She Quit Wall Street to Buy Laundromats and Built a $50 Million Empire

Codie Sanchez started out as a journalist and won a national award. But she decided words don't fix the world. Money does.

So she pivoted to Wall Street, working at Goldman Sachs, Vanguard, and State Street, while quietly buying boring businesses on the side: laundromats, car washes, the kind of thing no one in private equity would touch.

The Pivot

Then COVID stopped all travel. So she opened her laptop and wrote a newsletter about the secrets Wall Street keeps from you: how to buy the boring businesses everyone else ignores.

She wrote for a full year without making a penny. And instead of quitting, she kept going.

Building an Empire

Here's what she built from that foundation:

• Turned the newsletter into a whole new business
• Built a brand on social media and launched a fund, an education company, and a holding company
• Sold every new product straight to the audience she built
• Became a New York Times bestselling author with 12 million followers

The Journey

Journalist who wanted more. Wall Street by day, laundromats by night. COVID stops everything. Writes a newsletter for a year for free. Keeps going. The audience buys everything she builds. A $50 million holding company.

The Takeaway

Sometimes the year you spend building for free is the one that pays off everything after. When you're focused on building distribution first, the products take care of themselves.

The lesson here isn't about laundromats or newsletters. It's about showing up, creating value, and trusting the process even when no one's paying attention.

If you're in the middle of building something that hasn't paid off yet, keep going.