Boring businesses. That are the terms that Codie Sanchez uses to refer to her 25 (if not 26) multi-million dollar companies that she started after she quitted from Wall Street not so long ago.
Among all of her ‘boring businesses’ which are really lame actually, are laundromats, car washes and even lines of vending machines. These are all typical business type but Codie managed to build a $30M portfolio from these 25 businesses. She produces 8 figures income revenue from the companies.
Codie Sanchez whom are famous with her latest Contrarian Thinking, she believes in doing less while managing all of her multi-million dollar companies. According to her tweet, she only applies 3 steps to be able to save 20 to 30 hours of her week and still maintains her productivity.
1. Decentralized Management
To Codie, a CEO title is just a title which does not own us. Many years back, we always have the mindset that the CEO would control everything in the company. But the truth is that mindset just to make the business owns us, and us actually owning the business.
Codie believe in hiring good people to join her million dollar companies. People that better than us and let them run the show. Codie said, “Do not hire a dog, and then try to bark for it.” Why should we bark for them right? As a dog, the barking is her specialty and of course, she knows what she’s doing and what she should do as a dog.
Be relentless when hiring. Choose and select the best among all. We as the company owner need to realize the benchmark that we put to our subordinates and let them perform according to their expertise.
Codie keeping track the performance of all of her staff by introducing the concept of short & sweet scorecards fro all her staff every Friday. She believe in creating the Key Performance Index (KPI) tracking at the macro level is important in decentralizing the company management.
2. Rip Off & Duplicate
We as the founder and the head of the company, should have known the direction of our company. To Codie, we are not the one who become the arrow, but we should become the archer instead. The most important position that need to be hired in a company are the Chief Operation Officer (COO) and the Chief Staff Officer (CSO).
Working against the old way of people management, Codie did not follow the typical hierarchical structure in the company. But she applied the concept of a Team of Teams.
By ripping off the old structure and duplicate a team which consists of multiple teams, Codie emphasize the importance of sharing the goals to each of the team and they will decide what path that they should go in order to achieve the goals.
3. Don’t Drown in Data
Codie holds tight the simple old concept of decision making : KISS, keep it simple, stupid!
She didn’t believe in a lot of statistics, reports or even abundant of projects updates. To her, it is actually noise.
She also referred to the Pareto principle, where mostly, only 20% of the jobs will produce the 80% of the results. So, she focuses more on the output and activity measurement of each of the week, rather than keep checking the progress from time to time (even with no output yet).
Codie usually will pick 3 to 5 important statistics or reports from each of her million dollar companies, that will be showing her whether the business is growing or decaying. She also listed from some of her business weekly review like laundromats, the important reports that she focused on are the cash collected, customer complaints or issues, machines in working order, the costs and profit. All those things are compared by week over week (WOW) or month over month (MOM).
From her private equity business, her scorecards would be deals reviewed, deals done, each companies profit and loss, costs of the team and the accumulated assets. All of them also being compared by WOW or MOM.
Bonus Tips
Other than the simple 3 management tips of running her multi-million dollar companies, that Codie mentioned above, she also shared her daily routine of get physical in order to keep her body stay healthy and productive. She do intense weightlifting for 6 to 7 days a week only for an hour.
Codie avoid any night meetings. She treats herself like a school child, where no meetup on school nights are allowed. She will try to avoid any activities on the ‘school night’ in order to make herself get enough rest on the working days and be able to be more productive on the next day.
Other than that, Codie loves to walk while meeting, so that it won’t take longer time to get a conclusion from any issues. So, rather than set a time in a meeting room, why not her staff buy her juice and get to walk together with her.
She shared another two of her tips on staying productive while managing her 25 boring businesses. Why not follow her in Twitter for more of her updates and we should also be telling stories of her and others in ByteNod next time.
