How Adriana Gallardo Built a $300M Insurance Empire

If you’ve ever been stuck in traffic around southern California, you will likely recognize Adriana Gallardo’s face.

The founder and CEO of Adriana’s Insurance has catered to the Hispanic community for more than three decades. And for nearly as many years, her face has adorned billboards, bus stops and now some L.A. Metro trains. In her signature ads, Adriana is often pictured holding one hand up to her blond hair like a telephone, promising customers: “Savings in just 5 minutes!”

For a long time, she tells me, people — OK, white people — assumed she was merely a spokesmodel. “People see me, like, Oh my God, you’re real!” she says. “The best part is, they say, ‘You look better in person.’ I don’t ever want them to say, ‘You look better on the billboard.’ ”

Gallardo opened her first office in 1993, offering insurance her community “can afford, in a language they understand.” She now has some 600 full-time employees across more than 60 offices, making her one of the many inspiring immigrant stories on which Los Angeles is built. As her empire has grown, so, too, has her profile. Gallardo was a shark on Shark Tank México and is such a part of the fabric in town that Hollywood increasingly sees her as a conduit to the Latino community.

In May, Warner Bros. enlisted her to promote the latest installment of the horror franchise Final Destination: Bloodlines. The film’s logo was added to Adriana’s signature posters, with the text reading ominously: “Adriana’s has you covered until your policy expires … or you do.”

“Adriana’s Insurance over-indexes with Latino consumers in the Southern California area and has a large footprint in key Latino DMAs in Texas that also over-index in moviegoing,” Carlos Salcines, vp multicultural marketing at Warner Bros., says in explaining the partnership. Two collaborative ads were pushed out on digital platforms (in English and Spanish) and, according to the studio, performed “above and beyond what was imagined.” Final Destination: Bloodlines blew past opening weekend estimates to earn $102 million worldwide, with Hispanic viewers making up 32 percent of that audience, according to box office data.

On the same weekend Final Destination opened, Gallardo was a guest speaker at the 2025 Mindvalley Manifesting Summit in Los Angeles, a two-day self-help seminar where Gwyneth Paltrow gave the keynote speech. When Mindvalley founder Vishen Lakhiani welcomed Gallardo to the stage, he pegged her empire at $300 million. Of the invitation to speak at the summit, Adriana later tells me, “I manifested that.”

In her self-help book, How to Be a Chingona in the Face of Fear (which comes out in English this summer), Gallardo shares her journey from crossing the border at 18 to gracing the cover of Vogue México. At 54, she lives in a 10,000-square-foot home in Orange County, drives an Aston Martin (when she isn’t driving the Lamborghini or one of two Rolls-Royces) and flies private out of an airstrip within earshot of her company’s new offices, housed in a building she owns.

And she really does believe this life is available to you if you want it badly enough. Or as she recently asked her half-million TikTok followers, “Do you want to learn how to become the first millionaire in your family?”

Gallardo is certainly that. But curiously, a second millionaire would follow right behind her: Adriana’s younger sister, Veronica, whom you might recognize from her own billboards around town, advertising Veronica’s Insurance. Veronica, a brunette, is often photographed alongside a furry German shepherd. When she updated the billboards in 2022, outfitting the dog in a suit and tie, the comedic social media account Americana at Brand Memes tweeted, “The Veronica’s insurance dog had a makeover!”

The Gallardo sisters rarely speak about each other publicly, and neither Veronica (nor Veronica’s Insurance) is mentioned in Adriana’s book by name. That has only fueled speculation about their relationship. A quick TikTok search turns up this slug: “Veronica and Adriana Insurance Drama,” asking, “Who are these insurance sisters taking over LA?” Or as music producer Valentino Khan posted to his 120,000 followers on X last summer: “This is the real beef SoCal should be talking about.”

***

“A lot of people told me, ‘She’s a copycatter, she’s going after you,’ ” says Adriana, seated in her Irvine office, Chanel sunglasses on her desk, a glass bowl of peach slices within reach. Back in the day, she says, “My mom would make Veronica come to work. And she would come and go and come and go and act like she was doing us a favor and asking us for her paycheck. She’d be like, ‘Pay me my salary because I work X amount of hours,’ whatever.

“People try to make us fight,” she adds. Hollywood is littered with stories of powerful women pitted against each other. Though in this case one could argue the dueling billboards did that, a Betty-and-literal-Veronica story set at the dawn of the ICE Age. Before I leave her office today, Adriana will ask me to recommend a publicist. Though what she really needs is an agent.

The Gallardo sisters grew up outside Mexico City. Their father, Victor, owned a mechanic shop. Their mother, Rosy, was a homemaker. When Adriana was 18, she overheard her parents talking about moving to the States, wanting to give their kids a shot at the American dream, she says. Adriana assumed it was just talk, but soon they’d sold the house (then the couch, the microwave and even the forks). Her father and Veronica crossed the border first, followed by Adriana and their mother, who spent three nights on the bus to Mexicali in 1988 before entering the U.S. with passports and a tourist visa that soon expired.

“I became an illegal,” Adriana says, “or an illegal immigrant. I did not speak English, I did not have any resources.”

Hers was not a soft landing. The family briefly lived with an aunt before renting a town house in West Covina, which reminded Adriana of the town from Back to the Future. Veronica enrolled in public school, but Adriana had aged out. (She’d also been forced to leave her boyfriend behind in Mexico, a neighborhood kid named Leon whom she’d known since she was 11.) Their mom signed Adriana up for classes at a community college, which she hated, and after quitting school, she landed a job cleaning toilets at Burger King. Adriana’s greatest aspiration, she says, was working the drive-through window.

“I remember looking at those girls at the cashier and they looked pretty, their nails were long, they were wearing headsets. They looked important,” she says.

Adriana’s pivot to insurance was, like so much in her life at this time, her mother’s idea. Rosy, shopping for auto insurance in La Puente, noticed how busy the office was and pushed her firstborn to ask for a job. Adriana was content to stay at Burger King, where she’d learned enough English to move up to the window — “Double Whopper, extra cheese, cut in half” — but Rosy insisted. Adriana got a job in the Downey office. And within three months, she says, she’d become the top salesperson.

The job was going so well, in fact, that Rosy urged Adriana to quit. The Gallardo family should open their own insurance agency, the matriarch reasoned, convincing a real estate agent in Pomona to let them use a storage closet as their first office. Adriana was in her early 20s, driving a beat-up Volkswagen she’d bought for $650, and found herself cold-calling local car dealerships for leads. When one salesman offered her a stack of contracts — provided she have a drink with him first — Rosy wasn’t surprised.

“El poder de las nalgas es infinito,” she told her daughter. “The power of the buttocks is infinite.”

This was a difficult time, Adriana says. More than once, she walked in on her mother begging the phone company not to shut off service to their office. In tears, Adriana blamed her mom for bringing her to the U.S., for forcing her to open this business. (Did her mother have friends? “She had the Bible,” Adriana says.) Rosy was undeterred.

“I see your face all over the city,” Adriana recalls her saying. “You’re going to be rich.”

***

At first, Veronica wanted nothing to do with the family business. Which wasn’t a surprise. She’d always been the more impulsive sister, popular and crazy for bad boys. “Whoever I wanted,” she once said, “I got.” Like Adriana, her first job in the States was in fast food. But when she complained to her boss that she couldn’t afford the bus fare to work, he offered to pick her up from school.

Veronica would work a series of odd jobs, including selling meat over the phone. Sometimes she cleaned houses with Rosy on the weekends. As Veronica tells it, in the early ’90s, she, Adriana and their mother were in a car accident. They each received a small settlement, which Rosy wanted to use to go into business together — an offer Veronica refused.

“I wanted to enjoy life,” she says. “They gave me $3,000. I was like, You think I’m going to invest? No, I’m going to use it for a car.” And so, while Veronica tooled around town in a white Mustang convertible — a car that would later be repossessed when she couldn’t make the payments — Adriana and Rosy opened their first office under the name Hispano America in Pomona. (For the record, Adriana says she does not remember the car accident nor the invitation for Veronica to join them.)

At the time, Veronica was working a desk job for a rival insurance agent. But within three or four months of the family opening their own office, she says, she joined them — out of loyalty. “I just said, ‘You know what? I’m going to work with you. I’m going to help you guys.’ They said, ‘OK, Veronica.’ Of course they were paying me the minimum.”

Adriana described her younger sister as more than a little entitled. Veronica insists she put in the work, handing out fliers for what soon became known as Adriana’s Insurance (a name change suggested by their mother). “I was walking to all these dealerships, passing flyers, cards, to tell everybody to come and buy from us. I was the one actually doing all this.”

What’s clear is: The timing was right for two Latina sisters to take over the Southern California insurance game. In 1984, the state enacted a law making auto insurance mandatory; any motorist stopped for a traffic violation had to prove they had liability coverage or risk losing their license. Legal challenges followed, arguing the law targeted low-income drivers, since there were no guarantees the insurance market would offer coverage they could afford. But in 1987, the California Supreme Court upheld the law, and a wildly underserved Hispanic market started looking for agents who spoke their language.

“Many of our families did not have a checkbook to pay for the monthly fees of their policies,” Adriana writes in her book, “and the other insurance companies did not accept their cash because they distrusted them as customers. Furthermore, these multinational companies did not take the time to explain the policies to the people in their own language, and most of our community did not speak English.”

Adriana didn’t just speak the language, she had a face customers could trust. And soon it would be everywhere.

***

Adriana’s childhood sweetheart, Leon, had since crossed the border, and they’d gotten married around 1991. Neither was in the country legally. After working in construction, Leon came to work at Adriana’s Insurance, which caused some internal strife, according to Veronica. But the family found a way forward: Veronica and Rosy would own and operate a second location in Norco, she says, while Adriana and Leon would run the original office.

“I don’t know why they picked that ugly city,” Veronica says of Norco. “There was nobody there, it was empty, just cows.” But she was determined to make it work. She and her sister were extremely competitive, she says, and they’d talk daily: “I made this many sales, how about you?”

More offices would follow, with the sisters dividing up Southern California into territories. As Veronica tells it, she took Riverside, Moreno Valley and San Bernardino, where she was paying $400 a month in rent on a street riddled with prostitutes. Adriana, meanwhile, took Fontana and La Puente.

And there was a lot at stake. In quick succession, Veronica had gotten married and then divorced, once describing her first pregnancy as “traumatic” on her body. When she discovered her husband was a “slut,” she says, she put her child in a U-Haul and drove off, leaving her wedding dress in ruins on her ex’s living room floor.

Adriana, meanwhile, had two children, moved to Rancho Cucamonga and was driving a red Ferrari convertible. She was looking for a big idea when she spotted a vacant billboard on the 10 Freeway near her Fontana location. The owner wanted $8,000 a month, which was more than Adriana had paid on rent for her first three offices combined. But she took a leap, posing for the billboard, which also featured her Ferrari and the words “Lowest Rates!” For the first time, she says, English-speaking customers were calling. “Nice car,” they said.

The sisters quickly added television commercials to the mix, paying something like $40,000 per 30-second spot on Univision. “I used all my savings,” Adriana says, pouring her money back into the business. Making payroll was a challenge. Sometimes she’d find herself standing behind her customer service agents as the calls came in, ripping the receivers from their hands. “I was like, ‘Let me talk to the client. Yes, sir. Where do you live?’ “

“Adriana was always saying, ‘I’m the owner,’ ” Veronica recalls, adding: “I didn’t really care. We were partners, we were both putting in advertisement money. We were putting a lot of money in the business. Then we started having a lot of problems.”

***

On the heels of the TV ads, Adriana opened her first Los Angeles office, on Eighth Street downtown. But the cracks began to show. As Veronica tells it, Adriana cast the first stone, quietly opening an insurance office — in Veronica’s backyard — under the name Just Auto.

“I said, ‘Why did you open in my territory? We were supposed to respect?’ And she’s like, ‘It’s a different name, we’re going for another demographic, a different market.’ I said, ‘Why didn’t you open in your territory?’ ” (A rep for Adriana declined to comment.)

And so Veronica admits she opened a single office under the name Veronica’s Insurance “to prove a point.” The tension escalated, she says, when someone from Team Adriana parked trucks enwrapped in Adriana’s Insurance branding directly in front of Veronica’s first office. “I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Veronica says.

This was not an easy period for anyone. In 2008, their mother fell ill on a trip to Mexico, suffering from peritonitis, an inflammation of the membrane lining the abdominal cavity (which can lead to sepsis). The two sisters flew to Mexico to be with their mom, who passed away suddenly at 56. And while they continued operating offices under the Adriana’s Insurance name for another decade, the loss did not appear to bring them closer together.

In 2014, Adriana filmed a reality show for Estrella TV called Rica, Famosa, Latina, which followed the lives of wealthy, famous Latinas in L.A. Onscreen, she presented as a have-it-all entrepreneur (now with a bonus 5-year-old child), but behind the scenes, her marriage was crumbling. In her book, Adriana reveals she was crying at night, wondering: How had the woman who’d achieved the American dream from nothing “let her husband ignore her?”

“The reality is that we started to have different goals in life,” Adriana says now. “We got married too young, we built a beautiful family. But I describe him as a free spirit. He loves to party, he loves to travel, he loves life.” Adriana was getting interested in self-improvement. “I used to have conversations with him, ‘How can we be better than yesterday? We have to learn from our mistakes.’ He was like, ‘No mistakes were made.’ I wanted to keep growing the business, I wanted to grow myself. I wanted to be a better mom, a better businesswoman. He said, ‘Why?’ He was comfortable.

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you, ‘Oh my God, I was the best wife,’ ” Adriana adds. “He told me, ‘You yell too much.’ I was very controlling. His excuse was, ‘We’re always doing the things that you like, I can’t be me, I want to do the things that excite me.’ Then he opened a bar.” She shrugs, “I guess he wanted to have his own spotlight.”

After 24 years of marriage, Leon wanted out. Per California law, he was entitled to half of their assets. At the time, Adriana recalls telling him, “You didn’t build shit, I did it.” But she’s more Zen about that divorce settlement today. “You know what? He did build something. He was a part of it,” stressing: “I have a good relationship with him.”

***

Veronica implied the reality show was not good for business. (It should be said that Veronica is now developing her own unscripted series.) And by 2018, she wanted to make a clean break, asking Adriana to buy her out. By her reasoning, they’d built Adriana’s Insurance together.

A legal agreement was reached in February 2019, she says, with Adriana paying her “$1.2 million or $1.5 million” — a figure Veronica bats away in the air as if it’s nothing, saying it was not commensurate with the work (and investment) she put into building the business.

When initially asked about Veronica’s history with Adriana’s Insurance, Adriana had told me: “I opened an office for my mom, and then my mom helped Veronica to open one office. She was using the name” — the Adriana’s Insurance name — “but I am the one that built the name. Then one day [Veronica] just wanted to, what it’s called, be independent. OK. So, she put her name on and, yeah, that’s the story.”

When sent further fact- checking questions about the split, a rep for Adriana declined to comment. A source close to the family likened the arrangement to more of a franchise model, where franchisees contribute to advertising expenses, but that Adriana had built the marketing department and had negotiated with Univision. According to the source, “If I owned 20 Chick-fil-A locations, I wouldn’t say I built Chick-fil-A.”

Within one week, Veronica’s 18 or so offices were rebranded under the name Veronica’s Insurance. This abrupt change was not without risk, she says, likening it to starting over: “Imagine all of these clients I met all these years with that [other] name?”

Veronica was soon plotting her own billboards. She was seeking a way to differentiate her business, she says, when she spotted her beloved dog, Basko, at her feet. That’s how her German shepherd — whom she’d brought home in the wake of a domestic violence incident — found his face all over Santa Monica Boulevard. Basko even inspired Veronica’s slogan, “The protection you need.”

The billboards were an instant hit. When Netflix launched the Glen Powell movie Hitman in 2024, the company plastered mock billboards all over town. In one ad — which used Veronica’s typeface and logo — Powell posed alongside a German shepherd. Veronica’s phone lit up with friends saying, “Sue them!”

She laughs. Sue them? “It was amazing,” she says.

***

Veronica initially hadn’t wanted to participate in this story, but felt she’d been written out of the company’s history. As someone close to the family tells me, “They are competitors. But at the end of the day, they’re family first.” The two may not follow each other on Instagram, but Veronica invited Adriana to her daughter’s wedding. “I love my sister,” Veronica says.

“We’re friends,” Adriana says, “of course.” Of their dueling insurance empires, she says: “You know what? It’s my sister. It’s OK. There’s enough for everyone.”

And there’s room to grow. In 2022 — according to Janet Ruiz, the director of strategic communication at the Insurance Information Institute — only 55 percent of the Latin market had auto insurance, compared with 80 percent of the general market. And the language barrier (coupled with redlining policies) has left the Hispanic market open to exploitation. A 2017 ProPublica investigation found that some large insurance carriers regularly charged minority neighborhoods much higher premiums than white areas with the same risk, sometimes as much as 30 percent more.

Adriana is intent on honoring ­— and giving back to ­— her community. For nearly 20 years, she’s hosted an annual charity event at Christmas called Santa’s Tour, most recently at a sports arena in Pico Rivera. And much of her work is personal. After suffering a heart attack in 2017, Adriana funded the Spanish translation of the American Heart Association’s website, Go Red for Women. (According to the American Heart Association, cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 killer of new moms in America.)

Adriana’s empire has grown to include traffic school classes, job placement aid and immigration services. For the record, she became a citizen herself in 2002 following her husband, who’d gotten his paperwork through a program for field workers. While Adriana doesn’t remember the name of that program, she’s likely referring to the Immigrant Reform and Control Act of 1986, which was signed into law by President Reagan and included pathways to citizenship for some farmers.

When it comes to the current administration’s anti-immigration rhetoric, she says firmly, “I don’t believe that we Latinos are criminals.” Adriana reminds her clients that they can’t control what politicians say but “we have control over ourselves. So, let’s follow the rules, let’s keep teaching our kids unity and focus on doing the right thing.”

Veronica now owns 37 locations of her namesake business and commutes to her company’s headquarters in Ontario, California. In 2019, she paid $6.5 million for an 8,500-square-foot Encino mansion not far from Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra Jonas. According to the listing, the home has commanding views of the San Fernando Valley Basin, floor-to-ceiling glass doors that retract at the touch of a button and a guest house. The garage has space for her Rolls-Royce, Lamborghini and gray Porsche convertible. At 52, she’s working on a book of her own: Without Vision, There Is No Action.

While Veronica was house hunting, Adriana married Richard Martinez, a relationship and business coach who is 11 years her junior and looks like a young Andy Garcia. They met through friends back when Martinez was a personal trainer. Today, they’re co-founders in The Business Circle, teaching entrepreneurs how to scale their businesses. Of their marriage, Adriana says, “He protects me, he lets me be, he has his own identity.” Or as Martinez once said, “We complete, not compete.”

In How to Be a Chingona in the Face of Fear, there is a lot of talk about money. Not simply how to acquire it, but how to feel comfortable spending it — a problem Adriana seems to have conquered. She and Martinez share a 10,000-square-foot house in Orange County that she found after asking someone, “Where do rich people live?” She wanted a home that felt like a resort, she says, a vibe she achieved by ripping out the tennis court and building a spa in its place.

Of flying private, she tells me, “I like to be in control of my time,” adding: “I’m not saying it to brag but to inspire. It’s possible. I deserve it. And you deserve it.”

Coaching and empowering entrepreneurs, she says, is a natural outgrowth of her own journey. “I was able to find the success,” she says, “and my mom was there. Now, I want to be that mom — that teacher, that person — that believes in you.” Chingona, she explains, is a slang term meaning badass.

“A chingona woman,” she says, “is a woman that knows her worth.”

This story appeared in the July 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.