Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - Change Maker: Nely Galán

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

Nicole is joined by television mogul and former President of Entertainment for Telemundo, Nely Galan. They cover her incredible career, what it takes to be a self-made woman, and her experience with Donald Trump on the Celebrity Apprentice.

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Well, it doesn't. Charge for wasting our time. I will take a check. Like an old school check. You recognize her from anchoring on CNN, CNBC, and Bloomberg. The only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. Nicole Lappin. As you know, every Friday we talk with a public figure, someone we see as making a change

in every sense of the word, and along the way has been in, or might still be, in money rehab. So today I'm talking with Nellie Galan. You probably know her from her New York Times bestselling book, Self Made. She's a woman after my own heart. Or maybe you know her from her appearance as a contestant on the first season of Celebrity Apprentice. Or maybe you know her as the first Latina president of entertainment for a U.S. television network, Telemundo. Her accolades go on and on. But as her book implies, she is completely self-made. And I wanted to talk with her about how she did it and what advice she'd give all of us

trying to make it out there. Nellie, welcome to Money Rehab. So let's jump into it with a little warm-up. Never have I ever overdrafted. I have. Have you? I have never overdrafted because I have insurance on my overdraft on my accounts. Nicely done. Never have I ever leased a car. I have leased a car. I have leased a car because at different times my accountant told me to lease a car, but then I ended up buying the car at the end and then keeping it for 10 more years. Uh, never have I ever written a will or trust. I think that's so important. Oh my God. I just did my will and it took me a year to do it. This last year I had done it before when my son was a baby and then he's now 20 and I had to redo it.

I think that is the most important thing you can do. And I think that's another exercise in mindfulness because you'll understand what do you have and what do you not have and what happens if you die and where's the mess in your life? Yeah. Especially if you have kids, you have to put your big girl pants on and do this. Never have I ever played the lottery. Oh, I play the lottery. You do? I don't think I'm going to win. I don't think I'm going to win, but I do it more than anything because, you know, my parents, again, because they were poor and they, I mean, they used to

be well off and then they came here and they became poor because they lost everything in there and they were like already in their late thirties and they had to start all over again. They always buy lottery tickets. So as my, I always buy them lottery tickets just because it makes them happy. I love that. Well, I feel like I won the lottery talking to you today. Thank you so much. You too. You're like a sister from another mister, all the financial literacy after my own heart. I know. We love, we, you know, if you all understood that this, this topic is so much fun and that it really is so empowering. What, what, where else could you do something

that makes you smarter? It's really easy. It's not as hard. Everybody makes it seem like it's some big secret. It's not that big a deal. You can all do it. And that it's fun and that it just, it gives you building blocks of self-esteem, brick by brick by brick that is unbreakable. I agree.

Let's talk about your self-made book and your Nelly-isms, which I love so much. You've trademarked those, sister. I did. I did. I did. I wrote self-made for women of color because I felt like, you know, I was looking at how we were all raised and at least, you know, sort of in the white woman world, the women's movement had happened and there was the beginning of a conversation about money. And, you know, I've toured a lot and met Gloria Steinem. And I love because she said to me once, if I had to do it all over again, I realized like the women's movement should have talked about money. Because without money, without personal financial freedom, you're not liberated and you're

certainly not empowered. So to me, I felt like the word entrepreneur, I talked to a lot of women. It felt like very kind of not far reaching for women. Right. And I realized self-made had a different connotation. Right. It's not just an entrepreneurial connotation, but it's this idea that to make it to the end of your life, you're going to have to DIY yourself

from the inside out over and over again. You have to make yourself over. It's not just coming from the heavens. It's not being given to you on a silver platter, self-made is your lifetime journey that includes. And at the top of that list is your finances, right? And your health. I mean, the three most important things in life are your finances, your health, and time. Because when you're young, you don't realize time goes quickly. Your most valuable asset.

And I interviewed Sheryl Sandberg when Lean In came out. And I had a very intense conversation with her. I love Sheryl. I've done many things with her. And I said, but Sheryl, your book's not that relatable to most women and certainly not women of color because we're not even invited to the table. How can we lean in? And I remember in that interview thinking, who's going to tell the story of women that have not had a linear path? Because most of us didn't go to the right school,

don't leave school and get three jobs and become a billionaire. Most of us have parents that are immigrants or we have to support our parents or we might be a single mom and that derails us or we've been fired or God only knows. So who's going to tell our story and who's going to talk about at any point in that trajectory, how do you get on the runway of becoming self-made? And then how to take off do you get on the runway of becoming self-made? And then how to take off when you're on the runway. Your Nelly-isms are hilarious. Go get your own chips. Tell me what that means. When I was very young, I worked for this billionaire. I ran a little TV station. It was like, think of it as like-

Girl, a little TV station? Well, now it's Telemundo. But back then it was a rinky dinky was the first Spanish TV station. I was even embarrassed to work there. And he's the one that said, young lady, I'm a billionaire. Are you are you rich? He goes, don't you know, the Latino market's going to be good. And I quit my job at CBS as like a junior reporter to go run this rinky dinky station. And believe me, many a day that I go, what did I do? And then three years later, he sold it for a lot of money. And it is now what became Telemundo. And I said to him, how could you do this to me? How could you sell it and not tell me? And he goes, young lady, stop. These are my chips. You want to play? Go get your own chips.

And at the time I thought he was the biggest a-hole on the planet earth. I'm like, who says that to a girl? You know, like, and then I went home and I thought to myself, he's right. Why do I feel, I don't even think that I could own my own business. Why am I thinking that he's my savior? And I thought to myself, that's it. And I went and tried to start this business, launching TV channels for American companies abroad, like HBO in Latin America, HBO in Asia, whatever, ESPN, because I knew having run the Spanish TV station that all these companies were circling around those markets, but they really didn't know. Nobody in the company spoke Spanish or whatever, but it took me four years. I made no money for four years. I had to do like three side hustles. I became like a little reporter,

you know, those little reporters that go around the country and do the interview that then gets put on the anchor on the nightly news. I did like, I just did all that stuff for money. And in the fourth year I got HBO as a client and then my life took off and I built a business that was my first business that I later sold when I became president of Telemundo. Every job I have is business school. And I have gone in and out of entrepreneurship many times. I've worked for other people many times. When I'm working for them, I go, this is just another business school for me. So I think like I own the business. We saw that play out. I mean, in Celebrity Apprentice.

It was funny because I got a call from the president of NBC at that time. And he said, Nelly, because they had just bought Telemundo. And I think they were concerned because Donald Trump at that time had a bunch of lawsuits with Latinos. And they were worried that if they had hired all these, they had brought all these celebrities on Celebrity Apprentice. And they were worried that if they didn't put a Latina, that was a little more of substance, that he would, you know, crush somebody in a very mean way and that it would look bad because they were trying to uplift Latinos through Telemundo. And so they said to me, look, we're your biggest client. We need you to do the show. And I go, okay, but I can only do one or two episodes because I have

to run my business. And in the first episode, Donald Trump screamed at me for something. And I was probably the only person on that show that was actually an entrepreneur and a business founder. So I responded to him the way I would respond to many clients I've had, to many bosses I've had, which is like, first of all, don't talk to me that way. And second of all, let me tell you why you're wrong. And I stayed on the show and stayed on the show and stayed on the show. And it was very interesting to me because that show really changed my life. When I came off that show, I had letters all the way to the ceiling of my office from women that were ethnic in corporate America that were Latina or Black or South Asian or even Muslim women that were like, who are you? And how did you learn to speak truth to power?

And did you go to Harvard? And I'm like, no, I didn't even finish school. I mean, later in life, I went back to school and got a doctorate, but at that point I had a corporate path. And we don't share our stories and what we've learned in our failures. And so we haven't normalized this journey for other women. And when you do, you realize this isn't, we can do this. This is doable. I mean, I didn't know a soul. I had no money. My parents were broke. I didn't finish school and I still could retire at 45. And I still have worked with everyone in Hollywood and I figured it out. I just want you all to know that at 45, I went back to school because I wanted to go to school because I felt like that was a gift to myself. Not because I had to, not because I needed the degree.

And I got a master's and doctorate in clinical psychology, which has really served me well in understanding the issues of my life, the issues of the people that I've worked with. And it really helps me have empathy and compassion and also be able to help all of you and understand where you're at now and that you don't need to stay there. Well, your master's and doctorate in clinical psychology has an emphasis, I love this so much, on the psychology of money in multicultural communities. I focused on that because I noticed that the real problem in my own community was not the people, you know, Latinos work super hard and make money, but it was the mindset of still thinking that there is a glass ceiling to how much money you can make, or what's your position in life, or the Catholicism in my own community was like, rich people are bad and poor people are good. And that's just a story that we were told.

are bad and poor people are good. And that's just a story that we were told. So to me, I wanted to talk about how do we shift? How do we take our psychology to break the glass ceiling on your dreams? But I think that in our country, we get told, follow your bliss and the money will come. That's BS. We're very entitled. And this last year has taught us that anything that you didn't think could happen can happen. Believe me, it comes from a country that had a revolution. We could have had a coup d'etat. We could have the stock market go down tomorrow. We could all be broke. So life is about parallel tracks, mission and money. What do you love? Yes, pursue that. How do you make money?

Sometimes how you make money is cold. Nothing to do with what you love to do. Yeah, there's no shame to feeding your family when entrepreneurial experts are like, go out and do what you love. YOLO, FOMO, whatever. I'm like, yo, I have to pay the bills. And when I hear kids tell me,

oh, I'm selling real estate, but I don't have any money because it's considered, I go, go ride, drive an Uber. I can't. What if somebody sees me driving an Uber? If you think like that, you're not going to make it. You know what I say? I say, if I get in your cabin, you tell me you sell real estate and you're driving an Uber. I, I think more of you. Five stars. Grandiosity has to be killed. Ego has to be killed. Mission and money, but money comes first. Go make money. Go make money. Have five jobs. I don't feel sorry for you. I've had 10 jobs. Make money and put

money away while you are following your bliss. But the money has to come first because you can't really, like I now can do whatever the hell I want because I sacrifice. Sacrifice is not suffering. It's sacrificing for something greater than yourself. And I tell you this, I have a lot of girlfriends in their 50s, 60s, and 70s that now can't afford this apartment, now can't afford this. You don't want an old age. That's suffering. To not afford your life in old age is suffering. Sacrifice when you're young to not suffer later. So that's what you tell young people right now. Like I remember the brown rice and beans that I ate coming up in my career. And let me tell you something. Actually, the time when everything aligns in your life and you happen to be doing what you love and making money at it is ephemeral.

It comes and goes. All of us think we're all going to do well. But what we don't know that's going to happen, and it's very apropos in the middle of this crisis, is that crises will happen in your life many, many, many, many times. For so many of you young people, this is the first time. many times. For so many of you young people, this is the first time. I've had my house burned down. I've been through earthquakes. I've been through floods. I had to leave my country when I was five years old and my parents were broke. I've had breakups, divorces. I mean, people have children die. People have cancer. Things will happen in your life that were not in the game plan and they will break you. They will break you. You will not be the same person. Life has a lot of little deaths. The only thing you can control quasi is how much money you've put away, how you've invested your

money, that you at least have money to take you through the crisis, right? Because everything else, you don't know what's going to happen. You don't know what the story of your life is going to be. And so I'm not saying you can fix the story of your life, but there are parts of it. Math is the only thing that doesn't lie. So would you say that one of these ideas of entrepreneurialism that's really toxic is that we raise money, we spend a bunchterm gratification and I understand it. And I certainly understand it a lot for people of color, because sometimes if you're black or you're Latino and you go to Beverly Hills and you don't have on the coolest shoes and jewelry, you worry. And I don't

think white people understand that you worry that you're going to be profiled and that you're going to be kicked out or people are going to think you're a criminal or something and that has happened to us i mean i've had i've had people i've walked into a place and if i'm not dressed up they think i'm i'm the nanny of somebody or something i mean it's happened it's real it's not you know it is understandable but i think we're letting that thing beat us by spending that money on that jewelry and on those shoes and on those sneakers and for women on whatever it is instead of saying i'm gonna have the last laugh because i'm the richest girl in the room and you have to you have to carry that as a trophy inside of you that you know that you did everything right and that you are really self-made. Here's a tip from Nellie

that you can take straight to the bank. I told my son this the other day. I code the bill every month to this is a business expense. This is a personal expense. This is a medical expense. I highly recommend you do that. Even if right now you're young and you don't have a lot of business expenses, just say, put down personal. If you bought a dress, a pair of shoes, lipstick, whatever. And then if it's like a computer, that's a business expense. If it's, start making, doing that and then attaching the receipts. That creates mindfulness of how do you spend your money.

And that's it for today's episode. fullness of how you spend your money. And that's it for today's episode. Money Rehab is a production of iHeartMedia. I'm your host, Nicole Lappin. Our producers are Morgan Lavoie and Catherine Law. Money Rehab is edited and engineered by Brandon Dickert with help from Josh Fisher. Executive producers are Mangesh Hatikader and Will Pearson. Huge thanks to the OG Money Rehab supervising producer, Michelle Lanz, for her pre-production and development work. And as always, thanks to you for finally investing in yourself so that you can get it together and get it all. Bye.