How to Build a Business That Makes Money Without You

My new book, Own Or Be Owned, is all about building a business so good it doesn't need you. I broke it into the 12 Profit Levers… The 12 levers I've seen determine whether you print cash or hate your life. Check it out: https://contrarianthinking.biz/bigdeal-godin - cs This episode breaks down the exact frameworks for building a business that makes money without you, why 70% of businesses never sell because of owner dependency, and the three paths every owner is on whether they know it or not. From the five lies that keep you chained to your desk to the embed, solve, exit method that frees your time while growing revenue, you'll learn how to engineer presence without dependence and why the real measure of success is whether your business runs better in the weeks you're not there. In this episode, you'll learn: The lifer gut check: five yes or no questions that reveal whether you're an owner or an inmate, and why three or more yeses means your business owns you, not the other way around Why money only buys happiness when you trade it for time and autonomy, and how University of Pennsylvania research proved that happiness climbs past $200,000 with no ceiling for people whose lives already work The three paths of ownership: freedom, domination, and escape, and why trying to chase all three at once is like going on a diet, a bulk, and a juice cleanse simultaneously The five lies that keep owners stuck: I'll hire when we hit X, this quarter is the last hard one, I'm the only one who cares enough, my customers only want me, and it's not that bad The embed, solve, exit framework: how to stand in the bottleneck, build the thing that replaces you, and leave the seat without taking it back the first time someone runs it at 80% of your standard ___________ (00:00:00) Introduction: The Vacation Test and Why Your Business Is Actually a Job (00:01:04) The Tuesday or Funeral Test: Does Your Business Survive Without You? (00:02:17) The 70% Dead Deal Problem: Why Most Businesses Never Sell (00:03:49) The 75K Happiness Lie: What Money Actually Buys According to Science (00:05:56) Money Amplifies Life: The University of British Columbia Time Study (00:07:05) The Three Paths of Ownership: Freedom, Domination, or Escape (00:08:50) You Can't Ride Two Horses with One Ass: The Path Audit (00:10:51) The Five Lies That Keep You Chained: The Jailbreak Framework (00:12:38) Embed, Solve, Exit: The Three-Word System to Free Yourself (00:15:04) The 750K Sales Problem: Jimmy's Story and the Power of Systems (00:17:14) Presence Without Dependence: Yvon Chouinard's MBA (00:18:40) The Real CEO Job: Vision, Systems, and Delusional Optimism ___________ MORE FROM BIGDEAL 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@podcastbigdeal 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigdeal.podcast 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@big.deal.pod MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@codiesanchezct 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codiesanchez 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@realcodiesanchez OTHER THINGS WE DO 🌐 Our community: https://contrarianthinking.typeform.com/to/WBztXXID 📰 Free newsletter: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3XWLlZp 📚 Biz buying course: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3NhjGgN 🏠 Resibrands: https://resibrands.com/ 💰 CT Capital: https://contrarianthinking.biz/4eRyGOk 🏦 Main St Hold Co: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3YfGa8u Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  The action's on the court and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to US residents 21+ Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes and details.

• 0:30Codie Sanchez?

  There is one question that tells me immediately whether you run a great business or not. When was the last time you, the owner, or an important employee, took a vacation? If you're proudly saying something like, "Vacation? I don't take vacations. I grind. This place needs me," then your business is probably not a business, it's a job. So today, I'm going to give you all the secrets, the juice. So whether you work for somebody else or you work for yourself, you can steal them and implement them in your lives. We got the three paths every business is on right now, whether you know it or not, and the five lies that keep businesses chained to you. I'm Cody Sanchez. This is the Big Deal Podcast. Let's get into it.

• 1:08Codie Sanchez?

  Really quick, September 18th, every single thing you see in this episode, I am going to talk about live at the biggest event I've ever done in my whole life. I am going to give you $1 million free in cash and prizes for people to win. Every single person who comes will get something from me that has helped me make my first six and seven figures. And I'm going to walk you through how this book will help your life. There's a question I ask everybody in business. I want you to answer it honestly. If your business lost you tomorrow, would it be a Tuesday or a funeral? Picture it, like you step back from your job or team for two weeks. Does the machine keep humming? Or does it seize up, freeze, and are you getting nonstop slacks? The idea is, I want to tattoo this line on the insides of your eyelids.

• 1:53Codie Sanchez?

  If it can't survive without you, you don't own a business, you own a job. And a bad one at that with a terrible boss and probably a salary where you pay yourself last. So I've got this gut check and I call it, "Are you the lifer?" It's five yes or no statements. One, you haven't taken a full week off in two years. Two, your work hours and your personal hours have blurred into one long smear. Three, your closest relationships took a backseat to the business and everyone involved knows it. Four, your business has quietly replaced most of your life outside of it. Five, selling or closing the business would feel like losing part of your soul. Count your yeses. Three or more, you're not an owner, you're an inmate. And that's okay, because I know you might tell me, "It's fine. The business is doing well.

• 2:35Codie Sanchez?

  I love my job." All of that is great. But if you want to make more money, then you need to make sure you are replaceable, actually, whether you run the business or not. Because most people in business fail. 70 to 80% of businesses will never actually sell that are even listed for sale. Seven to eight out of every 10 owners who walk into the market to sell something, walk home with nothing. And we should know, I own one of the biggest buying and selling business marketplaces in the world called Biscout. And when we look at the autopsy of these dead businesses, the number one reason? Owner dependency. It's also why you won't get promoted in your job. Because if you can't build a team, then why would they give you more money and more

• 3:15Codie Sanchez?

  opportunity and more people to manage and hire? So like, just because you are an owner, doesn't mean that you actually have a business. The thing is, buyers don't buy jobs. They buy machines that make them money, whether you, the previous owner, shows up or not. And people don't give you more money if you are the entirety of a division or a group. If the whole operation lives in your head, there's really nothing on the table to purchase or to pay you more for. So your freedom problem is also a valuation problem. And at some point, you see it, you know, you don't own this thing, it kind of owns you. And then here's the question that should really pause you and maybe make you a little angry. You got into this business to set yourself free, so why does it have you by the throat?

• 4:00Codie Sanchez?

  Like, I can just picture the objection, right? So like, "All right, fine, Cody. I'm chained to it, but these chains are made of gold. I love it, you know? Once the number gets big enough, I'll buy my way out." Super cute in theory, but science has basically said that that's not what happens. So what does money actually buy?

• 4:19Codie Sanchez?

  In 2010, there's a Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman, he's incredible. And he published with a fellow Princeton economist, one of the most quoted findings in modern social science. "Day-to-day happiness rises with income, then flatlines around 75K." You've heard this one. It launched like a thousand TED Talks, gave a generation permission to stop asking hard questions about money. One problem, the study was bullshit. Because in 2021, a University of Pennsylvania researcher tested it with better instruments, better tools, then built an app that pinged more than 33,000 working Americans at random moments and asked how they felt right then in the moment, instead of from memory. Over 1.7 million real-time reports later, that famous $75,000 plateau was gone.

• 5:02Codie Sanchez?

  How high was it? Well, it climbed a lot, past $200,000, with really no ceiling in sight up to 500K. So who's right? I mean, here's the twist, I think. In 2023, the two rivals did something nearly extinct in academia. They put all their data together, brought in a neutral referee, and published a joint answer on one of the top journals in the country. The finding? Both were right about different people. For most people, more money really does, in fact, buy more happiness. But for the unhappiest, roughly 20%, the benefit stops around 100K. Past that line, money can't touch what's actually hurting them. And I think this is important because the whole episode, basically today, that we're going to talk about is in one data set. Money amplifies a life that is already working.

• 5:45Codie Sanchez?

  It basically can't rescue a life that is completely not working. So if the machine you built is eating your marriage, your health, your weekends, the next zero on the revenue line does nothing for you. You've enrolled yourself and the one group money can't help. And I think this is important to say, because I work all the fucking time, but I really like it and I choose when and how. And my employees work really, really hard, but they like it and they choose when and how. And we don't, you know, police when they come in in the morning and when they leave and how many vacation days they take a year. And we don't police if they want to build a new part of the business, if they want to grow a new part, if they want to try a new trade, like, no. And so the question here is really, I think, what actually moves the needle? The University of British Columbia, basically, they ran six studies on about,

• 6:30Codie Sanchez?

  I don't know, 5,000 people, and found that people who value time over money are reliably happier and actually held after controlling for how much money they had. A follow-up study found the same thing from the other direction. People who spend money to buy back time, they have a higher life satisfaction than people who buy more stuff. This is so important. Using your money to buy you more time makes you happier than buying things. And I think that's the thing most owners, they don't ever think about. And neither do employees. Like, how many employees? I mean, if you're one right now, tell me in the comments for real. How many of you make over $100,000 a year and you haven't gotten yourself a VA? Or an agentic VA? Like, you're just doing everything all the time and it makes you really feel good to say you're busy nonstop, even though you could just be productive

• 7:15Codie Sanchez?

  as opposed to busy? I think money only pays off when you trade it for time and autonomy. If you leave it unconverted, like, it's just some arbitrary score that nobody really knows about and you can't take it with you. So you move the target. The goal isn't to end up rich on paper, it's to end up free, to work on what you can do uniquely that you love to do, that you'd have to pry out of your cold, dead fingers. I have a mental model for you. I call this the three paths of ownership. And it could be of employment, too. Every owner is on one of three paths. Now, whether you picked it or not is a different question. Path one, freedom, is really the lifestyle business. Like, you optimize for making as much money and profit as you can every year, but augmented by your life. The business exists to fund a life, and the life is really the point.

• 7:58Codie Sanchez?

  Path two, domination. That means scale, market share, headcount, empire. You work like a maniac for a decade and that's the deal you knowingly signed and you love it. That's like my business. Path three, escape. You're building to sell. Like, every decision gets judged by one standard. Does this make the business worth more to somebody else? No, no one of those is better than any one, but you need to pick which one matches the life you actually want. I fucking hate all this business advice out there and life advice. It's like, "You should do this, because I did." It's like, "Bro, you're miserable? You don't have a family? Like, you don't have friends? You don't have hobby?" What? Okay, yeah, that worked for you to get to a billion dollars, but I don't want your life. Simultaneously, if you're like, taking advice from a lifestyle person who just likes to hang out and not work all the time, but you're a maniac, you're going

• 8:41Codie Sanchez?

  to be miserable too. And I think this is the disaster that most entrepreneurs are doing, which is like chasing all three at once and not trying to filter advice through what you want for your life as an adult with the willpower to choose yourself. So you're like, "No, I'll have freedom and an empire and a payday." And like, you can't pick all three at once, because that's like basically saying, "I'm going to go on a diet, I'm going to go on a bulk, and I'm going to go on a juice cleanse all at the same time." You're like, "What? I'm exhausted. I'm broke." It's actually impressive, you know? There's actually this quote from one of the best rodeo cowboys that exists. His name's Larry Mann, I think I'm saying that right? And he said, "You can't ride two horses with one ass." Okay, so how do you find out which horse you're actually riding? Well, I break this down in detail in this book, so I can give you every single segment

• 9:26Codie Sanchez?

  of it on September 18th. Click the link below. It's totally free for you to register for the event where we'll go through it. But let me give you the cliff notes. First, pull up the last 12 months of your calendar and your bank statements. If you say you want the freedom path, but the calendar shows 70-hour weeks and every dollar of profit, go back into headcount. You're basically running a domination play, but you're running it accidentally, which means like, you're paying full price and collecting none of the prize. Then if you want to see what a past audit looks like at the highest level, I think you could consider like Bill Gates, right? He used to memorize his employees' license At Microsoft so he could scan the parking lot and know who came in early and stayed late. You know, he branded out barely sleeping. Then he got close to Warren Buffett and he saw Warren's

• 10:09Codie Sanchez?

  calendar and it was like this paper datebook, almost empty, whole days with nothing on it. And one week in April had three entries. Like Buffett's a billionaire and his calendar is wide open. And Gates said it kind of rewired him. He'd packed every minute of his life and assumed that was like the only way for it to be done. And then here's the greatest investor and operator, maybe of all time, guarding the blank days. Like that was the point because they kind of were for him. And not saying either one's right or wrong, but the lessons Gates took from it in his own words, you control your time. And Buffett's version would be like, I can buy anything I want, basically, but I can't buy time. So Buffett's calendar and Buffett's path sort of matched perfectly. It is yours. And if you do choose the freedom path, change your scoreboard

• 10:51Codie Sanchez?

  today. Like on this path, the metric that matters is profit per hour of your time. And I break this down specifically so you can see a nice little graph on it, but revenue for you would be a vanity number, like a $2 million business and that nets you 500K on 15 hours a week would beat a $10 million business that nets you the same on 80. And so this is really up to you. Okay, so let's say that you've picked freedom. How do you actually get out of the middle of everything without the wheels coming off? This is like a really important question. First, we kill the bedtime stories. I call this the jailbreak. And these are like self-soothing little lies. The lies owners tell themselves to make the cage that you've built feel like a choice. There are

• 11:35Codie Sanchez?

  five of them. The first one I hear the most is, I'll hire when we hit X number. Like, no, you won't. The number's going to move every time you get close, because it's more about control. Lie two, this quarter is the last hard one. Ah, you probably said that last quarter and like the 11 before that. So like, maybe you've just decided to live on hard mode. What could we redo? And why do we keep doing what Einstein says the definition of insanity is, which is the same thing continuously and expecting a different result? That seems dumb. Lie number three, I'm the only one who cares enough. We call this the martyr complex. And if you haven't taken our avatar personality test in this, you're gonna want it because it'll tell you where you are blocking

• 12:16Codie Sanchez?

  yourself from making more money. It is true that nobody will ever care like the founder about your business in the same way. But it's also irrelevant because the question was never if someone cares the same. It's like, have you built a system where carrying 80% as much still produces a great result for you and the person who works with you? Lie four, my customers, they only want me. Yeah, sure. Like, a few of them. But most customers actually don't give a shit about you. They want your results. Like, and that's good, because you're not everything to everyone and you can build yourself out of that process. And the last lie that we tell ourselves is, it's not that bad. Right? This one's easy. Like, your spouse, your sleep, your back, your hot girl stomach

• 12:59Codie Sanchez?

  with all the stress, like, that's telling you that it actually is kind of bad. And it's really three words that solves this. Embed, solve, exit. So I want you to go stand in the bottleneck, like the one place where everything waits on you. You kind of probably already know where this is. Like, even in your job, it's like, man, I'm the one source of truth because I've been here the longest and everybody's bothering me on stuff all the time. And can I just spend a day getting it out of my head? And every time somebody asks me a question, I tell them to go look at this fucking thing? That was one of my employees, Lindsay, who like basically was being driven crazy because she is our longest standing ops employee and has like the passwords to everything. So she's getting, she's becoming a password keeper. What a miserable job. But

• 13:41Codie Sanchez?

  that's her fault, which I told her, I'm like, then put it down on paper and stop letting people treat you like their password keeper. Tell them they're being lazy. Go look at this thing. And like, don't guess. Look at where the work stacks up when you take a day off. Look at where people are pinging you nonstop. That's your address. That's the thing you got to go after. Then step two, we're going to solve it. So like with Lindsay, we're going to build the thing that replaces you in that seat. Sometimes it's hiring somebody to backfill. We did that. Sometimes it's a playbook. Sometimes it's just a rule. Like, you're not allowed to ask me about passwords until you've checked this file. And if I go find the password in there, you have to buy me a latte. Great rule. And that can be done by an employee or an owner. Because if every discount, every problem, every

• 14:22Codie Sanchez?

  whatever crosses your desk, then you need to hand it to the person who should own the discount process instead. Now, there are some that I think that you got to do. Like, if you're in an early stage business, you probably have to hire every employee. You can have a scoreboard. You don't have to do every single employee hire at every step. But what you need to realize is the knowledge in your head isn't an asset until exists outside of your head. And step three is the exit. Like, leave the seat. This is where all of us relapse. So hear me. Do not take the seat back the first time someone runs it at 80% of your standard, because they're going to. If you have five people running at 80% versus you at 95%, guess who wins? Your 95% was costing you

• 15:06Codie Sanchez?

  your entire life. I'm no mathematician, but five people do 80%, that's higher. So you're going to repeat this again and again and again. Embed, solve, exit. Embed, solve, exit. Until nobody in the building has a single point of failure. They're going to free you and your employees. You need to hand every employee you have this book, because at the end of every single chapter, it says, team handoff right here. And, you know, hey, give this to your marketing lead. And here's what the marketing lead's going to go do. I run an advisory program for business owners called Growth Boardroom. One of the owners in there, this guy Jimmy, had an incredible story about how he was the owner reliance issue in his business, basically. He was spending, I don't know, 25 hours

• 15:46Codie Sanchez?

  a week personally handling all sales and realized, because we like to put a price tag on your pain and everything you do, that that was costing him $750,000. So what did we, what did we do with him? We embedded in the problem. He recorded and transcribed every sales call for three months, turned it into a pitch, into a one pager and a repeatable sales system. Then he hired for the system and boom, he solved the founder dependency problem. And he didn't just solve it for 750K, he actually signed contracts worth over 934,000 in annualized gross revenue, I think. And was like 50% already at hitting the top line when published. His business grew when he removed himself from that problem. So I obsess over these frameworks and systems because I want

• 16:30Codie Sanchez?

  every business owner to be rich and free. Will you guys all make $900,000 off of it? I doubt it. But will you have somewhere in your life where you are better and richer because you put a system in place, both richer in time and money? Probably. Like, all of your time, all of your fun is what these problems cost you, but they can be solved with systems. And that is the entire reason I wrote this new book for you. More profit, less pain, to have more freedom with less chaos. So you're going to actually learn live at our launch about the real systems I use to scale multiple businesses to the nine-figure mark, and the specific ways you can hand stuff off to your team, even if you're not the one in charge of everything, to help your business keep growing. I'm launching this on September 18th. Free tickets in the link below. I'll see

• 17:14Codie Sanchez?

  you there. Last thing I want to just check in with you on, everybody online is obsessed with passive income and handoff sales. Like, that's not what I'm saying. I don't know how you can like run a business at a small scale, free of everything, ignore everything, run without you. Those are different. You're not allowed to disappear. Freedom doesn't mean you neglect the business that gave it to you. The gold standard is presence without dependence. So you're close enough to sense when something bad's going on. You're far enough that it runs without you, like not absent or indispensable. And the best proof I know is a guy who built a multi-billion dollar company while barely being in the building. That's Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. And he used to say he ran the company on his MBA, management by

• 17:55Codie Sanchez?

  absence. In his term, he literally was like, I'm gone from May to November. And he would call a handful of times while he climbed, surfed and fished. And like, for him, that wasn't neglect because he built a system around it and a team. Those months in the field were where he tested the gear, found the flaws, came home with the next decade of products. Then he hired operators he trusted, handed one of them the CEO seat for 13 years, and reserved for himself the single job that only he could do, living inside of the product. When he finally let go completely and basically gave the company away, Patagonia was worth $3 billion. Presence without dependence. And here's how you'll know it's working for you. The real measure of success is whether the business runs better in the weeks you're not there, or runs worse. That's what happened when I

• 18:40Codie Sanchez?

  finally did this for real. I got my life back and the business got better both at once. Not a trade-off. Now, I have to warn you, getting free is one thing, staying free is another. And so I want to make sure you design your life before the business does. Like, I want you to have to have your calendar set, like we've talked about before. Not let the business quietly eat and own every single part of you. Schedule the date nights ahead of time. I'm going to break this all down actually in the last chapter of the book, but let's leave you with this last thing. In business, you can either listen to the hustle porn, the mania, that you have to get up at 5:00 AM, read 57 books, work 24 hours a day until you die, or you can work on getting better and

• 19:22Codie Sanchez?

  building a system that's smarter with people who are better than you, because that's the entire purpose of a CEO. Your CEO, as a CEO, your real job is really three things, which is, give a vision so big other people see their dream as bigger underneath you. Create systems inside of your business so that the business runs without you, and be so delusively optimistic that other people believe you can succeed. That's the game. I'll see you guys on September 18.

• 19:52Speaker 02

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