Codie Sanchez

“I basically went through thousands of small businesses over the last five years, and I analyzed all of their pricing. And I found that on average, most businesses are priced anywhere from 30% below or 300% below the price of what they should be selling for.”

“Also, by the way, way easier to sell fewer people more expensive things than it is to sell a ton of people something really cheap.”

“Never, ever imitate. Don't let your sales people talk you into it. Don't let your friends talk you into it. Don't do it. Go premium. Premium is always easier.”

“The market rate is the average of everybody else's fear. It's basically like I mean, most people are broke. Most business owners don't make any money. Why, dear God, would you price off of what most people do?”

“And I think that's what deep discounting does. It trains customers to buy the discounts of the product. So if a customer only says yes at 30% off, that is your price now.”

“Custom, custom work at standard pricing means you're effectively donating your margin to your pickiest clients.”

“Could your current price pay somebody else to deliver the work and still leave you cash on the side? Profit. If the answer is no, delegation is mathematically impossible for you.”

“First you determine how much money does your work make or save your client each year. Then I want you to take that number, plug it into this equation. I'm going to put it up on the screen, but it's basically your price equals 10 to 20% of the value you created…”

“A price is only good or bad by comparison. So control the comparison, anchor it to the cost of doing nothing.”

“And there's actually a famous Harvard Business Review analysis that found that for the average company, improving price by just one percent, even if your volume, so the amount you do stays flat, is going to lift your operating profit by 11%. So raising prices …”

“Your floor is double what you charge today because anything less than double isn't worth the sweat.”

“Most businesses run three to one to one or worse.”

“Nobody will ever pay you a number you're too scared to say out loud. It's just not going to happen.”

“There's no making it, you know, like, oh, you've made it. You're like, I don't know. I don't think that ever happens actually. It just keeps getting more and more difficult.”

“Often in entrepreneurship, at least, we obsess on not being happy, and like, there's also, like sort of a cult around it.”

“But then I've been to his headquarters and he, like, for instance, they don't have credit cards. Zero credit. The entire place, nobody has a credit card in it. They have debit cards only.”

“Each time you swoop in and try to fix things yourself, especially where those problems are outside of your unique subject matter expertise, you basically remove the highest dollar use of your time for whatever seems urgent, but is really just in front of you.”

“What happens is you keep diving in front of every problem, and your brain gets rewired neuron by neuron to prefer being needed to winning, being free, or making more money.”

“I thought there is no way, you know, my company cannot afford to have me offline for that long. And it's still a regret of mine to this day because I thought I was being the hero and I was going to save everything. Everything was fine. I could have been gone f…”

“So decisions typically need written authority. So people know exactly what they can do without you. Delivery needs SOPs, documented processes, so somebody else can run it start to finish, not you, and you don't have to be miserable all day. Direction needs a s…”

“If there's a task that touches you more than twice a week, it gets a written system or a named owner, and I like you to do it by Friday.”

“Because most owners don't have their business fail because of not enough cash flow or because they can't generate enough profit. It's because they give up. And this problem has nothing to do with talent. It's really that you're too tired to keep going this way…”

“That first 1,000,010 million are much harder than the hundred million to a billion.”

“I could tell the good operators by the status of their cleaning vans. And so you open up the doors, and if it's a mess, I know that guy's not going to be on time, they're not going to hit their quota, and they're definitely never going to be in management.”

“And so the only thing I could figure out how to do was be in there earlier than everybody else and stay later than everybody else. That's literally all I had. But damn if that wasn't enough. And you know, of course one of the MDs sort of You know, saw me there…”

“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 when we look at the autopsy of these dead businesses, the number one reason, owner dependency.”

“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, the…”

“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 gonna move every time you get close because it's more about control.”

“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 your entire life.”

“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.”

“Your CEO, as a CEO, your real job is really three things, which is give a vision so big other people see their dream is bigger underneath you. Create systems inside of your business so that the business runs without you, and be so delusional optimistic that ot…”

“You know, we have, you know, we get a hundred and thirty million views a month, but the people that I actually sell anything to is probably, mm, 3000 to 5000 people a year.”

“I think businesses drift towards death quietly. They never run right into a wall on them. You always are kind of like moving your way towards it, but ignoring all the signs. And this checkpoint actually catches it early.”

“So in like, 1989 researchers found that perspective hindsight Assuming an event has already happened and explaining why makes people feel about 30% better at correctly identifying the reasons for future outcomes, which is crazy.”

“Bad speakers, they make the audience work too hard. You bury the lead. You got to figure out where is this going? How's it going to take? Great speakers remove that anxiety. They give you a map.”

“Pick one phrase you want people to remember, and then move that phrase through different levels. Start with the idea, then make it visual, then raise the stakes, then make it personal.”

“A newsletter with a 100,000 engaged subscribers can be more valuable than a million rented followers.”

“These details signal competence. They're also hard to remember. So if somebody's lying to you, they won't always match up.”

“It's one of the biggest differences between amateurs and pro. Amateurs are rushy. They're like afraid of silence. They fill all the words, so you know, I guess. If you want to be a great speaker, silence is not empty. Remember, silence is like tension. It's se…”

“Most people do not get rich through a salary. Pause. They get rich because their skills were so good somebody wanted them to own.”

“If you want to make a point, do not start with the point. Start with a moment when someone discovered the point.”

“You're doing sixty-five million in revenue now. You have, you know, 200 employees, a 150,000 dollar, or a 150,000 square foot studio.”

“So every time you soften the truth, I want you to think that you buy yourself a few seconds of comfort, but you cost someone else weeks or months of improvement.”

“The most respectful thing you can do for a competent adult is treat them like one. They can handle the truth or you guys shouldn't be working together.”

“Like half the time you learn context that might change the picture. The other half, they talk their own way to the fix and then they own it.”

“I've learned that great employees want clarity. Great friends and partners want clarity. Weak ones want comfort. And I don't want you to confuse the two.”

“Often, I think in the beginning, you want to try to give tough feedback in private until you've created a culture where everybody's so used to feedback. That giving it in public isn't that big of a deal.”

“Any feedback I have to give goes to those two groups as opposed to one-on-ones. I do not do one-on-ones.”

“If you guys talk to each other and you can't work it out and you are doing it direct, then you can bring it to me. But if you are not even having a conversation, I don't want to hear about it because all you're teaching me is that you're not good enough or str…”

“We would never have an office there and we would never live there full time because We call it the place where young people go to retire.”

“You cannot build one billion dollar business by accident, not to mention the six or seven or however many that family has. That's fucking hard.”

“We've, we have one business that we raise for now BizScout, which is our business buying and selling marketplace. We didn't raise that much, five million bucks.”

“Guy must have gone to ChatGPT, you know, listed out a few questions, and wrote me the most obvious AI ChatGPT brief of all time. And because of that, didn't get the job.”

“ChatGPT does a really good job of very short, prompted image creation. I still find even with Claude Design has a design. That looks like Claude. And you have to beat that design out of it still. I'm sure that'll be gone at some point. But chat actually does n…”

“We take all the data from Avoma and actually feed it into something that in real time can give you feedback on these objections. And it sort of voice triggers based on what you say on the phone call. It's been a game changer, especially for, we had an underper…”

“More than nine figures.”

“I was really upset when I saw the first, like, female young, or the youngest female self-billionaire was from Prediction Markets.”

“Because it just seems bad for society. Like, no net positive.”

“The value that you deposit minus the favor you withdraw equals how much relationship capital you have. The truth is most people go negative on the very first call, and then they wonder why nobody picks up the second time.”