The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 196: This Is The One Skill That Will Guarantee Your Success! (Even Against Smarter, Better & Richer People): Codie Sanchez

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

In this moment, small business expert, Codie Sanchez discusses how speed and self belief are the core traits for success. Some of the most successful people in the world have what has been labelled a ‘reality distortion field’. This is a personal energy that makes the people are you believe that they can achieve impossible tasks. Codie says that we actually all have this ability, and can make ourselves belief we are capable of achieving anything, and as a result we are more likely to achieve what we set set our minds to. Secondly, people need to adopt a bias towards action and decrease the time between thinking and doing. Codie says that time is the most important currency of our lives and too often we waste it by not having a sense of urgency. By taking action quickly, you can learn and adapt on the path to success before others have even started. Listen to the full episode here - Spotify- https://g2ul0.app.link//HMr9oSCneQb Apple -  https://g2ul0.app.link//HzxlTZFneQb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Codie's Book: https://lnk.to/main-street-millionaire Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's funny because at the heart of all of your messages, Cody, is this sort of deep optimism and belief that one can just kind of bend the world. And I say this because you know, whenever we're talking about this hypothetical young person, everything is kind of just, yeah, just go ask this person to do this and da da da. But as you're saying that, I was thinking, I resonate with that because I was that 18 year old kid that was just sending off the emails and asking people to help me and whatever else. But I don't think the vast majority of people have a deep internal belief that they can kind of just mold the world. That's so true. Do you know what I mean? Just like bend it in this direction. They think it is how it is and you play a role within it.

Not that you can just like, yeah, just go to a guy and knock on his door and offer him this. You're actually so right. Yeah, it's true. It's a bias that I think you and me have because we've been exposed to the fact that you can actually just burn the world around. Yeah, you just got to watch one person do it and then you go, oh, I'm a wizard too. You know, we're all wizards. Is this your banister effect idea that I heard you talk about?

Oh yeah, that's right. So well, there's two things I want to talk about. One is you've heard of Steve Jobs, reality distortion field. Yeah. So Steve Jobs was known for having this energy that basically made other people around him believe that they could change the world, that they were unstoppable. And so he would talk, people would talk afterwards after he died about how he'd come into their office and he'd be like, we're going to ship this product in 24 hours. I know we're going to do it in three weeks, but we're going to do it in 24 hours. He would get them all riled up and then they would ship it in 24 hours.

And after the 24 hours were done, they would kind of be like, you know, coming out from a blackout, like what just happened? How did he talk me into that? That's his reality distortion field, which I think is fascinating because we all actually have that ability. His was really strong. But for nerds, Star Wars nerds, like I am out there, it's like the force, you know? It's if you actually believe that you are capable of something, it's weird what you can accomplish. I think so. Amen. Yeah. You know?

So I like to read, you know, if you want to get a reality distortion field, reading the biographies of billionaires is really powerful. I'd rather read 10 billionaires biographies than 200 self-help books because they've actually done it. And so I think it's, who's the guy that wrote Steve Jobs book? Is it Abramov? Walter Isaacson. Walter Isaacson? Walter Isaacson.

Yeah. Incredible book to even listen to, to see that reality distortion field. Elon Musk is the same. I mean, I spoke to Walter and he told me that Elon has this just obsessive ability to just assume that everything he's being told is basically not true. I, if someone says something takes eight, eight months or something, he, he seems to just reject that idea on site and he immediately asks about the core components of the challenge. So he'll immediately go right down to the roots of the problem.

And from there, he'll figure out that in fact, it can get done in eight days. And I, and I just don't think people understand the advantage of saving that amount of time on any challenge you have in your life, on figuring out a way to make it happen faster. Because one of the great currencies of all of our lives is just the time that we have. And some people will take three to four years to start a business that with your information and that your understanding and your bias would probably take you 90 days. Yeah. That's a three, like a three year, nine months saving on life. Just because you have this sort of urgent bias, you have this bias towards believing that all these deadlines are actually just,

I don't know, bullshit. Yeah. I mean, one of my favorite mentors told me a line that changed my life, which was, it was Bill Perkins. I asked him why he's so successful in so line that changed my life, which was, it was Bill Perkins. I asked him why he's so successful in so many aspects of his life, damn near a billionaire. He said, the only reason that I am successful is I'm faster than everybody else. By the time they have thought about an idea, taken it to a meeting, and started to move, I have already made three mistakes and found a faster way." And so his bias on speed is fascinating.

If you ever hang out with the guy, it's wild. I'll be like, can we schedule a meeting? He's like, I'm calling you right now. And so he just moves quicker. So in our companies, we implemented something called the 24-hour rule, which was this idea that if we want to win, we have to have a bias towards action. We have to decrease our time between thinking about a thing and doing the thing. And so most people say, well, get back to you on that next week, right?

Get back to you on that next week. Hate that line. That is where dreams and money goes to die. Instead, I say, can you get it to me tomorrow? If all we do different than our competitors is they take a week to do things and we get it done in a day, I don't have to be richer, smarter or better. I'm just faster. And it drives my team crazy many times, but I'm not smarter.

I'm really not. I'm just very fast at a few things and I ignore a shit ton of stuff that I don't think is going to move us forward. What happens is people overthink things. And in this day and age, it happens more and more. They think about the thing and they confuse thinking with work. More often than not, thinking is not working. This is where people yell at me on the internet and go, well, if I just don't think about

anything and I move really fast, I could move fast in the wrong direction. Yeah, you could, but just iterate. Move fast and iterate. That's what most people don't do. And so I'll tell my team all the time, you're thinking about this way too much. Make a decision in 30 seconds. What's the decision? I'll tell you if I like it, yes or no. I like the decision, move forward. And so ask yourself that in life. It's like Mel Robbins, one, two, three, four, five, get out of bed. Mine is 30 seconds to decision. So if I've got tens of thousands of dollars or pounds, do you think, what would you do with it? I was playing this game yesterday. There's three businesses I really like right now.

I really like senior care centers. Senior care centers, okay. Which is interesting because you'd go Cody, I said tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands. But senior care centers are interesting because there's all these government grants and allowances for the fact that we do not have enough of them in the US and you can turn a house with the right licensing and zoning into a senior care center. And so I won't get too technical on it, but demographics show we have a huge aging population. We need more areas to take care of them.

And you can start smaller by having an independent living house that has a rotating nurse. You make three to five X the rent on that as you do a regular midterm or long-term rental. So I like the demographics of that one. Plus it's not super capital intensive because you could rent the house out from somebody else and then just layer this assisted living center on top of it. I also really like businesses today that are service-based but don't require a ton of upfront capital. So for instance, window cleaning businesses. I just bought one of these.

It's called Pink's with this company called Rezzy Brands, but I love it because I did it. We have a YouTube video that's going to come out and I was like, am I full of shit? Let's try this and see if I could actually do it. So you need to make $384 a day in order to have a business that does $100,000 a year if you only work five days a week. So I was like, can we make $384 pre-selling window cleaning services to somebody in order to start this business?

And we tried it and we did it. I might start like a window cleaning business, a pressure washing business, a painting business. You could also buy one of those. Those are trade services businesses. And then the third type of business that I always talk about are what I call gateway drug businesses or semi-autonom autonomous businesses like laundromats or cart washes. The problem with those are they're slightly more expensive. I just want to take a pause here and just sort of get perspective on what you're talking

about for someone that has no understanding of business. So my name is Nigel and I am 37. I've never ran a business before, I don't know anything about businesses or investing or anything like that. What is it you're telling me to do? Nigel wants to make more money, he wants to be an owner, he wants to be a millionaire in 10 years time. And Nigel's willing to work hard. He's willing to work the hardest. He just doesn't really know what to do because there's so many options and so many conflicting things he gets told all the time.

He's hearing all these words, Rezzy Brands, he's hearing like window cleaning power, he's like, what's she doing with the power washer? So if I was Nigel, here's the question I would be asking myself. I would be saying one, do I want to keep my job that I have currently or do I want to not keep my job? That's really important because it's like, am I going to go work on something 24 seven or not? I'm not making enough money to completely walk away from my job yet.

Okay, Perfect. So that means you kind of savings. Yeah. You want a little side hustle that you think could be your full-time. Right. So in that case, what I would start doing is asking myself, we have something called your unfair advantage Venn diagram. And what your unfair advantage Venn diagram is, is your skillset. So what is Nigel good at? And that that's as simple as like maybe Nigel's in marketing. So he's Nigel good at? And that's as simple as like maybe Nigel's in marketing. So he's actually pretty good at marketing. Maybe Nigel drives an Uber or a car service.

So he's really good at working super long hours. He's just got the workhorse in him. Then I add my network. Who does Nigel know that could help him? So that might be like Nigel's brother is actually a plumber. He works inside of a plumbing business. So if Nigel figured out how to buy a business, he could partner with his plumber brother in law or whatever, and they could do it together.

And then finally, it's like, what gets you excited? And by what gets you excited, I don't mean an industry. I mean, Nigel loves sales. Nigel loves it. He wants to sell people stuff. Okay. And the reason I talk about this Venn diagram like this is it's a little bit more complex than saying you should go buy a franchise.

You should go buy a window cleaning business or start those. It's because I think the biggest reason why people struggle with what to do next is they don't actually know themselves. And so if I was Nigel, I would say to you, find what your Venn diagram is of the things that you think you're good at, your network is good at, that you could actually go either start or buy a business on. Because the fastest path to wealth is having some type of ownership. So I would start there.

Before I knew what I know now about business, if I'd heard you say when I was 18 years old, just go buy a business, I'd go, Keri, listen, I've got $700 left from my call center job a month. How can I buy a business that's making millions or hundreds of thousands? I'm gonna have to wait till I'm rich. Yeah.

Well, yeah, you can't buy it with your 700 extra bucks, but you could buy it with your sweat and your time. So there's three ways to buy a business. You can either use cash, you can use expertise, or you can use time or what I call sweat equity. So think about it right now. I buy a bunch of businesses, I have a ton of cash. You know what I don't have a lot of? Operators.

I don't have a lot of people who can go actually run the business that I want them to run. But if I had a young guy who was super hungry and I could give him $100,000 to go operate the business that I was going to go run, I would probably do that. People do that every day in our community. And so for this young gun, you're not going to go buy the business outright yourself with your own capital. You're going to say, I'm working 12 hours in a call center right now. I am relentless.

If you pair me with somebody that knows how to run a plumbing company and I just have to learn and do a bunch of the bullshit to start the company and grow the company or continue the company, would you partner with me? And they're not going to be able to partner with a Steven or a Cody probably at first, but they might be able to partner with somebody's dad that they know. And so like for instance, we had a young guy in our group. I'll change his name to Adam since I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about it or not, but let's say.

So Adam was 19 years old. Adam worked inside of a marketing company and he had never run a business before, didn't have a lot of cash. Adam went to the senior partner of his marketing company that he worked for and said like, we have this vendor over here that we do some stuff with. They do all of our graphic design work. They're really good. The guy's kind of done with running this business.

Like I don't think he wants to keep doing it. I was talking to him about the other day, what if we bought this business and I ran it? Like I'll integrate it for us. I'll bring it into this company. And I think we can buy it with just a percentage of future profits we bring in, which is called seller financing. And the marketing head was like, if you think you can get that deal done, yeah, sure. And the guy was like, okay, Adam says, well, if I do that, can I have part of the company

for bringing it over? And he said, well, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't have to put in capital to the deal or I have to put in a very small amount of capital. You're going to run it. And we basically have like a risk-free trade because we just have to pay them a percentage of future revenue or future profit. Sure.

And so now Adam owns a business that he's about to sell because he basically partnered with his owner. And so, I mean, you can even think about that with your business today. If you're a young person working with Steven and you're like, hey, Steven, we're in this studio right now. I saw like a sign out front that says that they're actually, they want to sell this studio space. I thought we could rent out this whole thing and we could probably cashflow and make this

a profit center instead of a loss center for us. If I could like a negotiated deal that was basically a seller financed real estate deal for us, would we, would you want to do something like that? I could help us run the rental of it. Now you might say no to that first deal, but you're probably going to look different at that employee. A hundred percent. And also I just want to explain what seller financing is for someone that doesn't know. Seller financing is how 60% of all businesses get sold when they're small businesses. So it's very normal. Seller financing just means this, that the seller uses a percentage of future profits to let somebody else buy the business. And instead of you having a loan

or a mortgage for a house, they're basically saying, hey, my business right now makes $100,000 a year profit. I want to sell it to you for $300,000. You go, sounds good. I don't have $300,000. And they go, okay, well, why don't I sell it to you for $300,000 over five years and you pay me each year from that $100,000 profit that we have? Could we do a deal that way? You might be like, yeah, we could do that. They've just got to believe that you're going to be able to grow the business. Yeah. Or not royally fuck it up. Yeah. 100%. Which is, selling anything is a trust trade. So these days we have to do less trust when we sell something because we have immediate trust in like a credit card or money. This is almost going back to bartering days where it's like,

I'm going to sell you this with the idea that you're going to give me that. It's a harder trade, but it's totally doable. For the first time, I've taken my framework, the same strategies that have helped thousands create wealth and partnered with Stephen Bartlett and Flight Books to bring you Main Street Millionaire. The opportunity is here. The only question is will you take it? Grab your copy now at the link below.