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
And that was a big learning experience that was painful. So I don't want to do that again.
And then now in this particular, my newest business, it's more of, as you said, making a contribution and giving back and sharing my years of experience and knowledge with entrepreneurs so that I can offer them the guidance and the wisdom and help them cut out a lot of the pain and learning experiences that I had. make it easier for them.
I think that early in my career, actually, when I was working for my father, I experienced more of the glass ceiling and the prejudice against women. And once I went out on my own and said, yeah, thanks, Dad, I'm going to do this myself. Then I was able to break away from that because he was a bit chauvinistic. He came from another generation. And so I said, not going there.
I'm not dealing with that. I didn't really experience too much in the way of discrimination or any obstacles because I was a woman. I think I... Maybe I just had a lot of confidence and I just didn't let it stop me. I was just bearing to go and I just knew that I could do a better job than most anybody else let me at it.
So I'd say that for women, all women, whatever age, you have to believe in yourself and you have to have the confidence that you know what you know and you can do the job.
i think that women when i was between 35 and 55 i was juggling young children and a business and volunteer activities and i was exhausted and overwhelmed and i was stretched so thin sleep was a luxury and i the relationship with my husband suffered and My health suffered and I just couldn't do it all.
So I think that I can relate to women who are in that period of their lives where they're trying to juggle so many things. And what I learned the hard way was how to create the systems and the processes and build a team around me, use leverage and get out of that, that stress and overwhelm by a
building a real system and structure around me so that I could operate the business, whether I was there or not. And I developed metrics and data based management, and it all allowed me to have more freedom to do what I wanted to do. So by the time I was about the end of that time period, by the time I was 55 and the kids were, you know, grown,
I was able to take off and do whatever I wanted to do because I had a team in place. I had managers in place. I was free. And that's what I would like to share with other women that they can do that too. Doesn't matter if you're male or female. So don't let that stop you. So that's what I would give as advice to any woman.
The creation of all of the systems and the processes and building the team happened over a period of years. It was certainly not an overnight transformation. And I had to learn a little bit by a little bit by reading books and actually went back to college and studied with people like Robert Kiyosaki and read books like The E-Myth by Michael Gerber.
And I learned bit by bit how to establish written procedures. For every job, I learned how to write down what it was that I do so that I could teach someone else how to do it. It didn't really need a tremendous amount of financial success in order to learn how to delegate.
Even if you're a solopreneur, you can hire a very inexpensive virtual assistant or part-time help to just take some of those tasks off your plate. So you need to really think about
chunk it down into bite-sized pieces of what you do every day and what of those things that you do could be easily transferred to someone else to let them do it and one of my challenges was also to figure out what my decision-making process was so that other team members could make decisions even if i wasn't there that was more complicated because how do you chunk down and turn into a written process
how you made a decision about, for example, when to spend more money on advertising. And that was a very complicated thought process to come to that conclusion. And after a few weeks of trying to figure it out, I decided that I was watching the metrics of the sales.
And I was able to discern that if the sales were decreasing, like over a period of three days, that meant we needed to beef up the advertising. But you need to be able to document, all of these things.
And that takes time to be introspective and figure out how it is that you're running this business and get written policies, procedures, training manuals, build a team, train the team, create a company culture that embodies everything that you feel is important, your values and your principles, and have that carried out throughout the organization and And there are just so many aspects.
We needed to improve our customer service. We needed to make sure that we were collecting feedback from our customers so that we could provide the level of expectation that they wanted. And because we depended on repeat business, if we didn't keep our customers happy, we wouldn't get that repeat business. So there were so many aspects to it. And we had a team of two or three or four dozen people.
So it wasn't a huge business, but it wasn't real tiny either. And I had the ability to delegate and create processes and systems with our teams. Could you share some specific examples where you built a system for yourself? There are many examples. I'm trying to pull the one that would be the most relevant.
And I think one thing that might be relatable is that our business involved taking reservations for our air service over the phone. So we had reservations agents who would answer the phone and take a booking by using our in-house computer reservation system. And No booking was taken without somebody being on the phone to take that booking.
So as time went on, we were realizing that this was not a very efficient system and we invested a huge amount of money and almost two years to develop an automated reservation system. And that system, once we pulled the trigger on it and it went live, it was able to take the bookings 24-7 without any of our reservation agents talking on the phone at all.
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