Every issue, GRAZIA USA highlights Game Changers, who inspire, educate, and celebrate individuality, beauty, and style. Meet Dany Garcia, the CEO of The Garcia Companies, co-founder of Seven Bucks Production, co-owner and chairwoman of the XFL and founder of the lifestyle brand GSTQ who finds balance while doing it all.
My love of business started at a very young age, when I was in high school. I worked for an entrepreneur selling suits in his store, and I was so in love with this idea of building businesses and employing individuals and creating wealth, and the impact of that.
After college my plan wasn’t to go into finance, but a really a wonderful opportunity came up with Merrill Lynch. My mindset was, “I can learn so much here, and everything I’m going to learn, I’ll be able to apply to the future.” Then when I moved into film with a small independent production house, I approached it not just from a creative point of view, but as a business: “How does this film fit into a return-on-investment model? How are we adding to that and how are we creating it?” Then [my ex-husband] Dwayne [“The Rock”] Johnson asked me to become more forward-facing in his film and entertainment career, so I brought that business action into Seven Bucks Production, which we co-founded.
All the companies that are in my Garcia Companies portfolio — including Teremana tequila and the fashion lifestyle brand GSTQ — are very consumer-facing. My passion is in what I like to call “advancing the human experience,” serving the audience and adding value. The idea for GSTQ came about because as a professional body builder, I would go from meeting to meeting and my clothes always felt so restricted. I wanted to create designs that move with you. I believe women are the professional athletes in life, and their outfits should be killer.
GSTQ is not athleisure, but we wanted our clothing to go 15 hours. There’s a lot of inspiration from sportswear: How can clothes I design be made with the same principles of workout clothing, where it’s meant to help you perform and make you feel great? You’re not running home and tearing it off your body. I wanted my clothing to feel like, “We got you. Go crush.”
Between The Garcia Companies, Seven Bucks Production, the XFL and GSTQ, some companies need a little bit more [attention] than others. But I have invested deeply to make sure that my teams are empowered and that I’m communicating with them clearly, so they understand where we’re going. That’s a discipline that you have to get down before you can really have all these companies run. The kind of culture I instill at work is also key. I don’t perpetuate the culture of grind within my company.
I had a really strong turning point in my own sense of work-life balance in 2016. My husband took me on vacation to Hawaii where I slept for a week straight. I had been grinding and I was wiped. So when I came out of that I said, “Never again. There should be no grind. There will only be elegance in execution.” To do that, I had to change the way I was showing up, and the way I was executing. I spent a lot of time developing a process and empowering people so that my career wasn’t something I needed to escape from, and that was quite an investment in time and self-examination. I’ve been able to do that very, very well over these last few years, and because of that, we’ve had incredible expansion and growth.
Any secrets to success I’ve found have to do with falling in love with the idea of getting better every day. You also have to be comfortable in having an idea that no one else has had before, and that you may be the only one believing in it. Between finding ways to improve myself and my work and really doubling down on the things that I love and I believe in, those two factors have had a huge impact in my quality of life and my success. — As told to Colleen Kratofil.
