Every founder I've ever worked with comes to me with a "business problem” they’d like to solve…

"I have a sales problem."

"I have a marketing problem."

"I have an ops problem."

They're always wrong.

There's no such thing as a business problem. It's always a people problem showing up in a business setting.

Sometimes it's the wrong people. Sometimes it's people not talking to each other. Sometimes it's a missing person—a gap nobody's filling.

Once you see this, you can't unsee it. And it changes how you diagnose everything.

Over the past decade, I've refined exactly how I solve these people problems. I call it the Piper Method.

Let me show you what it looks like in practice.

When Codie Sanchez hired me at Contrarian Thinking in 2022 as CMO, she thought she had a marketing problem.

Here's what I walked into: Codie had built something genuinely impressive through pure grit. No big, expensive team. No big budget. Just her, contractors scattered across the globe, and aggressive execution.

She had massive attention—millions of followers, a growing newsletter, a brand taking off in teaching and guiding people through “boring business” acquisitions. But attention wasn't converting to revenue the way it should.

So she hired me to fix the marketing engine. Simple, right?

The early success was real. The momentum was real. But she'd hit a ceiling.

And the ceiling wasn't marketing.

Most CMO’s would have jumped in and started tactically improving funnels, launching a new campaign or two or doing customer research. At best, they diagnose first, looking at everything in marketing and sales—and that’s it. And that’s precisely the issue.

Before I looked at what was broken in marketing, I needed to know what Codie was building toward. Not the revenue goal. The life. Not in a “lifestyle business” sort of way but genuinely what she wanted to achieve.

She was grinding nonstop. Building multiple companies simultaneously. Creating tons of content, closing deals, handling operations—all while trying to scale.

The question wasn't "How do we grow?" It was "What does growth need to deliver for Codie?"

We needed to simultaneously grow:

All while turning Codie’s personal brand into a cultural and business media juggernaut that was synonymous with one word: ownership.

When you look at the big picture, it became clear that launching a new funnel (even if it made millions) wasn’t going to get her to where she wanted to go.

Because if we scaled the existing business but kept her trapped in the same grind, we'd just be building a bigger, more inefficient machine that would be incredibly frustrating to run and prevent her from focusing on the areas she was world class at—media.

That's the Purpose phase. We start with how the business should serve the founder and their life, not the other way around.

PIPER Phase 2: Insight

Now I could diagnose what was actually happening.

Codie gave me access to everything. Financials, all data, the good, the bad, the ugly. Full transparency.

Here's what I figured out:

Two separate companies she owned—Contrarian Thinking and Unconventional Acquisitions—growing but cannibalizing each other. Sixteen different products causing market confusion. A brand that didn’t match her story. Dirty data preventing anyone from making quick decisions confidently. A dozen talented contractors, all going hard in their own area—and nobody looking at the whole picture.

Continued growth was possible, but going back to Codie’s purpose—growing it just by focusing on the marketing piece would be malpractice.

Codie was in what's commonly referred to as the "messy middle." The first couple million? It’s a challenge but a lot easier if you have great distribution and product-market fit (which she had). The market takes care of itself. But somewhere around $2-3M, everything changes. You need structure. Process. Usually different people than the ones who got you here.

That's where Codie was. And it's arguably the hardest stage to transition through in business.

Codie didn't have a marketing problem. She had a leadership vacuum problem.

The business had outgrown what 1 person could orchestrate alone. And her revenue engine and delivery (ops and product) engine weren't just disconnected—they were actively working against each other.

Everyone had their heads down shipping work. Nobody was designing them as one system.

Codie gave me the autonomy high agency people dream of. CMO became COO. Full P&L ownership and oversight over most of the org.

Here's what we planned:

Merge 2 companies into 1 unified brand. Kill 13 products. Keep 2 courses and 1 community. Restructure every business unit. On top of a re-brand so her story matched the results the people in the community were getting.

Most founder-led businesses keep marketing, ops and sales separate. The founder stuck in the middle translating.

We didn’t do that. We built them as 1 system—designed from day 1 to align everything. Built for speed and durability.

Plans don't build companies. Codie is notorious for moving extremely fast and collapsing a decade of work into a year and making decisions in an instant. We put it into rabbit mode and got to work.

Some people had to go. Some got promoted. Everything got rebuilt. It wasn't clean. There was resistance. Things broke. But we started seeing the results quickly, so we both stayed in the arena to get it done.

Once you know the purpose, have the right inputs and insights (and eventually—good data), you can sequence the order of operations for maximum leverage and the work becomes much easier.

It’s the sequence of the work that becomes key. The wrong order can make the system worse, but the right order can unlock the revenue at a pace you didn’t realize was possible.

And that’s what we accomplished.

The education company went from ~$2m to ~$10m in top-line within that first year. Built a clear roadmap to $25M+. Grew the audience to 10M+ fans across social. 1M on the newsletters. Launched a top 20 business podcast, BigDeal. Her book, Main Street Millionaire, hit was an instant New York Times bestseller. Started and spun out out a VC-backed sister company, BizScout.

All possible with solving the right problems, sequenced, and enacted on by a group of super talented people we were able to attract to the company to build with us.

When I left, the company kept growing. She hired the operator behind MrBeast, Marc Hustvedt, to take the reigns. That's the difference between a temporary revenue spike and building a durable, scalable company that attracts another world-class operators to take the company through its next big transition.

But here's what actually matters: Codie got the business she dreamed of. The business runs without her in every decision. The Contrarian Academy continues to change lives of people across the globe.

Revenue, profits, and systems aside—the mark of a great business is the one that has a massive positive impact and leaves a legacy on their community.

And it started with a "marketing problem" that wasn't a marketing problem.

Here's the thing: I didn't have this method when I started working with Codie.

The story focuses on my time building with Codie, but from my time spent in corporate America to the past decade I’ve spent in bootstrapped startups in media, education, and tech, I’ve kept seeing the same patterns.

The same messy middle. The same people problems disguised as business problems. The patterns and problems that kept bubbling up were agnostic to company size, industry, funding, or revenue.

When I worked in-house, I was always frustrated by the founders' advisors. They'd tell you how you should build the business without fully understanding the business itself, what the founder wanted, or the real constraints inside of it.

And for whatever reason, founders often give more validation to third-party experts than to their own team.

When I became an advisor, I realized I was doing the same thing. And I hated it.

So I started talking to the team. I started looking at all the data—the same way a neurotic analyst would. I systematized it. I became a kin to a high-agency employee, but as the “hired gun” the founder trusted.

No fear of getting fired for telling uncomfortable truths. No political theater or optimizing for my next promotion. No worrying about workload. Just objective truths and efficient execution focused on one thing: getting the result the founder wants.

That's when I realized: this is the gap. This is what's broken.

Advisors often don't have the right context. It’s hard for Internal operators to be objective. And rarely does anyone build revenue and operations as one unified system designed to get the founder free.

So I reverse-engineered everything I'd done that worked. The patterns. The sequence. The system.

That became Piper. Both the process and the company.

It works because it’s me. It’s how I think—methodically and obsessive. And I know it works. To the tune of ~$150 million in revenue generated so far.

If you're stuck right now—revenue stalled, ops a mess, marketing not converting—ask yourself:

Is this actually a business problem?

Or is there a people problem underneath?

Is someone in the wrong seat? Is someone missing entirely? Are 2 people not talking who need to be?

Because you can't systemize your way out of a people problem. And you can't hire your way out of it if you're hiring for the wrong diagnosis.

Find the people problem first. Everything else follows.

I'm fully booked on Growth Operator clients until April (waitlist is open). But I am making space for 2 additional advisory clients because I love doing it and frankly, my current roster of advisor clients are seeing substantially more tangible results than I thought was possible in this format.

Advisory isn't Growth Operator work—I'm not doing a full diagnostic, embedding with your team, or building systems. But if you're stuck on a specific strategic problem and need someone who has been there before and who can be objective, it might be a fit.

If you're interested, fill out this quick form and let’s make 2026 the year your company goes from “we’ve had some growth” to “I didn’t know scaling this fast could be this simple.”

The most expensive mistake founders make when they finally decide to hire an operator—and how to avoid it.

Hit reply and let me know. This email list is still small (this is issue #3), so reply while I still can read and respond to every email.

—Chris Piper
The Growth Operator