Codie Sanchez: Your Blueprint to Financial Freedom [The Knowledge Project Ep. #211]

Shane Parrish: You built a business around acquiring other businesses and enhancing them. Where did this all get started for you, and what have been the key moments over that journey?

Codie Sanchez: I stole it all from private equity. I never would’ve thought about buying businesses. It seems too big and scary, and I didn’t grow up with a lot of money or cash or understanding of money, so if you had told 20-year-old Codie, “You would be buying businesses and then buying more businesses and building on top of them,” I would’ve thought I had to win the lottery or something. But thankfully, I got into finance and I kind of hated finance. I didn’t want to be [like] anybody in any of the companies, even the people at the top—I finally realized that after 12 years—but I was like, wow, they really understand this language of money and they know how to buy assets that make money. I want to learn how to do that, and I just don’t want to have to do it in a suit and I want to be able to do it in businesses that I [choose], and I want to be able to hold the businesses forever as opposed to buying them, splitting them up for parts, and then selling them off.