-Codie Sanchez

Before finance, before the businesses, Codie Sanchez was an investigative journalist on the US-Mexico border. She was in her early 20's in Juárez, covering human trafficking and cartel violence during the worst of it.

She walked past hundreds of pink flyers with the faces of missing women. Young, brown-haired, some of them named Sanchez.One realization stayed with her. The distance between her and the women on those posters came down to money. Money is what lets a person assert their will on the world instead of having the world assert its will on them.

That idea became the engine behind everything she built, and eventually behind Main Street Millionaire.
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Choosing Which Book to Write

Codie had the audience, the track record, and a thesis about buying overlooked businesses. Her early drafts leaned into the big-idea version, three chapters building the macro case for buying businesses. The writing was strong, she was already a genuinely good writer.

The question Charlie Hoehn, co-founder of Author.Inc, helped her sit with was "Which book was actually hers to write?" A big-idea book hands the reader a new lens. Codie gets people to a real outcome.

So they made the call together to restructure, compress the "why," and move the tactical material to the front. It became the manual Codie herself had needed when she was learning to buy businesses.

As she put it, "If the tagline is 'this book will change the world,' stop it. Try to change the individual, not the world."

‍Writing for One Person

‍That decision shaped everything after it. The audience got specific: a former coworker who kept waiting for the perfect plan, and every gatekeeper who ever told Codie she wasn't the type to do this. The characters got specific too, like Lisa Sutton, the former Miss Nevada running a mailbox store that quietly prints cash. Codie checked every number herself, built the spreadsheets, and sweated the terminology, because she knew sophisticated readers would look for the seams.

The Long Game

Main Street Millionaire debuted as an instant New York Times bestseller. Codie's book earned 2,000+ 5-star reviews on Amazon, with readers calling it “the best business book they’ve ever read.”
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Her aim for it was that someday a person hands it to their grandkid and says, this is why our family is where it is.
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