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 live the life the way you want to live it, whether that means working or not working. We have friends who are just totally enjoying their retirement. They have the financial means to do what they want and they travel or they play golf or pickleball or do volunteer work, whatever they want to do. And I think that the traditional retirement
definition of retirement of reaching age 65 and then you quit your the job that you've had for 30 or 40 years and then you're hanging up and go home and sit on the couch that's gone I don't see that happening I think that people can reinvent themselves and develop new ways to keep themselves occupied and follow a passion and maybe that passion will be generating some income or maybe it won't but you do have to have some financial wherewithal to be able to live the life that you want
I think that's important. I think that people nowadays have an opportunity to create so many more opportunities for themselves. And there are really no limits. You mentioned AI earlier and with the digital age, there are just so many things that people could do, so many opportunities. If you look around and see what...
Where people need to be served and you can provide that service, why not do that? And be creative, be bold, be confident, and don't let your age or your situation stop you. And I just believe that people need to go for it. That would be my final word.
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-20s, I opened my first business and went on to have a serial entrepreneur, if you will. I 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. 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 business. how to accomplish what I have and 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 I to launch out onto my own because I saw an opportunity.
And I think that's the main criteria 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. He was in real estate and he 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 market 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 because 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 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 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 refurbished. 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 a hundred passengers each that were operating in Alaska and providing the kind of adventure and 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 possible. to be going in the direction of real estate, and particularly multifamily real estate, because buying an individual home was becoming more and more cost prohibitive, which meant that people were going to be renting.
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