Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
Codie Sanchez tells her audience of 15 million to stop copying other people's formulas
Entrepreneur's September 2026 profile has the Main Street Millionaire author warning that a buyer who copies the wrong operator will build a disaster. Her case for buying laundromats is unchanged.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Entrepreneur's September 2026 issue profiles Codie Sanchez, who has a combined 15 million social media followers and wrote the best-selling book Main Street Millionaire.
- She built that following largely on one message: anyone can become an entrepreneur, and the path to success runs through small business ownership.
- She now says a builder who cannot find their own unfair advantages and does not know their weaknesses will spend a lifetime trying to apply other people's formulas.
- Her stated fix is to look inward first, name your strengths and goals, and only then build a plan suited to your own abilities and needs.
- "My belief is that you should have businesses that you own, that are profitable, and that you actually like to run," she told Entrepreneur.
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Why it matters
- constraint Advice that only works once it is fitted to the individual cannot be delivered to 15 million followers by content alone. A one-to-many acquisition program is limited in what it can honestly promise a buyer.
- decision Taken seriously, the sequence puts a candid self-assessment ahead of the deal search. That adds weeks to a process most first-time buyers begin with a broker listing and a bank conversation.
- contradiction Entrepreneur frames the personalisation push as counterintuitive while the same profile reports a movement built on people following her path, so a follower is receiving both instructions at once.
The qualification is about the person buying. Sanchez put it in terms of copying one named operator. "If you try to mimic Alex Hormozi, who's an incredible marketer and salesperson, but you are inherently more of a product person and a lifestyle builder, you're going to build a disaster, not a business," she said [10]. She takes the point from her own record: she spent too much time trying to follow other people's paths to success [8], and of her earliest videos she said, "like any new business owner, you get talked into things that aren't you" [16].
The acquisition case sits where it was. In the profile, her reason that laundromats, car washes and roofing companies are available is that they already have established consumer bases, are straightforward to operate, and are easy to acquire because their owners are often aging out with nobody else to sell to [5]. A self-assessment still leaves the buyer to price the business and to work out how much of the revenue leaves with the retiring owner.
Sanchez's own entry predates her audience. She bought her first laundromat more than ten years before the September 2026 issue, which puts the purchase in 2016 or earlier [18], after starting out in finance, having taken a job as an ETF consultant at the Arizona branch of Vanguard [15]. The profile does not report how buyers who followed her method have done [17].
Personal advice is also a business. Contrarian Thinking, which Sanchez now fronts, operates in investment, advisory and media services [7]. The version of the message that depends on knowing a buyer's strengths and weaknesses is the version that needs someone on the other end of it.
For an operator deciding this quarter, the revision changes who the method is for. Her claims about the assets stay as they were. Entrepreneur's profile ends by telling readers: "But please don't do it Sanchez's way. Do it your way. She'll help." [12]
What to watch
- Whether Contrarian Thinking's investment and advisory materials adopt the self-assessment-first sequence, or keep selling the repeatable system.
- Whether Sanchez publishes outcomes for buyers who used the Main Street Millionaire method.
- Any qualification of the acquisition case itself, meaning aging sellers and easy entry. That would be a larger revision than the fit argument.