Codie Sanchez spent years in the polished world of finance before she noticed something the glossy headlines missed: some of the most reliable money in the country is hiding in the least glamorous places. Laundromats. Car washes. Vending routes. Small, dull, cash-generating businesses nobody posts about.

She turned that observation into a mission. Through her Contrarian Thinking brand, she teaches ordinary people how to buy and run these 'boring' businesses — the kind that will never trend, but will quietly pay the bills for decades.

While everyone chased the next shiny startup, she went looking for the laundromat down the street.

Her pitch cuts against everything the startup world worships. Forget the moonshot. Forget the funding round. Buy something that already works, improve it a little, and let it compound. It is unfashionable, and it is exactly why it resonates.

On LinkedIn she has become a rare, grounded voice in a feed full of hype — reminding a generation chasing overnight success that real wealth is often slow, plain and hidden in plain sight.

Sanchez studied journalism at Arizona State University and began her career reporting from the US-Mexico border, including on violence and human trafficking in Ciudad Juárez. She then moved into finance, starting at Vanguard in 2008 and working at Goldman Sachs and State Street before building a Latin American investment business at First Trust.

She founded Contrarian Thinking as a newsletter and has turned it into a media company with a large audience across social platforms, alongside holding companies through which she buys stakes in small, established businesses such as laundromats and service firms. Her 2024 book, Main Street Millionaire, which sets out how to find, finance and run that kind of company, became a New York Times best-seller.

The approach rests on a simple observation: many profitable small businesses in the United States are owned by people nearing retirement who have no obvious buyer. Sanchez argues that buying one of them, rather than starting from scratch, is a lower-risk route to ownership, provided the buyer is prepared for the unglamorous work of running it.