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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
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.
Whether you are a travel agent or a customer, you could go online and book your trip entirely online. That was a huge transition for our company and it made a gigantic difference in our revenue. by being able to automate that reservation system.
So just like what you're talking about in terms of your podcast, the more you're able to automate some of your processes so that you can repeat your systems over and over again in less and less time, that enables you to increase your productivity and hopefully your revenue as well.
I think I'm a bit different than a lot of people. Financially, we could have retired when we sold our business to Alaska Airlines, and that was like 16 years ago. But we had still a lot of energy and ideas, and we didn't want to retire. So I think our decision to not retire was based on just our own motivation and desire and interest.
So we're, particularly I am, continuing to work just because I love it. And I don't feel the need to sit back and I do love to travel. My definition of living the dream is being able to travel the world. We take long trips. I recently got back from a six week trip in Europe and I plan to do a lot more of that.
I love cruising and I don't intend to give that up, but I also don't intend to give up my business. So I have to figure out a way to have the businesses run very smoothly and with these processes and systems going, whether I'm around or not. And so my definition of retirement is just living the life that I want and having whatever business I want to have. I don't need it for monetary reasons.
I just want it because it's my passion. It's my joy. And I don't see that age has any bearing on whether or not I continue to work. You know, as long as I love it and I can do it, I'm going to.
I think that people need to be able to pivot and that the pivot will depend on what their inner desires and motivations are. And I think that I personally am an advocate of people following their heart and following their passion. If they love what they do, why not keep doing it? Financially, I think it's great to make sure that you have
a consistent source of income whether that be some kind of retirement account that's generating some income for you or you have passive investments like our real estate they are considered passive investments because they earn money while we're sleeping so that's an important aspect of being able to be financially independent
Showing 81–100 of 205 · page 5 of 11
← Previous
Next →