Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - Turning Your Side Hustle Into a Multimillion Dollar Business with Nely Galán

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Nicole welcomes the newest member of the Money News Network podcast fam, "Money Maker | Mi Mundo Rico" with Nely Galán. Money Maker is the podcast for everyone with untapped greatness who just needs the tools to take flight. New York Times bestselling author and business mogul Nely Galán brings her hard-won business advice and interviews with other self-made gurus ready to pass the baton to the next success story. With the goal of reaching listeners who have traditionally been denied a seat at the table, Nely tapes weekly episodes in English and in Spanish.  Never miss an episode and subscribe to Money Maker here: https://link.chtbl.com/_9U0OQh1?sid=MM

Money rehabbers, you get it. When you're trying to have it all, you end up doing a lot of juggling. You have to balance your work, your friends, and everything in between. So when it comes to your finances, the last thing you need is more juggling. That's where Bank of America steps in. With Bank of America, you can manage your banking, borrowing, and even investing all in one place. Their digital tools bring everything together under one roof, giving you a clear view of your finances whenever you need it. Plus, with Bank of America's wealth of expert guidance available at any time, you can feel confident that your

money is working as hard as you do. So why overcomplicate your money? Keep it simple with Bank of America, your one-stop shop for everything you need today and the goals you're working toward tomorrow. To get started, visit bofa.com slash newprosmedia. That's b-o-f-a dot com slash n-e-w pros p-r-o-s media. bfa.com slash newprosmedia. I'm Nicole Lappin, the only financial expert you don't need a It's time for some money rehab. As you may have heard, I casually launched my own podcast network, Money News Network. Since January, we've had three shows out in the world. Money Rehab, duh. Help Wanted, a career development show I co-host with entrepreneur editor-in-chief Jason Pfeiffer and an advanced investing show. We have options hosted by financial expert Dominique

Broadway. And today we add a fourth to the roster, Moneymaker, hosted by the former president of entertainment at Telemundo, Nelly Galan. Nelly's podcast is all about building wealth, and we have developed this show with a serious commitment to empowering more people who have traditionally been denied a seat at the wealth building table. So Nelly is doing her coaching episodes in English and in Spanish. In English, it will be Moneymaker, and in Espanol, it will be Mi Mundo Rico. Recently, she flipped the script on me and interviewed me for her podcast we talked about money mindset and financial trauma and that episode will be coming out in a few weeks and of course i'll share that with you when it airs but in the meantime nelly dropped

her first episode today and it is a really great one for money rehabbers so i wanted to share it with you if you love it and i know you will click the link in the show notes to subscribe to her show. I am so honored to present Moneymaker. Welcome to Moneymaker, the podcast that gives you the tools to enrich your life in every sense of the word. I'm your host, Nelly Galan. Let's get started. of the word. I'm your host, Nellie Gallant. Let's get started. So a lot of people ask me, where did I get that entrepreneurial gene? How did I become a moneymaker? Well, when you're the kid of immigrants and you're an immigrant yourself, and from one day to the next, you leave your country in a revolution and your parents lose everything. Something you never think in this country could happen, but it happens. That you have this awakening that everything in

your life has changed. You come to this country, you become a translator for your parents. You really become like the adult in the family as a little kid that's five years old. You become a moneymaker. You learn to make money. And that may sound sad that you have to learn all these things from a young age. But the truth is that in your pain is your brand. When bad things happen to you, great things happen to you too, because you learn and you're not entitled and you know how to go after things and you know how to work in a team. not entitled and you know how to go after things and you know how to work in a team. And that team, that first team is your family. You do everything together and you're working for the good of the entire family. So for me, that's where it began. My earliest recollection of the entrepreneurial

buzz was in the seventh grade when I was in an all-girl Catholic school and we were going through hard times economically and I started selling Avon out of my locker and I crushed it. I made 200 bucks the first week I sold Avon and from there I had so many jobs at the same time. That's why when young people say to me, oh my god, I'm so tired. I'm like, are you kidding me? I've had three, four or five jobs at once. And the family was all together working together to, to survive in this country. So that was the beginning of it. But I want you all to know, and I'm sure you can relate to these stories where you go to work for somebody or something and you kill yourself and then something goes wrong. And that's where I'm going to begin today.

How do you turn a horrible thing that happens to you into an entrepreneurial path? For me, it was when I was 22 years old. I was very lucky because I'll tell you another time, my whole past story. But by the time I was 22, I was working for the CBS station in Boston. And I was in the producer reporter kind of training program that to eventually become a network correspondent. That's what I thought I wanted to do. And I was blessed to meet a man who was a big producer in Hollywood. He and his partner had decided to buy a Spanish TV station. In fact, they got a license for a Spanish TV station. And I was like, oh, a Spanish TV station. But I met him through my job interviewing people. And he said to me, young lady, what nationality are you? Are you Jewish? Are you what? And I said, I'm Latina.

And he goes, my partner and I just bought this Latino Spanish TV station. I think you should come and work for us. And I was like, oh my God, why would I want to do that? And he said, young lady, do you not know that the Latino market is going to be a huge market in this country? You're Latina, you're bilingual. Why wouldn't you want to be on the bottom floor of like an emerging business? And this guy was very rich, very successful. And all I thought about was, you know what? I'm dead broke. My parents are broke. And I left my job wanting to be a correspondent for CBS to work for this little rinky dinky little TV station.

And to this day, I think it was the best decision I ever made in my life and I always tell my son I wonder if you would have made that decision to be a correspondent on tv sounded much more glamorous than to be in a little rinky dinky startup right but that's the decision I made and in today's world we know that if you're employee one if you're in the startup of a new business of a new type of business you don't even have to be that smart you're going the startup of a new business of a new type of business, you don't even have to be that smart, you're going to do really well. And you may even become very rich. So that's how I began. I worked for these two guys that were rich at the time they were millionaires, eventually they became billionaires. And they had many businesses, many businesses in the

entertainment business in boxing, in real estate. And this was like, you know, something they were just throwing the dice on, trying out the Latino market. And I worked in a station, which was no different in today's world than working in a franchise, like in a Burger King or working in some little tiny startup. And so imagine that I was so excited learning so much every day. I didn't know anything about accounting. I hadn't even finished college by that point. And I had to hire a tutor to teach me finance. I had to like fake it till I make it. I didn't

have the proper education. I had so many gaps in what I knew, but I had to figure it out. I'd open the mail and I'd get, you know, I get offers to do things for the, but I had to figure it out. I'd open the mail and I'd get, you know, I get offers to do things for the company. I had to figure out, do I do it? I made mistakes on other people's money. I worked seven days a week. I helped them with their other businesses on days off. I mean, it was a very terrifying time and a very exciting three years of my life. And three years later, when I felt like, my God, this business is making money. I'm learning so much. I know how to do everything in a business, like in a little tiny business. I go into work one day only to find out that they had just sold the company. Can you imagine that? And so I was so distraught. You know, my, my bosses were people that I knew,

but I wasn't like friendly, but best friends with them. They were, they were hardly ever there. They were gone all the time. So it wasn't like I was used to just prancing and going into New York city and going into my boss's office and sort of talking to him whenever I felt like it, that wasn't the relationship. But I went that day and I was so distraught. And I'm like, you sold the company. How could you do this? And I do what you never do in business, what they tell you, especially as a woman never to do. I started crying. Like, how could you do this to me? How could you sell this and not let me know? And he said, young lady, these are my chips. If you're so smart, you're so great. Go get your own chips. And I was so distraught. I went home. I got into bed.

I was catatonic. I didn't get out of bed for three days and I was angry at him. I was so upset. Like how could somebody do that to me? It really felt like a relationship with some guy dumping you. That's what it felt like in my body. Like here, I thought this guy got me. This guy thought that I was special, that, you know, he was, he was going to help me. And instead I got dumped and it was terrifying and horrible. But in that moment, and in that moment, sometimes the most horrible moments of your life propel you to a higher place.

And in that moment, I thought, I will never let this happen to me again, ever. Just like if you were hurt in a relationship, you would say, I'm never going to let someone hurt me that way. And, you know, maybe stupidly, because I'm going to tell you later, you know, that I would do things differently today. There are other things I could have done in that moment that might've been better or easier. But instead I was like, I'm going to start a business. I'm going to do it. I got a severance package and I thought to myself, I'm going to live off that severance package. And then I'm going to figure this out and I'm going to do it. And I want you to know that the

next five years of my life, so I was 25 years old. Now, the good news is that was the right moment to start a business. I wasn't in a relationship. I didn't have kids. I wasn't married. I didn't have a mortgage, nothing. So I just went for it. I bootstrapped it and I went for it. So that part was good. The bad part is I didn't have a clue what I was doing. And for five years, I made no money. I had to take side jobs, going back to my old bosses at CBS and asking them to give me freelance work, interviewing people, which in that world is called being a stringer. And I had to do all kinds of little jobs here and there to make money. The whole thing was just very, very difficult. And what happened is that I didn't figure it out right away. I started

out thinking, okay, what did I learn from being in this TV station? I needed programming and it was hard to find programming. So I decided first I was going to do a programming business. I was going to make TV shows. Of course, everybody that's young wants to make TV shows. That's the glamorous thing to do. Everywhere I went, people were like, you don't know how to make TV shows. No, we don't think Latino TV shows are going to work. And I had focused on the Latino market because I just came off the station and I thought, okay, I'm going to sell TV shows to the guy that bought the station. No, that wasn't working. I had to pivot off of that idea. And I kept thinking, what do I do? What do I do? And I really didn't know all the things that I'm going to tell you to do,

because I really didn't have a clue how to get this going. I was lucky that I had a lot of friends that worked in TV companies and TV networks in the mainstream. And one of those friends, a woman named Concepcion Lara, was kind of like my mole inside of HBO. And she said to me, Nelly, I think that these people, like I work here, and I think that eventually they're going to want to launch TV channels, because they're already talking about launching HBO in India and in other places, but they really don't have the you know, they don't have the infrastructure to pull it off. And so it started clicking in my head, maybe I got to switch gears. I also at the same time, got a little postcard in the mail about going to my local chamber of commerce

for a get together. And I mean, in today's world, who would even think of that, right? But I got this card and I thought it was a sign. So I went to the chamber of commerce and it was like a get to know you kind of thing. And there were people there that were like, yeah, we're starting a business and we're writing a business plan. And I'm like, oh my God, I don't have a business plan. And so I found somebody there that helped me figure out how to write a business plan. Anyway, all this whole process of coming up with ideas and then pivoting, finding out that the ideas were bad, knocking on everybody's door, people rejecting me and rejecting me and rejecting me. And then me going, maybe I don't know what I'm doing. And then pivoting to something else. And then getting another piece of information

while I had all these side hustles got me to the place where finally I had a business plan. I had an idea and I used the contacts that I had met working for these two very successful men. And I had moles inside companies that were also giving me information about what were they looking for? Who were the right people to talk to? All of this stuff took five years, five long, horrible years. five long horrible years while my parents were like crying saying to me you are going to lose your looks you're not finding a man your whole life is trying to be entrepreneur why do you not go get a job and in the middle of all that because I was living off of this severance package and these little jobs I was taking I I lowered my overhead. I moved from

a nice apartment I was living at, a two bedroom apartment to a fourth floor walk up in the East Village. Why? Because when I was around these very successful bosses, they would say, when I was your age, I lowered my overhead. I started a business. And when I got to year five and I was praying to God, please God, I'm a good girl. Throw me a bone. Why isn't this working? I would remember my boss saying to me, when I was your age, I started a business. I lowered my overhead and it took me 10 years and I made no money. And then I became rich. And I thought, well, I'm only on year five. Well, in the fifth year, all of these pivots finally worked out. I went to HBO. HBO by then decided they were ready to launch channels around the world. And they had sent three guys to Latin America that didn't speak Spanish and didn't know

how to do it. I also had my girlfriend in the company that was helping me out and saying great things about me. So all these things came together and HBO became my first client. And very quickly, I became the go-to person in launching channels around the world. ESPN then called me, Fox then called me, and all of these people called me. And within one year of me being broke for five years, I had multi-million dollar contracts. And finally, I felt like I was on the path. So what did I learn from this experience? And what did I learn from this boss telling me, go get your own chips? Well, I'm going to help you. And I hope this podcast, as it goes forward, helps you connect all the dots and learn from someone who's been there,

done that, bought the t-shirt. I want you to succeed. I don't want it to be as hard for you as it was for me. So let me tell you, you know, they say, you know, hindsight is 2020, right? What would I do different? What do I want for my own son? What do I want for all of you? I'm going to tell you how to do this easier. So if you wanted to start a business, what should you do first? Number one, while you work for other people, think of those jobs as business school. Even if it's horrible, even if it's terrible, every single thing you learn, write it down. What would I do if this was my business? What are they doing wrong? I'm trying to tell them they're not listening. What would I do? What are the things I would do? What have I learned from them? And what are the

things I would do different? Number two, while you work for others, if you think you have an entrepreneurial mindset, go get a side hustle. See if you can manage multiple things at once because entrepreneurial life is managing many things at once. Take that money from that side hustle and put it away because I'm going to tell you right now, you will not be able to start a business without two years of salary saved. And I know you're all going to hear this and go, two years of salary saved. And I know you're all going to hear this and go, this lady's crazy. In this day and age, that's impossible. Well, that's the first thing you got to do. Got to figure that out. Whatever it takes. If you've got to live with five roommates,

if you've got to do whatever it takes, you got to have money saved. Because if you don't save enough money, when you go into entrepreneurship, you will be desperate and desperate people do desperate things. You have to know that you have time to make sure you don't give up. And that means money put away. What else? You heard me say, you have to lower your overhead. You have to sacrifice and sacrifice is not suffering. It's wanting something greater than yourself. It's going for something big. It's having a big goal and being able to sacrifice to get to it. Because when you run your own business, you're going to have to sacrifice for that business and for all the people that work for you. So you better practice. What else would, do you have to do? I will tell you, you know, today today everybody talks about venture capital and raising money, which means you're giving away a piece of the company. Before you do that, think about if this business that you want to do is something that you cannot get two contracts somewhere that you know you have income coming in before you get crazy and before you leave everything and leave all the other jobs and everything. You know, every company in America has to give

contracts out. And by the way, if you're a woman or a minority owned business, you have preference for those contracts. So a lot of you that may not be women or minorities, get partners that are women or minorities because you get to the top of the list. I did everything by getting contracts from corporations that fronted me the money to build my business. And you could do that too. In today's world, that's called supplier diversity. Look it up. You're going to be in shock when you see how many contracts are available in all companies in America for supplier diversity. And you can even get certified in advance to get those contracts and start pursuing them. You are gonna be shocked.

The other thing is that I would say there's a lot, a lot, a lot of advantages in today's world that didn't exist when I was doing all this. There are grants for entrepreneurs. There are small business loans that will help you at very low rates from the SBA. The SBA has also an organization called SCORE. You can go on their website. They're all over the country. They actually have even like offices all over the country. And they teach you step by step what to do and where all of the grants, all of the loans, everything in each state. And now there are these even small banks called CDFIs that give you money, loan you money at the lowest rate possible, and also have preferential treatment toward women and minority-owned

companies. You know, you're going to meet a guy that we're going to have on the podcast from Lendistry, which is one of those CDFIs that loans money to small business owners. And then look, I believe in chambers of commerce. You know, nobody realizes that they're still around. They still have get togethers. It's a great way to meet other entrepreneurs in your town. And you, you become a community with other small business owners. And obviously in today's world, we have podcasts, we have all kinds of ways to learn, but you've got to be in the community and in the space and going and hunting for grants and loans

and all kinds of things that are available for entrepreneurs. So the last thing I'm going to leave you with is I went into television when television was an emerging business. I know you see today all these streamers and all this and all that, but now it's saturated. It's the business is still there, but you're not going to make as much money as before. I would say to you, Google emerging businesses, emerging markets, and emerging cities. Today, the hot businesses are healthcare, elderly care, you know, being an Amazon seller, for instance, and being able to promote your business on Instagram, TikTok, on social media, whole other world. And so think

carefully before you choose. I happen to be at the right place at the right time in the right business. It took me five years for my timing to hit, but when it hit, it hit. I want yours to hit quicker without so much pain and suffering because I know all of you are going to become money makers.