How 3 Owners Each Found the 1 Thing Holding Them Back

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“I always thought luxury was the icing. But it was actually the cake all along.”

In our community, we see all sorts of businesses with a million different problems.

Take these three: Ian inspects houses, Randol runs a plastic surgery practice with his wife, and Karen rents space to hairstylists. And while their businesses are wildly different, each owner shared a similar problem.

All 3 hit a wall they couldn’t seem to climb, and all 3 got moving again by addressing a few simple things.

And in case you’ve been living under a rock, Codie's new book, Own or Be Owned, takes everything she’s learned over the last two decades building a portfolio of successful businesses worth over 9 figures, and distills it into 12 Profit Levers owners can pull to create a company that runs without them.

Most owners are really good at pulling one, but completely ignore the others. Own or Be Owned helps point you to the biggest 2 problems stopping your growth, and gives you the tools to fix them.

Here's what it looks like when a stuck owner finds their bottleneck and pulls the right lever.

Ian Mayer started a home inspection company so nobody could lay him off again, and it worked… right up until it didn’t.

He hit the same revenue ceiling 4 years running, but by the only scoreboard he had, he was doing everything right. More inspections, more agents, more work.

Then he sorted his customer list by revenue instead of job count.

“And I went, oh.”

A small group jumped to the top. Luxury agents with bigger homes, where pools, guest houses, and sewer scopes stack on top of an already higher base price.

“They may not give us as many inspections, but they give us way more average revenue per customer.”

Ian didn't change how he worked. He changed who he worked for.

His team cut the low-value networking, killed the marketing aimed at the wrong agents, and rewrote the website so 1 buyer would recognize themselves in it. Fast forward to today, and he’s blown the roof off his revenue ceiling, growing 40% YoY.

The P: Persona. Who you serve. Get it wrong and you spend your career competing with 10,000 people doing your exact job at your exact price.

Randol spent 14 years building a plastic surgery practice with his wife, and for a while, everything was going well.

But around 2022, growth went flat and stayed flat.

He had an MBA and a career running supply chains, but none of his experience told him where his money was going.

“I didn't have any more tricks in my bag. I didn't know what I didn't know.”

When he heard Codie talk about cash suck businesses versus cash flow businesses, something clicked.

Randol had loosened his supplier terms during COVID and never tightened them back up. So he picked up the phone and renegotiated to net-30 with his major suppliers. One round of phone calls freed up six figures in working capital.

“That was an easy, quick win.”

Then he put that money to work. Higher-margin recurring service lines, patients moving between the spa side and the surgical side, and more hours in his own books each month, spent hunting the next leak.

Overall, he was able to get his revenue up 21%, and his profit up 120%.

The P: Profit. Revenue is what you charge, but profit is what survives the trip to your bank account. Plenty of owners grow the first one for years while the second one shrinks until the margins disappear.

Karen Kaminski opened her first salon suite location in 2017, and she's up to 5 now.

She was also still cleaning all 5 of them herself and fielding every maintenance call that came in. Why? Because she'd done it that way for 10 years, and that's just what you do when you own a business... At least in the beginning.

But at some point, every owner has to take stock of what their time is worth, and figure out how to delegate.

“When I took a step back, I'm like, wait a second. I can make X doing a consulting call, and then have somebody else do that.”

Picture a line down the middle of a page. On one side is the work only you can do, and on the other is the work pretty much anyone can do.

Changing a lightbulb sits on the wrong side, but calling potential partners to explore an expansion is on the right side.

Getting all her non-owner tasks taken care of means she’s been able to establish 3 businesses across 5 locations, with 20+ builds.

Try this today: open last week's calendar and take note of all the tasks you touched. Put a checkmark next to the ones that required you. Whatever's left without a checkmark is your first hire, your first SOP, or your first thing to automate.

Karen used the time she bought back to stack 2 more businesses on top of the first one.

The P: Process. If nothing's written down, nothing runs without you. And a business that can't run without you is just a job with worse benefits.

Ian, Randol, and Karen were all spinning their wheels trying to fix the wrong things.

Ian was working on marketing when his problem was his customer, Randol kept trying to spike revenue while his problem was cash, and Karen kept trying to fix things herself instead of delegating the menial tasks.

Each one of them needed someone to tell them which kind of owner they'd become.

And after seeing this over and over again, Codie created a unique diagnostic tool our members have used to discover their ownership style.

After spending an ungodly amount of time and money on research and surveying over 15k business owners, she unlocked a way to tell you exactly what’s stopping your growth.

It tells you what you do well, where you likely struggle, and where you should focus.

It’s called the Owner Score, and after a series of questions, it gives you a benchmark for where you are and tells you the exact Profit Lever you should pull first.

Most owners guess at that for years, and guess wrong. Which is how you end up working harder on something that was never the problem.

Find out where you stand → Take the Quiz!

- Team Contrarian