Ral West
speaker
205 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Ral West’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thanks, Vince. And I love the distinction of the time difference.
Okay, Vince, in a capsule, 40 years plus, I've been an entrepreneur. And before that, I grew up in an entrepreneurial family. So I think it ran in my blood. So in my mid twenties, I opened my first business and went on to have a serial entrepreneur, if you will, had many different businesses. And the primary business was one that I ran with my husband and we ran the business for 25 years.
It was a business that operated charter air service between Alaska and Hawaii with wide body jets. And after 25 years, we were able to exit the business by selling it to Alaska Airlines. And in other career pivots since then, we have owned small cruise ships, we have invested in multifamily real estate syndications, and we are still doing that. So a varied career for, as I say, over 40 years.
And that brings me to today where I have yet another business that I've started where I'm teaching entrepreneurs how to accomplish what I have in that you can run your business and have the life that you want at the same time.
To start with, I was raised in a tourism family. So that was my initial business was related to tourism. And I was helping businesses with their marketing and advertising, businesses that were involved in tourism in Alaska. I wasn't born in Alaska. I was born in Seattle, but I moved to Alaska in my 20s. And that's where I decided to launch out onto my own because I saw an opportunity.
And I think that's the main criteria here. is that there was an opportunity because there were many small tourism businesses that didn't know how to get their product out to market. And I had the experience doing that in the work that I had already done in tourism. So I thought, hey, I can offer them this service and I can provide them with what they need to get their product to market.
So I did that to begin with. Then the business that my husband started was a spinoff of that. She was in real estate and she decided that he wanted to make these free trips to Hawaii like I was doing because some of my clients were in Hawaii. And she said, okay, I'm going to represent Alaskans who own condos in Hawaii and I will work at the condos for them.
Then I added to that with, okay, but you need to also add the rental cars and the air and make a whole package out of it. Cause that was my experience in tourism. So you need a whole vacation package. So together we built that company and it was basically a merger of his expertise with my expertise and we ran with it. Along the way, we started investing in some real estate just on the side.
And later on, when the time came to sell the business, that opportunity arose because we knew that Alaska Airlines was planning to enter the Hawaii market. And we knew that their pockets were deeper than ours. And it just made sense for them to buy our company rather than for us to duke it out in the marketplace. And we'd both lose a lot of money.
So we convinced them that buying our business was a lot cheaper than winning the market from us. So the pivot that came next was again a spinoff because my family's business that I had not been involved in personally for several years was involved in small cruise ships in Alaska.
And we had a different idea as to how to present cruises to people visiting Alaska instead of just going from port to port. We felt that they would have a better experience of Alaska by leaving from a port and going out into the wilderness, getting onto a skiff and playing with the whales, going kayaking, going ashore and taking hikes in the forest or even walking on a glacier.
And these things were things that we were enjoying on our own boat in Alaska, because by that time, my husband's a boataholic, so we had to have boats up here. And so we found a couple of cruise ships that were bank owned. They had been owned by a company that went bankrupt. And so the bank held them and they were sitting at a dock rotting. So again, it was an opportunity.
And we seized that opportunity and bought those ships out of rather low price point and fixed them up and bought them.
found somebody to operate them for us and then later there was another company that went bankrupt and we bought some more cruise ships so we ended up having five small cruise ships under 100 passengers each that were operating in alaska and providing the kind of adventure that wilderness experience that we felt that people would really enjoy in alaska so that lasted for about 10 years and we were selling the vessels one by one to the company that operated them
But COVID happened then. We had one ship left and it got tied up to a dock because no cruise ships were operating anywhere in the world. So that was a pretty obvious sign to us that it was time to pivot away from cruise ships. So we sold that last ship.
and then we spent a fair amount of time studying the landscape of world economy where were the opportunities where was the world going next what would be the outcome after covid we would listen to podcasts and we would read we would attend workshops that's when we decided that the future seemed to be in going in the direction of real estate and particularly multi-family real estate
Because buying an individual home was becoming more and more cost prohibitive, which meant that people were going to be renting. So we decided that that would be a good place to put our money. And we started investing as a general partner, limited partner in various syndications. where we were involved in purchasing complexes that had 100 or more apartment units in a complex.
And we now own over, or we're part owners anyway, in over 6,000 of these apartment units in five states across the U.S. So it's a combination of seizing opportunities, but also just keeping your eyes on what's going on around you. The world is changing all the time. And if you're not Staying aware and keep your eyes open to what's going on around you, you can miss some of these opportunities.
So that's the main key.
I think that I definitely am a risk taker. And that comes from my family culture as well and coming from the entrepreneurial background that I have. But I do take calculated risks and I do the homework and I run the numbers and I do some research and investigate the market. And I've learned along the way because sometimes I didn't do my research and my homework. as well as I should have.
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