When Codie Sanchez first started working on her book, she had the concept most authors would kill for. Millions of followers, a message people were desperate to hear, and real results to back it up. The early drafts leaned into something ambitious: a "big idea" book called The Three Waves, with three full chapters building the macro case for buying businesses. The trends, the thesis, the why behind all of it.

The writing was strong. Codie's a genuinely good writer. But when we looked at those first three chapters together, we both realized the structure wasn't matching what she's actually best at. A big idea book (think Bullshit Jobs or Malcolm Gladwell) presents the reader with a new lens on the world. You get a perspective shift, not an outcome, and that's fine for what it is. But Codie actually helps people get real, transformative results. The book needed to reflect that.

So we made the call together to restructure. The "why" chapters got compressed and the tactical material moved up front. It became the book Codie originally needed when she was learning acquisitions. A manual you could actually use. That decision, choosing which book to actually write, is what made everything else possible. As Codie put it, "If the tagline is 'this book will change the world,' stop it. Try to change the individual, not the world."

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‍Who Was This Book Actually Written For?

What made the difference was getting specific about who this was actually written for. Not the faceless masses. Real individuals she could picture at the signing table.

The first person Codie pictured was a former coworker. Smart, capable, everybody knew it. She'd been saying for years she was going to do her own thing, but when Codie caught up with her years later, she still hadn't done it. The reason? She'd been told she needed licensing, insurance, a 52-step plan. She got overwhelmed and never started.

Codie wanted to hand that woman a book and say, just read this. You don't have to have the perfect business plan. You don't have to do a SWOT analysis. You don't have to figure out who your first 50 customers are. They're already there. Just start with a little business to buy.

The other person she pictured was every boss and finance gatekeeper who ever told her she couldn't. She wanted to prove a point. You're not so special in finance. You don't have golden keys nobody else knows about. They could do this just as easily as you can, and you just don't want to show them that because you make more money if they don't.

Every author I've worked with who wrote for the masses instead of real individuals made a worse book for it. No exceptions.

How the Writing Earned Its Space

There's a moment in an early draft where Codie starts talking about Lisa Sutton, and the book just comes alive. Tiny, five foot four, former Miss Nevada in sky-high Louis Vuittons, clacking around her dusty mailbox store that prints cash flow. When you meet that character, you can see her. That chapter became the standard for the rest of the book, and Codie knew it. Once she found that gear, she brought the same energy to every chapter that followed.

Then there's Spencer Scott, a six-nine software engineer who got so fed up with his garbage collector knocking over his bins that he posted a landing page offering to start a garbage company if enough neighbors signed up. He got hundreds of orders. So now on Wednesdays he collects garbage, and the rest of the week he runs SaaS companies. As Codie said, "You've never met a more series of weirdos than people that own small businesses. It's probably why we call them boring. They're the opposite of boring."

The details matter in a different way too. Codie was nervous about sophisticated readers in private equity and hedge funds poking holes in the financials. She went back through every number, built spreadsheets, double-checked terminology. Net income versus net profit matters when millions of followers will find every error.

The cover alone went through 30 versions across three designers before we landed on Pete Garceau's design. Gold foil, high-quality paper, custom graphics throughout the book. We had 150 to 200 versions of those graphics alone, and some of the designers hid easter eggs in theirs. A diamond, a little plant figure. Details you'd only catch if you were paying attention. When you're writing about boring businesses, you need the book itself to be anything but boring. That extends to the structure too. Every chapter had to earn its place.

After enough time with the material, you can't tell if it's good anymore.

What Makes the Editor Relationship Work?

Codie said it directly: "After writing so much, you can't tell. Sometimes I'm like, I have no idea."

That's where the editor relationship becomes critical. You need a semi-contentious relationship, as it pertains to ideas, with your editor. You can like your editor, but you should be getting in arguments here and there. As Codie described it, "I have to trust that my editor has my best interests at heart and that he wants to see me win. And he has to trust that I want the same thing for him. If that happens, then we're going to win."

That trust has to go both ways. When it does, the editor can push back on ideas that aren't landing, and the author can push back on edits that lose the voice. Without it, books get polite instead of good.

How Codie Chose Her Publisher

Codie published Main Street Millionaire through Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group. She had multiple offers on the table, but what tipped the scale was finding a publisher who genuinely understood what she was building. Not just someone who wanted to acquire the book, but someone who believed in the movement behind it.

When her publisher talked her out of a giant launch event because it would make everything about the event instead of the book, it confirmed the decision. That's the sign of a publisher who cares about the brand more than the next quarter.

What Actually Drives the Book

Before finance, before acquisitions, Codie was an investigative journalist on the US-Mexico border. Juarez. The City of Death. She was in her early twenties, covering human trafficking and cartel violence during the peak years. She saw bodies on overpasses. She saw a man stabbed. She walked past hundreds of pink flyers with the faces of missing women. Young, brown-haired, last name Sanchez.

One day it hit her. What's the difference between her and those women on the posters? Not nationality, not ethnicity. Socioeconomics. Money. If you have money, you can assert your will on the world. If you don't, the world asserts its will on you.

That's what drives the whole thing. As Codie points out, 79% of all millionaires in the US are self-made, but upward mobility is still unfairly distributed toward those who already have some version of wealth. Budgeting won't close that gap. Stock market investing won't either, because you need money to start. Real estate, same thing.

What Codie saw in acquisitions was different. A massive supply of businesses for sale, a tiny demand of people who know how to buy them, and a transaction where nobody has to lose for you to gain. The seller gets a retirement plan. The buyer gets cash flow and equity.

Codie's vision for this book was that someday, somebody hands it to their grandkid and says, this is why the family is where it is today.

What Makes a Book Scale

Codie could have written the prestige version, the big idea book that wins awards and sits on coffee tables. She chose to build something people could actually use, and that choice shaped everything that followed: the structure, the audience, the stories, the outcome.

If you want to see what a book built this way could produce for your business, estimate your book's ROI here.

And if you're ready to figure out which book your business actually needs, see if you're a fit.