For Beginners

More than half of the people who buy the course or join the Contrarian Academy are traditionally employed. Most are well-paid and highly skilled, but either burnt out in their jobs or tired of building someone else’s wealth— or both. This course will teach you how to leave (or supplement) your full-time job so you can stop the side hustle once and for all.

Yes, the course starts from where we all start—the beginning. We even have a module to help you determine what type of business to buy (since there are quite literally millions to choose from). Don’t worry if you don’t know much about the industry or have had no previous experience – we’ll guide you through it all.

The key difference is how we approach this course vs. every other course we’ve experienced. Our Acquisitions Foundations course takes you down a specific path. Instead of dumping 15 choose-your-own-path of what to do and when to do it video hours on you, we give you play-by-play instructions so you know what, why, and how to do it. You even get templates and exercises. Then we give you the next step. That produces momentum, gives you small quick wins, and keeps you motivated and excited to keep going. All of which give you confidence and increase your chances of reaching your goal. It’s the same process we use to buy our own businesses, so we know it works (even during recessions). Another key difference is we specifically teach you how to buy the best off-market deals and use seller financing to creatively negotiate the most profitable deal possible. Other courses don’t teach this, or don’t teach it well, and expect you to use a broker (who works for the seller, not the buyer) and go into debt to buy a business (not ideal). We want you to get the best business, with the best deal, using no money of your own (or as little as possible).

Yes, absolutely. If you have the ability to buy a small business in your country, these concepts apply. While some things are specific to the U.S., like SBA loans, there are a number of similar programs through local banks and through local governments that provide small business loans. We have a bunch of information on our course about those options. So the structure and framework we provide will still be beneficial to you.

Hi! I’m Codie Sanchez, we own lots of businesses at Contrarian Thinking Capital and Main Street Holding Company *you can see them on the site here. We’ve taught 9,000+ how to buy and build businesses *you can see all our owners all over our sites and social. After more than a decade in finance I realized we could either buy all the businesses ourselves like private equity guys do, or we could bring people along with us. I stopped believing it was better for me, or anyone, to own everything. So now we have 5 years and thousands of owners to prove that how we do acquisitions works and yes, we can take back Main Street.

Yes! Updates are coming, and all updates are free for 1 year.

Simple – buy the course if you only want the information and resources. Plenty of people have been able to learn the ins and outs of business acquisition and become owners from it. However, most people want more than information and resources. They want connection, accountability, and support. This is where the Contrarian Academy comes in. If you would benefit from a full year of expert guidance and accountability, weekly support calls, deal review calls, and an active and growing online community supported by expert facilitators, the Academy is where you want to be. It’s where most future business owners people end up. Buying a business (especially your first) can be long, challenging and lonely. So, if you’re fully committed to buying a business within the next 365 days, we recommend joining the Contrarian Academy. For everyone else, we recommend sticking to just the course. You can always upgrade to the Contrarian Academy when you’re ready (and we’ll credit 100% of your course purchase towards the Contrarian Academy).

Think of a blog post as a distilled chapter from a book and the Acquisitions Foundation Course as a graduate-level college class. (But much more fun to attend.) The course goes into more detail, with use cases, examples, checklists, and video tutorials on every single strategy. Blogs are flat. Singularly focused on tactics. The course is dynamic and specifically engineered to help you buy your first business with easily repeatable strategies so you can continue to acquire more (if that’s what you want to do).

Only you know the answer to that. What I know to be true, my only regret in life thus far is waiting to long to bet on myself. Every day I waited was a tax on the future life I truly wanted.

Yes. And we’ll credit you $2,000 towards the Contrarian Academy. In fact, it’s the best way to get into the Contrarian Academy in the future. Because we know you’ve already got skin in the game and are doing the work, you’ll skip the waitlist.

Absolutely. It does every day. This system has worked for actors, marketers, engineers, analysts and just about everyone else. You don’t have to be a business expert. Far from it. In fact, it’s probably better that you’re not. That way you’ll be more open to following our proven process. All of the strategies taught are built on universal business and dealmaking principles and are not industry-specific.

At the end of the day, that’s a question you have to answer. However, I can tell you that the strategies in this course are the same ones I use to buy businesses, and what hundreds of other people have used to buy their businesses and generate millions in revenues and profits. Of course, I can’t guarantee you’ll do the same. There are zero guarantees in life. But it sure is a lot easier to acquire a business that is already making 6 or 7 figures than trying to start one from 0. Let’s say you do join the course, spend $2,000 and acquire a business using seller financing or an SBA 7a loan (both strategies we teach in the course) so you have to put zero or very little of your own money down. And let’s say – being conservative here – you buy a company that then profits you only $5,000 per month. That’s $60k a year in your pocket. Is it worth it for you? I think so. But everyone has different financial goals. What’s yours?

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Go search all our socials, look us up on Trustpilot, see the people around the world who have bought businesses. Our millions of followers and thousands of students are our best way to show you what’s possible. This is a process as old as buying real estate it just hasn’t been available for all. We change that.

The course is self-paced. Once you complete one lesson, you can move on to the next. We recommend that you take about 4 weeks to complete it, but you can go faster. There are about 20 hours of total video, in 9 units. It goes by faster than you think.

Do you believe in betting on you? That’s a fundamental question only you can answer. We think you either take the risk or you work for someone who did. You also know that most people will never do anything. So our entire mission is to find you the doers who will follow through and execute. That is really the key ingredient. We call you doers, not talkers.