrated quality of awful leaders:

They try to please everyone & lead by committee.

The hardest parts about leadership:

• Telling truths people don’t want to hear
• Watching decisions people will regret
• But you can’t force mentorship
• No one cares about your business as much as you do
• Micromanaging means YOU hired wrong

Doesn't mean you have to be a jerk.

But often trying to please everyone is the worst thing you can do for your people.

What do you think?

Wall Street has one rule:

Never start what you can buy.

Here’s everything you need to know about buying a biz in 2025: 

While 90% of startups fail, 80% of acquisitions survive the first year.

88% of people worth $30M+ have done at lease one acquisition.

That means the best way to get rich isn’t to start a business like they love to tell us.

The best way to wealth with the highest degree of certainty is through acquisitions.

Right now, the average small business owner in the US is 67 years old. When you’ve run a business for 10+ years, you're bound to be exhausted.

These owners are motivated to sell by what I call the 7 D's:

• Departure
• Divorce
• Disease
• Disagreement
• Distress
• Death
• Dullness

They’re desperate to exit the game but don't know how. 

Most people think they need millions in capital to buy a businesses.

But they don't realize 60% of all business sales involve seller financing.

Instead of going to a bank for a loan, the seller becomes your bank.

You put some money down, and they get paid over time from the business profits.

There are 3 reasons why a seller would agree to this:

1. Cash

Let’s say the bank offered the seller $750,000 for their biz but you offered the seller $1.15 million paid over time.

They’ll make an extra $400,000 by being the bank.

2. Taxes

Lump sum payments hit the seller with massive tax bills.

Installment payments spread over 10 years means lower tax brackets and potentially hundreds of thousands saved.

3. Speed

Bank loans take 3-9 months to close. Seller financing can close in 2-3 weeks.

Now which businesses to target? 

Ones under $10 million in revenue with at least 15% profit margins.

Blue-collar service businesses fit this bill - HVAC, landscaping, cleaning services.

They're cash-flowing, recession-resistant, and boring enough that private equity ignores them. 

BUT, before searching anywhere, create what I call a deal box. Define exactly:

• How much cash flow you need annually
• Maximum purchase price
• Geographic preferences
• Industry focus
• Must-haves and can't-stands

If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll never find it.

Next up, how to find businesses to buy? 

1. Venmo Challenge

Pull your payment history and filter out friends and big companies. What's left are small businesses you already pay - cleaning services, handymen, landscapers.

2. Personal P&L Review.

Open your credit card statements and look at small businesses you spend with. These are owners you can reach out to.

3. The 9-5 Strategy:

One of our community members bought her coworker's $1.5M business with full seller financing after he decided to retire to go skiing with his wife.

↓ ↓ ↓

As a thank you for sticking around to the end, I want you give my "Deal Clarity Workbook."

It helps you figure out what business is right for you.

Grab it here: https://lnkd.in/enPdVi_D

What I wish I was told before I had success.

The “Hate Us ‘Cuz They Ain’t Us” Curve:

When you first start out, they tell you...

You’re lame.
You’re crazy.
That’ll never work.
Oh, she’s a one-hit wonder.
She probably has a rich dad.
Or slept her way there.

THEN, we hit the top of the curve. Your success is obvious. And things start to change... They say…

Oh yeah, I know her.
Hey, long time no talk!
Love to meet up and pick your brain.
How did you do that?

And the grand finale...
They ask you for a job.

If success is your goal, expect people to talk a lot of crap for a long time. Let them. Because one day, you’ll just get to point at the scoreboard.

↓↓↓

FYI 

If you're ready to step out of your comfort zone this year and buy a business, come to my live event this week. 

I'll teach you how (over 3 days): https://lnkd.in/eEye_qd6

The richest people in the world don't just build companies...they buy them.

Here’s how you can too (without their millions): 

Three reasons why buying beats building a business from scratch:

- 45% of new businesses fail within 5 years
- Most entrepreneurs make only $67k/year
- First 3-4 years are unprofitable

Compare that to when you buy...

You inherit customers, systems, and profits from day one.

"But Codie, I genuinely can’t afford one."

That’s what I thought too when I started. 

There are 3 ways to buy any business (without needing millions):

1. Experience
2. Sweat equity
3. Money

You only need ONE of these three to pull off a deal.

1. Experience

This is perfect for people who know the industry inside and out.

Maybe you've been a plumber for 20 years and want to buy a plumbing company.

Sellers value genuine knowledge over $$ because they know you won't destroy what they built.

2. Sweat Equity

If you’re thinking about working in the business and growing it, this is for you.

Many retiring owners care more about their legacy than maximizing the sale price.

They want someone who'll take care of their employees and customers, not just squeeze the biz for cash.

3. Money

This doesn't have to mean YOUR money.

I've bought plenty of businesses with 0-15% down using other people's money. You can:

- Use SBA loans (government-backed with low rates)
- Get investors to fund the deal
- Or structure seller financing

Seller financing often works as a win-win too. 

Banks tend to lowball business valuations and charge high interest rates.

But when sellers finance you directly, they get a premium price AND earn interest on the loan.

They make MORE money by cutting out the bank.

Just make sure you show what’s in it for them:

- Higher purchase price (ex. 15%+ premium)
- Tax advantages (spread over time vs lump sum)
- Faster close (30 days vs 120 days)

A win-win.

So what businesses should you target?

A few strategies I use: 

1. SOWS method:

- Stale: Revenue hasn't grown in 3+ years
- Old: Been around 5+ years
- Weak: Competitors are terrible
- Simple: You can explain it to an 8-year-old

2. The Venmo Method

Look at your personal P&L:

- Who do you pay every month?
- Who are your competitors?
- What vendors do you use?

These are the businesses you should buy.

Instead of paying to get your problem solved, why don’t you get paid to solve it for other people? 

Right now, boomers own $5-10 trillion worth of businesses.

And when these owners retire…

It’s either we buy these businesses, or BlackRock does.

I’d rather see more of us own our local than have PE swallow everything up.

If you want to learn how to buy a biz, you should come to my masterclass today. 

It's completely free & solely focused on teaching you how to buy a biz for a little as $0. 

Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/e86jsivr

How to be unrecognizable in 90 days:

1. Be obsessed

Every outsized outcome I’ve seen came from people who genuinely enjoy the pressure. Not motivated people. Obsessed people. It’s almost impossible to compete with someone who treats the thing you dread as fun.

2. Clean out your closet

Get rid of anything that doesn’t fit the person you’re becoming. Cluttered space creates cluttered thinking, and cluttered thinkers don’t make money. Changing how you show up physically is one of the fastest ways to change how you behave.

3. Clarify your ONE thing

Not five ideas. One. Put a number on it and give yourself 90 days to get there. You have to prove to yourself that you keep your word.

4. Tell a better story about yourself

Not a vision board. Write down the words. If your life were a book, what’s supposed to happen next? What goes wrong and how do you react to it? When challenges show up, it’s much easier to keep going if you already decided they were part of the plot.

5. Start a not-to-do list

Becoming elite means cutting distractions aggressively and doing fewer things better.

6. Eliminate distractions

Most distraction is optional so make it harder to waste time and easier to focus. Small changes here create outsized results.

7. Outwork people

If you wake up earlier, protect the first part of your day, and eliminate distractions, you will get ahead faster than you think. Because most people just aren’t willing to work hard.

8. Move in silence

When you’re actually changing your life, you don’t need an audience. Do cool shit. Then talk after the result.

Do this for 90 days and your life will look different.

Because you WILL be different.

Is talking about vanity superficial? Maybe.

Is it effective? Absolutely.

Being well-dressed and well-groomed is a massive edge in any negotiation. It’s hard to push back on someone who looks like they’ve already won. Own your 2026 look.

I asked my mom & dad for advice recently from raising me and my brother...

This is what they told me, maybe you’ll find it useful too:

1. Your kids are not your friends. They’re yours to safeguard and support, but set rules. Biggest problem with most kids in our generation, their parents wanted to be liked not respected.

2. Psy ops are underrated. My mom had this line for whenever I got into trouble. She’d say, “When I ask you a question like this, I already know the answer. I am giving you a chance to come clean...” At which point I’d sing like a canary because I’m a scaredy cat. I found out today she rarely knew the answers. Brilliant and maniacal.

3. Always on the same page. My mom and dad rarely fought in front of my brother and I. They would never go back on the word of the other. United front to deal with us mini terrorists.

4. Make time. My dad had this silly line that is actually not silly: “You can make money, you can make a cake, but you can’t make time.” So they made allllll the time for us.

5. Four chairs. We have these four chairs in our living room, no tv. Growing up, we’d sit and debate and talk for hours. Politics. Opinions. Our days. Only thing not allowed was an opinion you couldn’t defend unemotionally. We still do this today.

6. Mi Sangre mi siempre. They’d always say, blood comes first. They meant it. I hired my brother, my dad, my mom, my cousin at times. We stick together and we may fight like hell but never in front of others.

7. Once you decide, you don’t quit. We could play any sport or instrument BUT if we committed we had to play the full year all out. No 3 lessons and quit. Taught us to choose thoughtfully and keep going even when it hurt.

8. Always call. They still pick up the phone nearly every time it’s family. My dad in a meeting will pause to answer my mom. My husband taught me this too, and I try to do the same. If they’re your first priority this is an easy way to prove it.

9. You’re not a princess, you’re a president. My dad always used to say that line. He told me this week that I lived up to it. Gutted me. He taught us we didn’t need to be saved, instead we could save ourselves and help others.

10. Hug often and seriously. If you’ve ever hugged my parents, they mean it when they do it. Such a simple, free gesture. My mom always gives you a hug and says vaya con dios… go with God. How can you not do big things with parents that hold you like that?

Just some Lessons from the Road from parents I happen to think are some of the best in the world.

Moms and dads everywhere, I’m in awe of you.

Hardest job I’ve ever seen.

*This is one of my favorite pics of me and my dad. Doesn’t get old.

Harsh truth on scaling businesses: 

Your goal as CEO is to build a team that runs your entire company better than you.

5 other lessons I’ve learned the hard way from 15+ years of being an owner:

1. Operating Systems Win

The difference between McDonald's and your local burger joint isn't the food.

It's that any 16-year-old can run McDonald's because of their systems.

If your business needs you to be the hero every day, you own a job, not a business.

No systems = Everything breaks when you aren’t there

The most effective systems I’ve seen all had the same four features.

I call it the PEIC framework:

1. Proven (battle tested)
2. Explicit Processes
3. Implementation
4. Continuous Improvement

Apply them across your core functions and your business will pretty much run on autopilot:

2. Your Revenue Is A Reflection Of Your Vision Distributed

Every time you say your employees don’t care about your business, you're admitting you failed at distributing your vision.

When your team can't see where you're going, they can't help you get there.

Your business needs two guiding metrics. 

At Contrarian Thinking, we call them “Oars.”

One needs to be quantitative and one qualitative. These act as our north stars to drive prioritization and resource allocation. 

Our left oar? Revenue. Our right? Followers. 

Everything flows downstream from those two numbers. 

3. Successful People Make Quick Decisions

Not only that but they move fast, in the right direction.

It always sounds simple but it comes down to knowing exactly what you want and having systems to execute on it.

That’s where planning in layers comes in:

Annual → Quarterly → Monthly → Weekly

Once you're clear on direction, decisions become obvious.

All that’s left is to track:

- What team
- What goal
- Who
- Percentage Done
- Status

 Keep an eye on all five and you’ll always have a pulse on what’s going on in your biz.

4. Successful People Hang Out With Other Successful People

Your success as an owner is determined by who you surround yourself with.

If you're the smartest person in your business, you're doing something wrong.

Your goal should be to build a team that runs your company better than you do.

5. Find 1-1 Mentors To Hold Your Hands

I used to turn my nose at masterminds.

But then I realized my only other option was to figure sh*t out with years of expensive mistakes.

That’s why I have coaches for everything now.

Most wealthy people got rich by paying for shortcuts whenever they saw one.

There’s no shame in stealing someone else’s 10,000 hours.

Time is the only thing you can't buy more of.

Get in rooms with people who've already solved what you're facing.

↓↓↓

I'm running a masterclass this week on how to grow any business faster. 

Sign up here to reserve your seat: https://lnkd.in/eJcGFHnN

Only 6% of Americans own a business.

And of that, less than 1% ever hit $1,000,000 in revenue.

After investing in businesses for 15 years, here are three reasons why 99% of businesses never scale past 7-figures: 

1. Organizational Challenges

There are a ton of sub-catagories here but today we’re going to unpack “Executive Vision.”

Most owners think their problems stem from poor strategy, when it’s typically poor execution.

You can have the best plan in the world, but if your team can’t understand it... you're not going anywhere. 

You need to have a clear vision that every person in your business believes in and wants to fight for.

The best CEOs think in years, then translate this vision in plain english to their team.

Make it stupid simple: everybody needs to know where the biz is going, what their contribution is, and why they are important.

When done right, it creates a flywheel:

• Executive vision gets translated into specific quarterly goals
• Goals become daily/weekly metrics on dashboards
• Dashboards drive structured team communication
• Communication reinforces the culture you're building 
(…which makes scaling almost inevitable).

When you nail this sequence, your team starts executing your vision without you having to micromanage every decision. 

2. Finances & Future Casting

The worst thing you can do is manage your business like a personal checking account.

Sadly, that’s what 99% of owners do.

They look at what's in the bank today and make decisions based on that number.

There’s a reason why that never ends well… 

Because revenue is vanity and cash flow is sanity. That’s not just to make a cute rhyme.

If your business lost all revenue tomorrow, how long would you survive?

You need to know this number.

That’s why we tell all our owners to have a rolling 90-day view of expected cash inflows & outflows.

With this data, you know:

• When to hire
• When to invest
• When to hold back on a big purchase

Scaling a business is hard enough, keep a little sanity in your life by keeping a pulse on collections, obligations, and cash reserves. 

3. Avatar Defintion

When owners say people can’t afford their product…

99% of the time, it's not a pricing problem. It's an avatar problem.

Most businesses chase anyone with a pulse and a credit card.

As a result, they end up selling snow to Eskimos instead of hot chocolate to skiers. 

Compare that with owners who get obsessed with ONE specific customer type.

And I’m not just talking about demographics…I mean knowing their pain points, what podcast they listen to, where they go on vacation…

I have yet to find a business that can’t scale to $10M focusing on one person.

↓ ↓ ↓

Come to my masterclass to learn how to scale your business farther than you may think you can push it.

More info here: https://lnkd.in/eJcGFHnN

Everyone should be obsessed with chasing their first $500k.

Capitalism has pulled more people out of poverty than any system ever created.

Stop pretending it’s evil.

↓↓↓

And one of the most important skills to learn to hit your first $500k? 

Sales. 

Read this to learn why now is the perfect time to get great at sales: https://lnkd.in/eqESyABe

The #1 killer of businesses is bad cashflow.

15 other harsh business truths for you:

1. The greatest muscle you can build is urgency. Bureaucracy is business poison.

2. Decrease the time between having an idea and getting it done. Everything changes.

3. Never sacrifice reputation in the name of business. You can always start another company. You can never create a new reputation.

4. Long-term games and long-term people compound. Resist shiny objects.

5. Hire smart people, pay them well, set them up for success... Then leave them the hell alone.

6. “There’s nothing worse than being sick, fat, tired and trying to run your business.” - Dana White

7. The highest ROI investment founders & owners can make is in themselves. Health shapes mindset. Mindset shapes action.

8. You're better off learning negotiation than financial modeling. Business is less spreadsheets than words.

9. The best business of all time has only you, a computer, and the send button.

10. Every additional employee increases complexity. Hiring is a last resort.

11. The best advice comes from those just a couple steps ahead of you. These people still vividly remember the problems you're facing today.

12. Sell painkillers, not vitamins. There's more money in needs than wants.

13. No discounts. Compete on value, not price. Any biz with $$$ can enter your market and bleed you out. Differentiate beyond commodity.

14. A happy customer is the most powerful marketing. Prioritize reviews. Humans are social animals.

15. If no one thinks you’re crazy, you’re too late. If everyone thinks your idea is good? Even worse. Outsized returns lie in non-conformism.

↓ ↓ ↓

Come to my masterclass tomorrow to learn how to grow your revenue & profit. 

It's 90 minutes + fully remote. 

Details here: https://lnkd.in/eJcGFHnN

Over the past two decades I’ve led 3 multi-million dollar companies. Including Quest Nutrition which sold for a billion dollars. 

In 2010, I hit rock bottom. 

I was the Chief Marketing Officer at a tech company just named the 42nd fastest-growing in North America.

We were making money and winning awards, but I hadn’t taken a day off — except for Christmas — in six and a half years. I was miserable.

So, I walked away from my high-paying job. Gave back my equity.

I went to my partners and quit. But it turned out that they were miserable too. 

We started Quest Nutrition fueled by a desire to solve meaningful problems. Not just make money. We asked ourselves a different question:

“What would we do and love every day, even if we were failing?”

That question changed everything. 

In just a few years, Quest grew from zero to a billion-dollar valuation. Inc. Magazine named us the 2nd fastest growing company in North America.

With the sale of Quest, I could have retired to my own private island. But I’d be bored by that in a week. 

So, I started Impact Theory, a media company using storytelling to empower people to realize their full potential.

As CEO, my mission is to help people across the globe adopt the mindset they need to achieve all their goals.

My results:

→ $1B sale of Quest Nutrition
→ 4M+ YouTube subscribers
→ 500M+ content views
→ 17,932+ Impact Theory University students
→ 100K+ email subscribers

Want to learn how I did all of this? Check out my website: tombilyeu.com

Tom Bilyeu

If I suddenly lost everything and had to rebuild my income from $0, here's my 90-day AI playbook.

No connections. No reputation. Just a laptop, ChatGPT, and 1 hour a night.

Most people would update LinkedIn and mass-apply for jobs. I'd build a business that doesn't need a boss.

Week 1: Make AI find your unfair advantage.

Everyone has 1-2 skills the market pays for. Most people can't see them.

Feed your resume, past projects, and LinkedIn recommendations into ChatGPT.

Prompt: "Analyze my background. Identify 5 highest-value skills by market demand. For each: who pays for this, what problem it solves, and what a $2K-$5K offer looks like. Rank by speed to first dollar."

AI sees career patterns you've been too close to notice.

Week 2: Validate before you build anything.

Most people spend months on websites, logos, and brand colors. Skip it. Go straight to money.

Take your top 2 offers and use AI to write 10 outreach messages to potential clients.

Prompt: "Here's my offer: [offer]. Here are 10 profiles of potential buyers. Write a message for each that leads with their pain point, positions my skill as the solution, and ends with a low-friction next step."

50 messages, no responses? The offer is wrong. Not you. Adjust and resend.

Week 3-4: Turn one client into a system.

Most people just "do the work" and hope for referrals. I'd turn that first project into a machine.

Prompt: "Based on this project [details], create: 1) A standardized onboarding questionnaire, 2) A templated deliverable I can customize in 2 hours, 3) A results-tracking doc that proves ROI. Make everything reusable for 10 more clients."

Now you're not trading time for money. You're selling a system.

Week 5-8: Build a pipeline that runs without you.

Take every client conversation, testimonial, and result and turn them into content.

Prompt: "From these results, create 20 LinkedIn posts. 5 'mistake I see' posts, 5 client transformations, 5 'how I'd fix this' breakdowns, 5 contrarian takes. Hook under 140 characters. CTA to DM me."

One hour on Sunday = clients finding you all week.

Week 9-12: Use AI to 3x your rates.

Don't find more clients. Make each one worth more.

Prompt: "Analyze my service delivery. Identify 3 ways to increase deal size by 2-3x. For each: the additional result for the client, how to present it, and new pricing."

$3,000/month x 4 clients = a salary.
$8,000/month x 4 clients = freedom.

Same clients. Bigger offer.

Most people spend months on job boards, tailoring resumes to algorithms, waiting for permission to earn a living.

I'd spend 90 days building something no employer can take from me.

The leverage isn't the AI. It's that most people won't do this. The ones who do have almost no competition.

This is exactly what I built into my free custom GPT. It walks you through validating your idea, building your offer, and going from zero to launch with AI and all my frameworks built in.

Stop planning. Start building -> https://buff.ly/NVhBI9Y

CEO at Impact Theory | Co-Founded & Sold Quest Nutrition For $1B | Helping 7-figure founders scale to 8-figures & beyond

90-Day AI Playbook: $0 to Full Income

I used ChatGPT for over a year. Gemini lied to me. Grok gave me data but not depth. Here's why I switched to Claude:

Most people pick an AI tool once and never question it again.

That's a founder mistake I see constantly: loyalty to a tool instead of loyalty to an outcome. 

The second you stop testing your assumptions, you start optimizing for comfort instead of performance.

So I ran a real test. 

Same prompts. Same problems. Four different AIs. Here's what I learned:

ChatGPT became a yes-man. Over months of daily use, I realized it was optimizing for pleasing me, not challenging me. When I pushed back on its reasoning, it caved. That's not a thinking partner.

Gemini fabricated information with full confidence. It didn't flag uncertainty, it manufactured certainty. In business, bad data kills faster than no data. If a tool lies to you, it's not a tool. It's a liability.

Grok was exceptional at surfacing real-time information. Fast, sharp, great for raw signal. But it couldn't go deep. It gave me ingredients without helping me cook.

Claude did something none of the others did... it pushed back. It identified gaps in my reasoning. It didn't just generate outputs, it helped me think. 

For my deep dive YouTube research, for game development on Project Kyzen, for the frameworks I use to coach founders... it became the tool that makes me sharper, not just faster.

The principle underneath this is one I apply to everything:

Hypothesize. Test. Measure. Adapt. Discard anything that doesn't move a KPI.

That's the Physics of Progress. And it applies to your AI stack the same way it applies to your marketing, your hiring, and your product.

Don't be loyal to your tools. Be loyal to your outcomes.

What AI are you using daily? 

And when's the last time you actually tested whether it's still the best option?

Let's chat more about this in my community for Founders: https://buff.ly/ukAUERQ

My New AI of Choice

If I had $500 and 90 days to build a real business, here is my playbook.

No team. No funding. No connections.

Just AI and obsessive execution.

Most people would spend 6 months planning.

I'd have paying customers by Week 3.

The old playbook is dead.

It used to cost $50K-$150K and a year to launch. Research firms. Developers. Copywriters. Designers. Every step required writing a check to someone more expensive than you.

AI killed that model. One laptop, the right prompts, and you can do the work of a 10-person team.

Here's my exact 90-day sequence:

WEEK 1: VALIDATE BEFORE YOU BUILD

I would NOT start by building a product. I'd prove people will pay first.

I'd feed AI every Reddit thread, Quora answer, and Amazon review in my market.

Prompt: "Analyze these 100 customer conversations. Extract the top 10 problems people are desperate to solve. For each: severity, frequency, willingness to pay, and existing solutions failing them."

Then I'd write the sales page BEFORE the product exists. And take real money.

Prompt: "Write a sales page for [product] solving [top problem]. Include: headline, 3 pain points, transformation promise, pricing, and FAQ handling the top 5 objections."

If nobody buys, I saved $500 and 89 days. That's not failure.

If people buy, I have the only signal that matters: cash.

WEEK 2-4: BUILD THE MINIMUM VIABLE OFFER

Not a product. An OFFER. A product is what you think people need. An offer is what people proved they'd pay for.

Prompt: "Based on these pain points and validated sales page, create the simplest version of [product] that delivers the core transformation. What to include, what to cut. Nothing extra."

Then build it in a weekend with Bolt, Lovable, or Replit Agent. What cost $50K+ now costs $200/month.

WEEK 5-8: CONTENT AS THE GROWTH ENGINE

No paid ads. No cold DMs. Content that proves you understand the problem better than anyone.

Prompt: "Using these 10 validated problems, create 30 posts. Each: hook under 15 words naming a specific pain, 3 actionable steps, and a question that drives comments."

If it doesn't perform, it's not good content. Don't blame the algorithm.

WEEK 9-12: OPTIMIZE OR KILL

Prompt: "Here are my 60 posts, engagement metrics, and sales data. Identify which topics drove sales (not likes), which hooks stopped the scroll, which offers converted. Revise the plan using ONLY winning patterns."

Most people grind manually and burn out in month 3.

I'd validate in Week 1, sell in Week 2, build in Week 3, and scale what works by Week 9.

The barrier to starting a business used to be money.

Now it's the willingness to move fast.

$500. 90 days. No excuses left.

On March 5th, I'm doing a free live masterclass where I reveal how to build a 5-member AI team and launch a business in 72 hours using only ChatGPT. No experience required.

Can't make it live? Sign up anyway and get the replay: https://buff.ly/1YZTqnt

90d To Launch Your Business

It’s been 39 months since ChatGPT launched and changed the world. Here are 39 rules to get the best output from every prompt 👇

Most people blame the tool.
The real variable is how you think.

Rules 1-10 focus on: Mindset

1. Clarity beats cleverness

2. Ambiguity creates garbage output

3. The model mirrors your thinking

4. If you’re confused, it will be too

5. Treat prompts like instructions, not wishes

6. Garbage in = garbage out

7. Precision is leverage

8. Vague goals get vague answers

9. Ask like an operator, not a tourist

10. Assume nothing is “obvious”

Rules 11-20 focus on: Structure

11. Always define the objective

12. Specify the audience

13. Set constraints (length, tone, format)

14. Ask for step-by-step reasoning

15. Break complex asks into parts

16. One task per prompt

17. Order matters—sequence your requests

18. Use bullets when clarity matters

19. Use examples to anchor intent

20. Tell it what not to do

Rules 21-30 focus on: Quality Control

21. Ask for assumptions upfront

22. Request edge cases

23. Demand trade-offs, not platitudes

24. Force it to challenge you

25. Ask for first-principles thinking

26. Have it critique its own answer

27. Iterate—great outputs are rarely first drafts

28. Ask for multiple versions

29. Stress test the response

30. Optimize for usefulness, not eloquence

Rules 31-39 focus on: Power Moves

31. Give it a role (“Act as…”)

32. Define success criteria

33. Ask for frameworks, not facts

34. Request checklists over prose

35. Use it to think, not decide

36. Don’t outsource judgment

37. Use prompts to clarify your own thinking

38. The prompt is the real product

39. Master the input, and the output compounds

The real lesson?

AI can't replace your thinking.
It rewards people who already know how to think clearly.

If these rules were useful, save it.
If it made you rethink how you prompt, share it with your team.
If you have a question about one of the rules, ask me in the comments.

If you want to try this out on my Custom GPT for starting your business... click here!
https://buff.ly/qmqtM9g

39 Rules For AI Prompts

Your pitch isn't broken. Your thinking is. I've coached hundreds of founders. They all say the same thing:

"I just need to explain it better to investors."

No. You need to UNDERSTAND it better.

If you can't articulate your business cleanly in one sentence, you don't have a pitch problem. 

You have a clarity problem. 

And no slide deck, no pitch coach, no rehearsal in front of your mirror is going to fix that.

Explanation is downstream of clarity. Not the cause of it.

Business has physics. 

If you know what you're trying to accomplish, then you know the questions to ask. 

If you DON'T know the questions to ask, you don't understand the physics of your own business yet.

Here's the good news: AI just made this fixable in 10 minutes.

Not as a crutch. As a mirror.

3 AI prompts that will expose every gap in your thinking before an investor ever gets the chance to:

PROMPT 1 - "The Brutal Mirror"

Paste your pitch into ChatGPT or Claude and say: "Act as a skeptical investor who has seen 10,000 pitches. Tear this apart. What's unclear? What claims am I making without evidence? Where would you stop reading?"

This is not about getting AI to write your pitch. It's about forcing AI to show you where your thinking falls apart.

PROMPT 2 - "The Physics Test"

"Based on my pitch, what are the 3 most critical assumptions I'm making about my business? For each one, tell me what data I would need to prove it's true, and what happens to my entire model if it's wrong."

If you can't answer those questions YOURSELF after reading the output, you just found the exact gap that's killing your raise.

PROMPT 3 - "The One-Sentence Kill Shot"

"Compress my entire business into one sentence that a 12-year-old would understand. No jargon. No buzzwords. If it takes more than one sentence, tell me what I'm trying to say two things at once about."

If the AI can't do it, neither can you. And if you can't, no investor is going to do the work for you.

Here's what most founders miss:

Investors don't say no because your pitch was bad. 

They say no because they could feel that YOU didn't fully understand what you were building.

Clarity is the cheat code. 

Not charisma. Not connections. Not a better deck.

Run these 3 prompts. Read the output. Sit with the discomfort. Then rebuild from what's actually true.

That's how you earn the right to walk into a room and make people believe. 

I made a custom GPT to help with this process, get it here:

3 Prompts for Clarity

What used to cost $150,000 in app development now costs $200/month.

Welcome to the age of AI agents — this is how a subscription replaced your dev team:

"You need a technical co-founder." "You need $150K for developers." "You need 12 months to build an MVP."

All dead.

You describe your app in plain English. AI agents build it under your direction.

No coding. No wireframes. No 47-email thread with a dev shop in another timezone.

How it works:

You open Bolt, Lovable, or Replit Agent. 

You type: "Build me a mobile app for freelancers to track time, generate invoices, and send payment reminders. Clean UI, dark mode, Stripe integration."

An hour later — a working prototype. Not a mockup. A functional app you can test with real users today.

Pick a tool. Don't spend a week comparing. They're all staggeringly capable.

Here's a real example…

Your idea is a habit tracker for people in addiction recovery.

Step 1: Describe it "Build a daily check-in app for people in recovery. Streak counter, mood tracker, journaling, emergency contact button. Calming colors. Mobile-first."

Step 2: Direct the details "Add a weekly mood trends dashboard. Push notification reminders. Make journaling optional but encouraged."

Step 3: Set the business logic "Free tier with basic tracking. Premium at $9.99/month unlocks analytics and accountability matching. Stripe for payments."

Step 4: Refine with real feedback Share it with 20 people. Watch what they use, what they skip. Tell the AI: "Remove accountability matching — nobody used it. Add guided breathing — three people asked."

The result? 

A working MVP that would've cost $80K–$150K from a dev shop. Built in a weekend by someone who's never written a line of code.

The old model: Idea → Raise money → Hire devs → Build 12 months → Pray. 

The new model: Idea → Build tonight → Test tomorrow → Get signal immediately.

"You don't get to build slowly. You need signal now. Fast is the only way to get signal and refine."

AI gets you 80–85% there. Not 100%.

Simple apps like trackers, dashboards, booking tools? Near-perfect. 

Complex apps with heavy integrations? You'll need a developer for the last 15%.

But instead of explaining your vision for 3 months, you hand them a working prototype. Instead of burning $150K before anyone touches it, you've tested with real users for free.

The barrier between "app idea" and "working product" just collapsed.
You don't need a co-founder. You don't need funding.

You need a subscription, a real problem worth solving, and the guts to ship before it's perfect.

I built a GPT to help you with exactly this process.

Get access right now, here: https://lnkd.in/g68c--mP

AI is flooding your feed. Most of it is garbage. Here's the one thing it can't fake.

Every platform you scroll through right now is being buried in AI-generated content. 

Blog posts. 
Tweets. 
Carousels. 
Captions. 
Even video scripts. 

Most of it looks real. 
Sounds real. 
Feels real. 

And 99% of your audience can not tell the difference.

That is about to become every founder's biggest problem.

Because if your content strategy is "post more stuff," you are already losing. AI can out-volume you in seconds. It can mimic your voice.

It can copy your frameworks. 
It can produce at a pace no human team will ever match.

So what can it NOT do?

It can not go live.

It can not answer a question it did not expect. 
It can not stumble, recover, and show the audience it is thinking in real time. 
It can not make someone feel like they are in the room with a real human being who actually cares about solving their problem right now.

That is the moat.

I go live every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 7-9a PT on YouTube and Twitch. 

Not because it is easy. 
Because it is the one format AI can not replicate. 

You see me think. 
You see me get challenged. 
You hear me work through a founder's actual problem, live, with nothing scripted.

And that builds something AI never will: trust.

We are not in the content business. 
We are in the trust business. 

Content is just how we earn it.

Here is what most founders get wrong about AI right now. 

They either:
- Ignore it and get buried by people using it
- Over-rely on it and become indistinguishable from everyone else
- Fear it instead of leveraging it

The right move is to use AI as your unfair weapon AND go live to prove you are a real human with real depth.

AI is the most underused team member in most of your companies. 

But it is also a freight train. 

And if I fail to convince you of that, you will get obliterated.

I am hosting an AI Masterclass that breaks down exactly how to use AI to scale your business while building the kind of personal brand that no algorithm can replace.

Here's the link to sign up: https://buff.ly/ougpCl3 

The future belongs to founders who wield AI AND show up live. 
Everyone else gets washed away.

Go LIVE to beat AI

Someone on your team will quit this year. You may not need to replace them.

Not because they don't matter. But because most of what they do every day is repeatable process. Not magic. Not instinct. Process.

And right now, AI has made it possible to capture that process, hand it to someone already on your team, and run it faster than before.

The default move when someone leaves is to panic-hire. Post the job listing. Pay $40K+ in recruiting costs. Wait 3-6 months for the new person to ramp. And carry a 30-40% chance they don't work out in year one.

That's not a growth strategy. That's a reset button.

Here's what I'd do instead.

Run a 3-week offboarding protocol that turns a departing role into a system.

Week 1: Extract

Record every recurring task, workflow, and decision the departing person makes for 5 business days. Use AI to transcribe Loom walkthroughs, meeting recordings, and screen captures into step-by-step SOPs. The goal is to separate judgment calls from repeatable sequences. Most founders are shocked how much of a role is sequence, not judgment.

Week 2: Assign + Automate

Hand the repeatable work to someone already on the team who has context. Use AI to cover the volume gap: content drafts, data pulls, reporting, scheduling, first-pass analysis. Build a simple dashboard so you can track output without managing the person hour by hour.

Week 3: Stress Test

Run the new setup under real conditions. Fix what breaks in real time. Measure output against the previous baseline. By the end of week 3, you'll know whether you actually need to hire, or whether the system holds.

Most of the time, the system holds.

This isn't about eliminating people. It's about eliminating dependency on any single person.

If one departure can stall your business for 6 months, you don't have a company. You have a fragile arrangement.

Build systems people plug into. Not personalities the business is built around.

I'm hosting a free masterclass on using AI to augment your team, without scaling your headcount. Click here to sign up: https://buff.ly/Fi9SyfY

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Codie A. Sanchez

Tom Bilyeu

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The Battle

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