Today in 5 minutes or less:

✔️ Learn: A Mission We Can All Get Behind

✔️ Earn: Contrarians, Meet BizScout

✔️ Turn: Why We’re Building This Now

LEARN

A Mission We Can All Get Behind

I’ll never forget the day I bought a laundromat.

Nearly a decade ago, it was my first real step toward financial freedom. But that day, it didn’t feel like it.

“Codie, WTF have you gotten yourself into? You’re going to get fired from your job. This is a horrible idea. You know nothing about washing machines. You barely do your own laundry.”

I never could have imagined that less than a decade later, that little laundromat would lead to a not-so-little portfolio with many, many Main Street businesses.

I wasn’t born into wealth. My parents were hard-working Americans. Nothing about my childhood hinted at a future in which I’d become a voice for financial empowerment.

But after college, when I went to work as a journalist in Juarez, Mexico, the harsh realities of reporting on human trafficking taught me a valuable lesson: money is power.

That realization inspired me to dive into the belly of the beast.

I worked for financial firms like Vanguard, State Street, and Goldman Sachs. That led me to start buying and owning businesses for myself, and publicly sharing what I learned online so others could steal my homework.

I realized I’d much rather help a large number of ordinary people learn to build wealth together than help a small group of already rich people get even richer.

So today, our mission at Contrarian Thinking is to give smart, hardworking Americans a toolbox to take back Main Street and transform this land into a nation of owners.

I hope you’re one of them.

For the last few years, our business’s core focus has been helping people like you learn. We teach the art and science of buying and growing small businesses through our:

• Media
• Courses
• Educational programming
• Events
• Speeches
• And more

We’ll continue doing so, with many big plans in store. But today, we’re adding another tool to the toolbox — one focused on helping people earn.

It’s a moonshot, but one day, I think it could become our most impactful tool, period.

EARN

Contrarians, Meet BizScout

I believe that one day buying and selling businesses will be as normal and easy as buying and selling real estate.

BizScout will be the infrastructure behind this — the ultimate platform for entrepreneurs looking to buy, sell, or grow a “Main Street” business.

A beautiful one-stop shop for buyers, sellers, brokers, and vendors to access a wide marketplace of on and off-market deals, useful tools, a phenomenal user experience, and the most actionable data.

There’s a lot of work to do and features to build, and as is, it’s far from our founding team’s vision. But BizScout will become the go-to home for Main Street businesses changing hands, blending technology with a personal, human touch.

In doing this, we’ll help bridge gaps between generational legacies of small business creation, preservation, and innovation.

See, we spend A LOT of time with current and aspiring business buyers, sellers, and brokers in our Contrarian Community. When it comes to today’s biz buying platforms, we’ve heard it all:

• “Meh”
• ”It’s the only option”
• “Impossible to find the right business”
• “Can’t get anyone to respond”
• “Huuuuuuge time suck”

NOT what you want to hear about a product! So we’re laser-focused on addressing these challenges with:

• Curated, high-quality listings
• An off-market deal engine
• Buyer verification
• Practical search options
• Helpful integrations
• Unique insights

Today, I’m inviting you to give BizScout a go. It’s hard to say buying a business will ever be a breeze. But as BizScout gets built out, we hope to start making the process a bit breezier.

Buyers’ Big Painful Problem…

It often sucks to buy a small business. It is sometimes 10x+ harder — and takes 10x+ longer — than buying real estate — and not always for good reason.

Many business marketplaces are full of zombie listings, inaccurate data, and frustrating communication. We are working to solve this.

Here’s what we’re aiming for long term:

Before BizScout:

• Buying a business feels overwhelming
• Business listings online are often useless
• Brokers and sellers rarely respond to you
• You never have all the info you need
• Waste of time, you feel annoyed and alone

After BizScout:

• Everything you need is in one spot
• The right sellers stand out
• You have productive conversations
• Progress is clear
• A sense of calm settles upon you

Acquisitions are hard. Buying a business takes guts, takes work, and takes time. It’s easy to get discouraged and lost in a pile of messy listings, accounting, legal work, and communication that saps time and energy. With BizScout, our vision is that it won’t have to be as painful as it is today.

Sellers’ Big Painful Problem…

It often sucks to sell a small business. As with buying, it is sometimes 10x+ harder — and takes 10x+ longer — than selling real estate — also not always for good reason. On a good day, selling a business can sometimes feel like a financial colonoscopy.

Before BizScout:

• Marketplaces offer awful experiences for selling
• Businesses are difficult to value accurately
• You need high-touch help to manage financials and communication
• The process feels invasive & time-wasting
• You get countless disorganized requests
• You and your team are stressed
• You want to give up before you even get your exit

After BizScout:

• Everything you need is in one spot
• You easily stay on top of buyers
• The right buyers are clear
• Deal progress is obvious
• You feel like this was… weirdly straightforward

Selling a business can be brutal. BizScout will become the go-to tool to help you find the right buyers, close your deal, and ensure your legacy will be passed on to good hands.

Let’s Be Real

Building this out is going to be a beast. We’re in the very early stages of a new platform. It’s going to have issues, and we have dozens of features on the roadmap we think you’ll love.

We don’t just want you to try the product — we want your honest, productive feedback as our team puts in the work making it better every single day.

Ready to try it out?

TURN

Investing In This Now

So, why am I placing so many chips on this idea? Answer: Because THIS is how we keep turning things around for the better. THIS is how we right the ship.

Let’s step back for a minute.

Think about the world today. Venture-backed tech companies launching with missions to “change the world” have long held the spotlight. TV shows, podcasts, books, news, you name it.

But we’re turning the tide.

The pendulum is swinging back toward cash flow and away from “vibes.” Energy is being directed toward entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA).

We increasingly believe that over the next 15 years, certain terms, like:

• “Cash flow”
• “Small business”
• “Local”
• “Profitable”

…Will develop a cool factor like those that have dominated the last 15, like:

• “Startup”
• “Raising VC”
• “Unicorn”

Big-swing ventures are always crucial, but we believe this is generally a healthy trend and a better path for most people.

Why Now?

Consider this: The CEO of Zillow, upon founding the company, said, “The web [had] been around for now 9 or 10 years, but still I couldn’t get pictures of homes and complete listings and prices and addresses…. We were trying to answer a simple question. What is that house worth? What should we offer if we wanted to buy it?”

Solving that led to a company worth nearly $13 billion. Now the same question applies to small businesses — except it might even be worse, and the web has been around for a long time.

Imagine you owned a home, built it up, and cared for it over the years. Then eventually, when you were ready to move on, instead of selling it you just bulldozed it and walked away.

That happens far more with small businesses than you might assume. 10,000 baby boomers are retiring daily. Their generation represents the majority of small business ownership in the US. Most of them will retire in the coming years, but many have no real exit plan.

True, many of these businesses will not make good acquisitions. But many will. And today, many owners (boomers or otherwise) aren’t really sure how, where, or even that they can sell. So they shut their doors, sometimes spending money to do so.

This is a tragedy, and we need to close these gaps.

We want to help owners determine their business’s value, and understand how to profit from it by changing hands through a sale. Then we want to see a new generation preserve these owners’ legacies — and make money doing it.

The Good News

There’s a young generation HUNGRY for hands-on entrepreneurial work.

They were told to go bootstrap their startups or indenture themselves to venture capital, but they’re now recognizing the potential in the more accessible, boring, stable, cash-flowing businesses down the block that already exist to buy, sell, and build:

• Fencing
• Plumbing
• Manufacturing
• Carwashes
• Landscaping
• HVAC
• Cleaning services
• The list goes on, and on, and on

These are businesses that require LOTS of hard work and grit, and yes, can fail. But they also come with accessible frameworks (that you can hone) for acquiring and scaling — the kind of stuff we teach our students.

Meanwhile…

• We’re seeing more and more teens interested in the trades.
  
  
• We’re seeing tech bros launch garbage companies, and NFL players build waste management businesses.
  
  
• We’re seeing MBAs shift focus from venture-backed startups to profitable, local, small businesses.

The next generation is simply not interested in sitting in cubicles behind a screen or dedicating years to someone else who’ll fire them the moment it’s useful. And they’re certainly not interested in being replaced by AI.

But, they are interested in vitamin D and in building something they own.

OWNERSHIP

One of Life’s Great Unlocks

Ask anyone how things are going in this country, and they’ll likely have a story to tell. No matter their beliefs, I’d bet the overarching theme is that there’s room for improvement.

Well, we believe we can’t turn things around at scale until it’s easier for smart, hardworking individuals to build back ownership in their lives.

Ownership is one of life’s great unlocks. Sure, it’s an unlock to building wealth, but it’s also an unlock to building stronger communities.

Ownership is responsibility, and responsibility develops us into better people, leaders, parents, and citizens.

Our children need better tools to build ownership, and I believe in my heart that BizScout can serve that cause.

Simply put, we’re developing a tool that I would’ve loved to use when I looked to acquire that very first laundromat.

But I hope we’re building much more than just a tool to buy and sell a business.

I hope that we’re building a tool to take back Main Street. It’s the heartbeat of our country — and a path to wealth, memories, and legacies.

It’s not easy to be an owner. But it can be well worth it. It’s also up to you — and only you — to choose your hard, so choose wisely.

Let’s go build a nation of owners.

What’d you think of this week’s newsletter?

Hit reply to let us know. How ya feeling? Did we crush it? Blow your mind?

Want more where that came from?

✔️ Head to our website. For practical tips on biz-buying, we have another newsletter you might like... Sign up free here.

Powered by HubSpot

Adelante = always moving forward

This email was brought to you by Codie Sanchez, Jacob Cohen, and Jazmine Anderson