How to Build a Business That Makes Money Without You

1. 0:00 – 1:04

   Introduction: The Vacation Test and Why Your Business Is Actually a Job

   1. CSCodie Sanchez0:00

      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 gonna 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 Codie Sanchez. This is the Big Deal podcast. Let's get into it. 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 gonna 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.

2. 1:04 – 2:17

   The Tuesday or Funeral Test: Does Your Business Survive Without You?

   1. CSCodie Sanchez1:04

      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: 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 [laughs] 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, and that's okay 'cause I know you might tell me, "It's fine. The business is doing well. I love my job." All of that is great, but if you wanna 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.

3. 2:17 – 3:49

   The 70% Dead Deal Problem: Why Most Businesses Never Sell

   1. CSCodie Sanchez2:17

      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 BizScout. 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 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 kinda 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? Like, I can just picture the objection, right? So like, "All right. Fine, Codie. 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 that's not what happens. So what does money actually buy?

4. 3:49 – 5:56

   The 75K Happiness Lie: What Money Actually Buys According to Science

   1. CSCodie Sanchez3:49

      In 2010, there's a Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman, he's incredible, and he published with a, 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 1,000 TED Talks, gave a generation permission to stop asking hard questions about money. One problem: the study was bullshit. [laughs] Because in 2021, a University of Pennsylvania researcher tested it with better instruments, better tools, and 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. 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 are 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 gonna talk about is in one data set. Money amplifies a life that is already working. 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 in the one group money can't help. And, 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 wanna build a new part of the business, if they wanna grow a new part, if they wanna try a new trade. Like, no. And so the question here is really, I think What actually moves the needle?

5. 5:56 – 7:05

   Money Amplifies Life: The University of British Columbia Time Study

   1. CSCodie Sanchez5:56

      Uh, the University of British Columbia, basically they ran six studies on about, 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 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.

6. 7:05 – 8:50

   The Three Paths of Ownership: Freedom, Domination, or Escape

   1. CSCodie Sanchez7:05

      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. Path two, domination. That means scale, market share, head count, 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 that's like, "You should do this 'cause 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? I, I, I... 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 gonna 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 gonna go on a diet, I'm gonna go on a bulk, and I'm gonna 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 f- uh, from one of the best, uh, rodeo cowboys that exists. His n- name's Larry Mahan. I think I'm saying that right. And he said, [laughs] "You can't ride two horses with one ass."

7. 8:50 – 10:51

   You Can't Ride Two Horses with One Ass: The Path Audit

   1. CSCodie Sanchez8:50

      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 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, the CliffsNotes. 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 head count, 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 wanna 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 plates at Microsoft so he could scan the parking lot and know who came in early and stayed late. You know, he bragged about barely sleeping. Then he got close to Warren Buffett, and he saw Warren's calendar, and it was like this paper date book almost empty, whole days with nothing on it, and one week in April had three entries. [laughs] Like, Buffett's a billionaire, and his calendar is wide open. And Gates said it kinda 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 kinda 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 match perfectly. Does yours? And if you do choose the freedom path, change your scoreboard 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 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.

8. 10:51 – 12:38

   The Five Lies That Keep You Chained: The Jailbreak Framework

   1. CSCodie Sanchez10:51

      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 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 gonna move every time you get close, uh, 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 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. [laughs] They want your results. Like, and that's good because y- 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 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.

9. 12:38 – 15:04

   Embed, Solve, Exit: The Three-Word System to Free Yourself

   1. CSCodie Sanchez12:38

      So I want you to go stand in the bottleneck, like the one place where everything waits on you, and you kinda probably already know where this is. Like even in your job, it's like, "Man, I'm the one source of truth 'cause 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 dri- being driven crazy because she is our longest-standing ops employee and, and has like the passwords to everything. So like she's getting... She's becoming a password keeper. What a miserable job. But 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 gotta go after. Then step two, we're gonna solve it. So like with Lindsay, we're gonna 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 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 gotta do. Like if you're i- in an early-stage business, you probably have to hire every employee. Um, you, 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 it 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 'cause 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. I'm no mathematician, but five people doing 80%, that's higher. So you're gonna repeat this again and again and again, embed, solve, exit, embed, solve, exit, until nobody in the bu- building is a single point of failure. You're gonna 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, uh, you know, "Hey, give this to your marketing lead, and here's what the marketing lead's gonna go do."

10. 15:04 – 17:14

    The 750K Sales Problem: Jimmy's Story and the Power of Systems

    1. CSCodie Sanchez15:04

       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 he's... how he was the owner reliance issue in his business, basically. He was spending, I don't know, 25 hours a week personally handling all sales and realized, 'cause we like to put a price tag on your pain in 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, uh, 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 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? P- 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 gonna actually learn live at our launch about the real systems I used 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 you there. Last thing I wanna just check in with you on. Everybody online is obsessed with passive income and handoff sales. Like that's not what I'm saying. Y- I, 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.

11. 17:14 – 18:40

    Presence Without Dependence: Yvon Chouinard's MBA

    1. CSCodie Sanchez17:14

       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 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 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 wanna 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 gonna break this all down actually in the last chapter of the book, but let's leave you with this last

12. 18:40 – 19:21

    The Real CEO Job: Vision, Systems, and Delusional Optimism

    1. CSCodie Sanchez18:40

       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 building a system that's smarter with people who are better than you because that's the entire purpose of a CEO. The... 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 delusionally optimistic that other people believe you can succeed. That's the game. I'll see you guys on September 18th. [outro music]

Episode duration: 19:21