What Codie Sanchez Gets Right About Boring Businesses — And Where Crypto Infrastructure Fits

If you've spent any time researching passive income or "boring business" models in the last few years, you've probably run into Codie Sanchez. Former Wall Street, built an eight-figure portfolio buying laundromats, car washes, vending machine routes, and other unglamorous cash-flowing businesses. Contrarian Thinking. Millions of followers.

One of the clearest voices explaining why the most reliable path to financial independence runs through boring, not exciting.

She's right.

And I want to build on what she's built, because the same thesis that drives her entire framework points directly at crypto payment infrastructure as the next logical step. Not a replacement for what she teaches. An evolution of it.

Here's where I think her thinking leads, and why.

The Core Insight She Got Right

Codie Sanchez's fundamental argument is this: the businesses that make people wealthy over time aren't the ones that sound impressive at dinner parties. They're the ones that solve a basic, recurring problem, generate predictable cash flow, and run without the owner managing every detail.

Laundromats. Car washes. Vending machines. ATMs. Parking lots. Self-storage.

The pattern across all of them: customers need something repeatedly, they pay a small amount each time, and the owner earns on the volume without being present for every transaction. The business is boring by design. Boring means predictable. Predictable means you can plan around it.

She's also right about the psychology.

Most people chase exciting opportunities and end up with nothing. They want the startup that becomes the next Uber. They want the crypto trade that 10x's. They want something they can brag about. Meanwhile, the guy who quietly owns three laundromats in his suburb is generating $15,000 a month in cash flow that his neighbors know nothing about.

Boring wins. I believe that completely.

My background is in law enforcement — not exactly a glamour industry. I left a $200,000 career not to chase something flashy, but to build something systematic. Something that compounds. Something I could explain to my family without a pitch deck.

The boring business framework is right. The question is which boring business fits the moment we're actually in.

Where Her Framework Gets Honest — Including About ATMs

Here's what I respect most about Sanchez: she applies her own framework ruthlessly, even when it undermines businesses she could be selling.

On ATMs specifically, she's been direct: it's a business she would "never invest in." Her reasoning isn't complicated. Small margins. Rising costs. Long payback periods. And most importantly — a long-term bet on the wrong trend.

Cash usage in the United States has fallen to roughly 20% of all transactions. That number was 40% fifteen years ago and it moves in exactly one direction. The customers who use ATMs are an aging, shrinking demographic. The infrastructure costs — physical machines, cash float, vaulting, maintenance, regulatory compliance as a Money Services Business — don't shrink as the customer base does.

She named the ATM business as one to avoid. That takes intellectual honesty. Most people in that space would never say it.

Her vending machine assessment runs in the same direction. The economics work at small scale but hit a ceiling fast.

Product restocking consumes 30 to 50% of revenue. Location commissions take another 10 to 25%. Card processing fees on small transactions — sometimes hitting 5 to 6% on a $2 purchase — compress the margin further. The "passive" label falls apart once you're actually running the route.

The point isn't that these businesses don't work. Some do. The point is that a rigorous application of the boring business framework requires asking: which direction is the trend moving? Is the problem this business solves getting bigger or smaller? Is the infrastructure I'm building riding a growing tide or a receding one?

That's the right question. And it's the question that leads somewhere interesting right now.

What the Boring Business Framework Actually Requires

Let me articulate the criteria Sanchez's framework implies — because she doesn't always spell it out this explicitly.

A great boring business has all of the following:

Recurring, predictable revenue. Not one-time transactions. Not project work. Something that generates income on a regular cycle without renegotiating the deal each time.

A problem that gets more common over time, not less. Laundromats solve a problem that isn't going away. Car washes solve a problem that isn't going away. Businesses that solve problems tied to declining behaviors — cash usage, physical media — face a different long-term trajectory.

Low ongoing labor once operational. The owner earns on volume without being present for every unit of that volume. The system runs. The cash flows. The owner's job is oversight, not execution.

A light regulatory footprint. The boring business shouldn't require a law degree to operate. Licensing should be manageable. Compliance shouldn't be a full-time job.

Scalability without proportional capital. Adding the next unit of income shouldn't require the same capital investment as the first. The model should get more efficient as it grows, not less.

Run every business Sanchez has ever recommended through those five criteria.

The best ones hit all five.

The ones she warns against — ATMs, certain vending categories — fail on criteria two and sometimes four.

Now run crypto payment terminal placement through the same filter.

Where Crypto Payment Infrastructure Fits the Framework

Recurring, predictable revenue. Yes. The residual model in payment processing is the textbook definition of recurring income. A partner places a terminal at a merchant location. Every time a customer pays with crypto, a transaction processes, a fee is generated, and a percentage flows to the partner automatically. The merchant doesn't renegotiate. The partner doesn't invoice. The income runs in the background indefinitely.

A problem that gets more common over time, not less. Seventy million Americans own cryptocurrency right now. Fewer than 2,300 businesses accept it at the local level — a ratio of roughly 24,000 crypto holders for every accepting business. That gap doesn't close on its own. It closes as infrastructure gets placed. And as more people own crypto — ownership doubled between 2021 and 2025 — the number of people looking to spend it grows. The problem this business solves is getting larger, not smaller.

Low ongoing labor once operational. One to three hours per week across a growing portfolio of locations. The terminals process transactions without intervention. The residuals calculate automatically. The partner's active time is in building the portfolio — signing merchants, placing devices — not in managing what's already placed.

A light regulatory footprint. Operating as a payment processing agent under a licensed processor's umbrella doesn't require a money transmitter license. The agent operates under the processor's existing licenses and banking relationships. The GENIUS Act, signed July 2025, established the first federal framework for digital dollar payments — which means the regulatory environment is now clearer, not murkier. A standard business license and standard 1099 income reporting are the primary requirements.

Scalability without proportional capital. Adding merchant number 11 to your portfolio requires the same asset — one conversation with one business owner — as merchant number one. There's no additional down payment. No additional debt service. No additional cash float. The income grows as the portfolio grows, and the portfolio grows through time and relationships rather than capital.

Five for five.

Crypto payment terminal placement hits every criterion in the boring business framework.

Not despite being a crypto-adjacent business — because the business is fundamentally a payment processing infrastructure business that happens to serve a new and rapidly growing payment method.

The Evolution, Not the Exception

Here's the frame I want to leave you with.

Codie Sanchez didn't invent the boring business concept.

She popularized and systematized something that's been true for a long time: the most reliable wealth-building happens through ownership of infrastructure that solves recurring problems, not through speculation on what the next exciting thing might be worth.

The original boring business was the general store in a Gold Rush town. The picks-and-shovels supplier who sold to every miner regardless of whether they struck gold. The Levi Strauss who made the pants every prospector needed instead of panning for ore himself.

The modern boring business is the credit card terminal agent who signed 200 merchants in 1985 and collected residuals for 40 years as card spending became universal. The ISO who built a portfolio not by betting on Visa's stock price but by placing the infrastructure that made Visa's network work at the local level.

Crypto payment terminal placement is the same play, in the same infrastructure category, at the same early moment in a technology adoption curve.

The boring business thesis says: own the rails, not the cargo. Earn on volume, not on price. Build recurring income from recurring problems. Let the compounding work.

Crypto payment infrastructure is exactly that. It's the boring business the framework has been pointing toward,

applied to the technology shift that's actually happening right now.

If Sanchez's framework led you here, I don't think that's a coincidence. I think you followed the logic where it actually goes.

If you want to see what the opportunity looks like in practice, you can watch the short training I recorded for you HERE. 

Gedam Tekle is a former U.S. Marine and Oakland Police Sergeant who left law enforcement to build crypto payment infrastructure businesses. He has personally exited two eight-figure companies and helped over 4,000 entrepreneurs build residual income. He is the founder of Dividend Shift.