The Best (and Worst) Businesses to Buy in 2026

Codie Sanchez and Nicole Lapin discuss how so-called "boring businesses" can be lucrative, accessible investments for entrepreneurs willing to stray from trendy startups and focus on essential, service-oriented industries.

Finding and Purchasing Boring Businesses With Minimal Capital

Sanchez recommends platforms such as bizscout.com—a "Zillow for small businesses"—to quickly find opportunities. For example, laundromats can often be purchased with just 10% down, typically requiring an investment of $30,000-$50,000 on a $300,000 to $500,000 business. Entrepreneurs can leverage Small Business Administration (SBA) loans or seller financing to cover the remainder, minimizing the need for large upfront capital and enabling first-time business owners to enter the market more easily.

Understanding the Financial Structure and Profitability of Businesses

The primary expenses for laundromats are lease payments, utilities (mainly water and electricity), and equipment. Successful management of these expenses—locking in a favorable lease, ensuring equipment isn't outdated, and controlling utility costs—is crucial for profitability.

Laundromats typically generate stable margins between 10% and 25% (up to 30% with premium services), placing them in line with the average small business's 15% margin. To boost income further, owners can add wash-and-fold services, which appeal to busy families willing to pay $50-$75 a week for pickup and delivery. Targeting commercial clients such as nail salons and Airbnb hosts can also yield contracts worth thousands per month.

Comparing Boring Business Models: Winners and Losers

Home service businesses—such as pest control, HVAC, plumbing, window cleaning, painting, and landscaping—offer significant upsides. They provide recurring revenue, high average transaction values, and, with strong branding and trusted employees, can command premium pricing. Sanchez notes a trend where rebranding home services and ensuring reliable, professional labor creates a business homeowners genuinely trust, which justifies higher rates. Companies like "That One Painter" and "Pink's Window Cleaning" are cited as examples of success within this renaissance of home services.

Conversely, certain businesses consistently underperform. Drop-shipping faces intense competition from Amazon and Chinese suppliers, making profitability unlikely unless selling courses about drop-shipping itself. Agencies (e.g., marketing, podcast services) and consulting ...

Codie Sanchez and Nicole Lapin discuss the pitfalls of staying in "founder mode," the addictive behaviors it encourages, and why transitioning to a true owner mindset is essential for business health and personal wellbeing.

Founder Addiction Mimics Substance Dependence and Harms Success

Sanchez draws a parallel between the compulsion to be a hero in one's business and substance addiction. The constant desire to feel needed and indispensable—to get that "hit" from success, customer praise, team dependence, or novelty—acts like heroin for founders. She warns that being addicted to this hero complex ultimately turns founders into the villain of their own story. The more a founder clings to control, the more they risk hating themselves, resenting their business, and fracturing relationships with family. When founders prioritize being the irreplaceable hero, their businesses become dependent on them, limiting scalability and threatening long-term sustainability.

Sanchez notes that this pattern is reinforced by the very structure of capitalism and the startup ecosystem, where venture capitalists and influential voices like Paul Graham champion founder obsession. These leaders benefit as entrepreneurs push themselves to extremes, often working tirelessly on little sleep, with only a slim chance of big success. Most founders, Sanchez argues, sacrifice their wellbeing for uncertain returns, while only a rare few achieve large-scale, lasting success.

True Business Ownership vs. High-Stress Job With Poor Boss

In contrast to founder dependency, true business ownership is defined by freedom from operational necessity. Sanchez’s litmus test is simple: if a founder can take a two-week vacation and the business continues to generate revenue and profit independently—handled by a capable team—they are truly an owner. Otherwise, the business owns them.

Successful owners build teams of A-players who surpass their own expertise. Sanchez mentions that her greatest success as a CEO is when she feels embarrassed by how much better her team is in their respective lanes. Ownership is about designing a system that runs reliably without the founder’s micromanagement, much like a train where the founder is only one of many engines. Owners should focus on analyzing data, setting vision, and ensuring all systems function, not on administrative, operational, or sales tasks. Founders bogged down in these roles simply have a high-stress job with a terrible boss—themselves.

Sanchez shares that she owns 20 businesses that cashflow without her involvement, proving sustainable ownership is possible. She also emphasizes shifting mindset from “How am I going to do this?” to “Who within the team can help us achieve this?”

Contrasting Founder Philosophy With Sustainable Owner Framework

Some exceptional operators, like Brian Chesky and Elon Musk, continue to thrive in f ...

Codie Sanchez’s research reveals that the personality of a business owner fundamentally shapes the success or failure of a company. Through studying over 15,000 business owners and high achievers, Sanchez identifies key archetypes and actionable insights to build balanced, high-performing teams.

12 Archetypes Show how Owner Personalities Impact Business Success or Failure

Sanchez explains that businesses with similar processes can have wildly different outcomes, and the main differentiator often isn’t the sector, size, or industry, but the personality of the owner. After analyzing responses from a large sample of owners at different stages of growth, Sanchez and her team identified 12 distinct archetypes, each with specific strengths, weaknesses, and functional impacts. This archetype framework mirrors the approach of tools like Myers-Briggs or horoscopes—revealing inborn tendencies and predilections that owners naturally exhibit.

Like established personality assessments, this framework helps owners understand their natural inclinations and how those affect business operation and structure. By knowing your archetype, you can build your role around tasks that energize you and delegate those that drain you, ultimately increasing both effectiveness and satisfaction.

Ball Hog Archetype Excels at Closing Deals but Creates Bottlenecks When Nothing Closes Without Them

Among these archetypes, Sanchez highlights the “Ball Hog.” Ball Hog owners are strong closers who drive deals, command visibility, and often outperform peers, which draws them to entrepreneurship in the first place. However, this strength becomes a weakness: their involvement is required for every major deal to close, creating a founder-dependency bottleneck. Entrepreneurs with Ball Hog tendencies tend to discourage initiative and foster structures in which only they can finalize key transactions.

Sanchez notes this is common among high-performing entrepreneurs who move from outperforming in other environments to running their own businesses. Yet, as employers, they realize their approach suppresses team development. To balance these tendencies, Ball Hogs should hire people-pleasers and advocates—team members eager to help and capable of managing collaborative dynamics. Real-world examples in Sanchez’s own business show how people-pleasers on her team help her let go of tasks better handled by others, avoiding conflicts that arise when multiple Ball Hogs work together.

Building Teams Where Members Surpass the Founder In Domains

The ideal CEO, Sanchez asserts, is surrounded by A-players who individually outstrip the founder’s abilities in their own domains—an arrangement that can even feel intimidating, but it’s a sign of successful leadership. Complementary archetypes are crucial. For instance, a Ball Hog founder accelerates when complemented by people-pleasers and artists, rather than b ...

The experiences and reflections of Codie Sanchez and Nicole Lapin shed light on how cultural narratives, internalized beliefs, and business systems all interact to shape women’s journeys as entrepreneurs and mothers.

How Founder Obsession Narratives Deter Women From Family and Business Goals

Codie Sanchez shares that she once believed she shouldn't consider having a baby until her business was established, a belief rooted in the scarcity of visible female role models successfully managing both entrepreneurship and motherhood. She recounts: “There was many a day where I was laying on the floor of my little office and really just thinking, if I don't have the business established, I should not establish a baby. And that was because there weren't other women around me that I saw doing it.” She describes the lack of examples in her own network and the rarity of seeing pregnant women running businesses in media, highlighting how this absence creates a false narrative of incompatibility—a narrative that men are not expected to confront. Sanchez notes, “How many times have you really seen a pregnant woman running a business on video? I just hadn’t seen it that often. Maybe celebrities, but not business leaders.”

Nicole Lapin underscores this double standard by pointing out that male entrepreneurs, such as those with many direct reports like Jensen, Brian, and Elon, are rarely questioned on how they balance fatherhood and leadership, whereas women are constantly confronted with those expectations. Furthermore, Sanchez and Lapin discuss how most business advice and "rise and grind" guidance is tailored to male founders and seldom addresses the reality that pregnancy can upend not just time management, but also the founder’s physical and emotional capacity.

Sanchez is forthright about the challenges she faced: the process was long, expensive, and difficult, which is a narrative often glossed over publicly. By speaking candidly about these challenges—and the reality that for some women, even great effort does not result in success—she hopes to normalize the conversation and combat the false, male-centric benchmarks for entrepreneurial success.

Aligning Pregnancy and Motherhood With Sustainable, Systems-Based Businesses

Sanchez and Lapin both acknowledge that pregnancy imposed constraints and reduced capacity, which forced them to build their companies around sustainable systems and effective delegation, rather than obsessive personal effort. Sanchez notes, “Reduced capacity during pregnancy accelerates building self-sufficient businesses as founders can't maintain previous work intensity.” The outcome is often a business that is more resilient and valuable, able to thrive independently of the founder’s constant input. Pregnancy and motherhood reveal the cyclical nature of life, standing in contrast to the myth that total devotion to business is essential for success.

Both women emphasize that developing business systems to accommodate life changes is not only practical but also deepens perspective on what constitutes real success. Lapin describes how she had to build systems on the go during her own late-in-life pregnancy, learning firsthand that when “later” is always the plan, it can easily slip further away.

Addressing Partner and Investor Signaling Risk Concerns

Lapin shares her anxiety about telling partners and investors about her pregnancy, worrying that it could jeopardize business deals or create doubts about her commitment or capability. Sanchez acknowledges such biases exist but recounts that, in her experience, sharing her pregnancy was met with excitement and inspiration. Seeing a woman juggle both visible leadership and pregnancy, she notes, is motivating for many and reflects the universal human experience of starting families—something she feels is underrepresented in entrepreneurial narratives.

Sanchez stresses that transparent communication about pregnancy and the subsequent adjustments to operations are key for ensuring business function continues while founders adapt ...