Q&A with Galey Alix, DIY Designer and Star of HBO MAX's Home in a Heartbeat

Galey Alix is a DIY Designer and Star of HBO MAX's Home in a Heartbeat. Galey worked at Goldman Sachs from 2010 to 2023 in Asset & Wealth Management in Florida.

1. How did you start your career at Goldman Sachs and what was your path at the firm? What did you learn during your time here that helped you in the next phase(s) of your career?
My career at GS spanned from 2010 until 2023. My path at the firm was a bit unconventional. I interviewed for an internal wholesaling position in the Chicago office when I was 23 years old. I remember desperately wanting to work at GS, but I hadn’t anticipated the -20 degree Fahrenheit weather in Chicago in January when I did my on-site interview. As a Florida girl, the cold was enough to scare me away so I declined the incredible offer GS presented. Upon declining, I let the firm know that I still wished to work at GS one day and to please keep me in mind if an opportunity presented itself in a warmer state. I despondently remained in Florida, questioning daily if I had made the wrong decision. Exactly one month later, I received another call from GS. Only this time, it was a different voice on the line and that voice was offering me an opportunity to interview for my dream job and in my favorite state. The position was for a Regional Director (External Wholesaler) covering South Florida. The gentleman on the phone ended up being my direct manager for all 13 years I was at the firm and I spent every one of those years working hard to prove him right for taking a chance on me.

It would be fraudulent to not attribute a tremendous amount of my success outside of the firm to what I learned while at the firm. In my years at GS, I learned that the most successful companies are those that possess a competitive niche in their respective sector. I learned that if you want to be an effective leader, you can’t just tell people what to do you have to show them. I learned that being ESG conscious and focusing on sustainability is essential in today's environment. And finally, I learned that your client and their best interests always come first. I built my design business on these principles and fortunately it seems to be working.

2. You recently starred in HBO MAX's Home in a Heartbeat, which premiered in April 2023 while you were still at the firm. Tell us about what inspired you to start home renovations and pursue it as your next career. 
In my wildest dreams I never could have imagined amassing such a large social media following due to a small side-passion I was posting on Instagram. Even wilder, to have a TV series made about the business that evolved from it. And wildest yet, getting to do all of this while I maintained my career at GS. It certainly was not easy to get this OBA approved, but everyone around me at the firm was supportive and that was enough to keep me fighting for the approval.

The last year of my life has been a turbulent whirlwind of extremely high highs, often debilitating stress, and a lot of firsts. I would do it all over again if given the chance, though I'm confident I would not survive this gauntlet a second time. While renovating strangers' homes was a nice reprieve from what was happening in our economy and thinking about which funds to sell to clients, it was extremely taxing on my body and mind. Also, I was still hyper focused on my sales stack ranking at GS, which became difficult to maintain as editing my TV show in post became a third full-time job. It was a lot.

What I've learned from this experience is that when your side hustle starts to compromise your mental and/or physical health, it's time to change things up. This is why after season one aired, I forced myself to make the decision I had been dreading. Do I keep the job I love at GS with the financial stability and consistency it has provided me since college, or do I brave the wilderness that is entrepreneurship? Ultimately, my decision boiled down to this: I want my life to be as additive as possible. The deciding factor was thinking about the happy tears I’ve had the incredible fortune of witnessing on my reveal days. Surprising a deserving family with their dream home allows my team and I to experience that euphoric feeling with them. I would likely never be able to replicate these feelings in any other career and this is ultimately what determined my pivot. Today, my design side-hustle is officially my only hustle.

3. How did you balance your job at Goldman Sachs with your DIY designer work before you left the firm to pursue home renovations?
I have always been plagued with an OCD-like obsession with everything needing to be perfect. I am skilled at making rooms look aesthetically appealing because I don't stop moving things around until it looks perfect and everything is visually at peace. The same approach was applied to how I managed my territory at GS. I was surgical and precise in everything I did. Each client received a personalized follow-up email from me with a full summary after our meetings. I memorized the names of everyone's kids, dogs, birthdays and what they ordered for lunch so that they knew I cared. I refused to end a meeting without "closing them" first... as if the world would implode if I didn’t. These are the reasons I was successful in running my business for GS while also renovating homes and hosting a TV show. I never let anything fall through the cracks because I sweat the small stuff, all of it. The obvious compromise here was sleep, having a personal life, and getting to exercise. As a competitive collegiate runner, running has always been my way to de-stress, but even that was compromised while trying to "be perfect at everything else”.

When asked how I balanced my career at GS with designing and hosting/producing a TV show... the honest answer is I didn't. There was no balance. I threw everything I had into those two endeavors and it worked but was not sustainable. My advice to anyone looking to juggle passions is to not be afraid to make sacrifices to live out your dreams. Nothing worth achieving comes easy so be prepared to work hard, make significant sacrifices repeatedly, and trust your ability to determine when to change things up again. As a long-distance runner, I know what it's like to push yourself through the really uncomfortable part in order to achieve the goal, but also how to allow for recovery after the fact. That is no different than what I did in the last year of my life. I pushed myself to my limit and now I'm in recovery mode... kind of.

4. How do you differentiate yourself in the home renovations space?
I previously mentioned how GS taught me that the most successful companies all have a competitive niche in their sector. They are unique in some particular way, which translates into a meaningful advantage among their peers. I also learned that you always put the client first. I differentiated myself in the saturated market of "home design and renovation" by deploying both of these concepts since day one.

To be fair, making my business model unique was born more out of necessity rather than intention. I noticed that every designer I was up against approached their client meetings the exact same way. They would show their clients countless fabric swatches, sit on couches together at Pottery Barn, and review renderings for hours. Weeks later they would all come to a decision on a hundred different line items and the project would then start. I did not have time for that. Not only did I work at GS full-time, but I am admittedly impatient. If I was going to make this business work for me, I only had time to work on weekends and I certainly didn’t have time to consult back and forth about every design decision. More importantly, my clients found this refreshing. Sometimes all the stimulus – swatches, samples, shopping, options – can leave them overwhelmed and confused. I know my technique isn’t for everybody, but I have found that it is rewarding for clients in its speed with less stress.  

I decided on day one that every client who hires me to design and renovate their home only needs to make two decisions: 1. Do you trust me blindly with the design of your home? And 2. What is your budget? Once we agree on these terms, I would take your credit card while you grant me free reign to design and install your dream home. Of course I would study you as we walk through your home together and listen to everything that isn’t working for you, although I do not provide any feedback or share my thoughts. I want this new home to be uniquely custom to your style and needs while also being a fun experience with a ‘surprise reveal’ at the end. After our walkthrough, I’d spend the next month designing and ordering everything for your project. Once it all arrives, you move out for a three-day weekend while my team and I move in. You’ll come home on day three and the entire install will be completed (bathrooms, kitchens, you name it).

My competitive niche is that I remove all of the time, decisions, and stress that get put on a homeowner during renovations. Additionally, a three-day weekend renovation while you go out of town means not having to live through months of workers in and out of your house. You also get to avoid breathing in construction dust and paint fumes for months. Lastly, I put everything I purchase on the client’s credit card and make sure it’s a rewards card so that they get all of the points. Designers typically put project purchases on their own cards and then invoice the client at the end, but I feel strongly that if my client is spending $100k on furniture and decor that they should receive all the flyer miles. And that brings me back to my other GS takeaway… the clients’ best interests always come first.

5. How did you build your 5 million followers across your social media platforms?
The only part of my story that's difficult to talk about is the beginning. A few years back, I was engaged to who I believed was the love of my life. We bought our dream home in Connecticut and while I've always been a Florida girl and refused to move to a cold state, I was willing to do it for love. Because he agreed to let me keep my job at GS and work in Florida for the next year, I promised to commute to Connecticut every weekend and turn our new house into a home. I couldn't find any designers or handymen to work on weekends, and with my OCD, I certainly didn't want anyone working on our home while I wasn't there to oversee. My only resort was to DIY. For the next year, I flew from Florida to Connecticut every weekend and worked on our home. I turned our basement into a magical theater room and converted one of our garages into a state-of-the-art boxing gym. I filmed the transformation of each room and then edited it into several videos that I posted for my 900 friends and family following me on Instagram at the time. I would stay up all night working on these rooms and then surprise my fiancé in the morning and of course I filmed and posted his reactions too. He even cried on a few reveals.

Almost one year later, I completed our home, resigned from GS to move north and get married, and was prepared for our wedding a few weeks away. There was just one problem. Over that year, the stress of losing my financial independence as I prepared to leave my job, moving away from my family in Florida, and the exhaustion of flying every week led me to lose myself. I no longer felt in control of my life and as a result I started to control food… in a deadly way.

I had developed a severe eating disorder. As our wedding date was quickly approaching, I opened up to my fiancé about it as I did not want to start our marriage with any secrets. I asked him to help me find a local therapist and wanted to work through it together, but I was not met with the same desire. He gave me an hour to pack my things and I never saw him or the home I spent a year creating for us again. I landed in Florida having lost my fiancé, our home, my health, and my income as I had just resigned from GS. The hardest part was waking up in the morning and being hit with the reality that everything I cared about was suddenly gone.

I deleted Instagram off my phone and checked into therapy. I came out a few months later and was extremely fortunate to have been able to get my GS job back. I felt healthy enough to finally log back into Instagram, where I anticipated my 900 followers would be messaging me for wedding photos. Instead, I was met with tens of thousands of strangers asking me to renovate their homes. From Australia to Mexico, they were coming in by the minute. For a moment I thought I had accidentally logged into a celebrity's account when I reinstalled the app on my phone.

My design videos of the renovations to my home in Connecticut had gone viral. People all over the world were sharing my 60 second videos and asking me to come work on their homes. I started saying yes to helping complete strangers because I welcomed any excuse to not think about what I was going through but was also hopeful that making other people happy would in turn make me a little happier.

The first home I did was for a beautiful family in Boynton Beach, Florida. They went to Disney World for the weekend and I moved into their home to surprise them with a renovation. The video I made of their install got 30 million views on Instagram shortly after I posted it. That’s when I realized surprising homeowners may be more than a passion, it might just be a business. Over the course of the next year, I completed over 100 spaces and today, my design videos have garnered over a billion views, 5 million followers, and a series on HBO Max.

I am grateful for the home in Connecticut and where heartbreak led me, but am even more grateful for all the homeowners who have trusted me along the way. Getting to work on their homes with complete trust and creative license is ultimately what led to my mental health recovery. It gave me a sense of self-worth again and something to look forward to each day.

6. What advice do you have for others who are interested in pivoting their careers?
My best advice for someone looking to pivot careers is to stop waiting for things to get easier or for timing to be better. Chances are, it only gets harder. Instead of waiting for the easy part, get better at handling the hard parts and go for it. You have to take control and design your life, or your life will design you… and chances are, you don’t have the same style.

7. Have you leveraged your GS network since leaving the firm? If so, how?
I have definitely put my GS network to good use. I hired one of my former GS clients to become my new financial advisor, overseeing my personal finances now that there is no longer a conflict of interest. I've been hired to design homes for a number of my former GS clients and also several of my former GS colleagues. And last but not least, I've stayed in close touch with my colleagues at the firm because nobody has a pulse on the market like GS, so my portfolio is grateful for that.