Many founders say they want scale.
Fewer are willing to confront the moment when growth requires them to stop being indispensable.
Companies often plateau not because the market weakens or demand fades, but because the founder remains the operational center of gravity. Decisions route through them. Teams defer to them. Execution slows.
Ral West has seen this pattern repeatedly in the entrepreneurs she now advises. The turning point is rarely structural at first. It is psychological.
“I’m holding my company back.”
Scaling begins when a CEO recognizes that their involvement — once essential to early growth — has become the constraint.
The hesitation to step back rarely comes from ego. It usually comes from fear.
A founder who carried the company through its earliest stages often believes the business will weaken without their presence. Quality could drop. Customers could suffer. Decisions could go wrong without the founder there to intervene.
The internal narrative sounds familiar:
“The business would die without me.”
West hears this regularly from founders who say they want to scale but continue operating as if the company cannot function without them.
The contradiction is subtle. The CEO wants growth while maintaining a structure that prevents it.
Operational dependence becomes the quiet ceiling.
Early-stage companies rely on founder control. That is often unavoidable.
Scaling requires relocating that control.
Instead of sitting inside the founder’s daily oversight, it moves into three structural elements:
The founder still defines the shape of the organization — the standards, values, and limits within which decisions occur.
West often describes the structure using a simple analogy. The company is the bowl; team members are the fruit inside it. The bowl establishes the boundaries. Inside that structure, the fruit can arrange itself in many different ways.
When leaders tighten control around every decision, the organization cannot adapt.
“You can kill your business by holding on too tightly.”
Scale requires a structure that allows initiative inside clearly defined limits.
One of the most consequential changes West introduced in her company was open-book management.
Instead of restricting financial information to leadership, the company shared its financials with the team. Employees learned how the business worked — how revenue flowed, where margins came from, and what drove profitability.
The initial obstacle was education.
Many employees had never seen a profit-and-loss statement or a balance sheet. Leadership began teaching financial literacy internally so the team could interpret the numbers and understand the business.
“We shared our financials with our team.”
Once employees understood how the company made money, decision-making improved. Teams could evaluate tradeoffs with context rather than guessing.
More importantly, transparency shifted psychological ownership.
Employees stopped behaving like workers inside someone else’s company and began acting like contributors to a shared outcome.
Transparency alone does not produce alignment.
West’s company paired financial visibility with incentives tied to company performance. When the business met its targets, employees shared in the results.
The effect was immediate.
People who understood the economics of the company and saw a direct benefit from success began making stronger operational decisions without constant supervision.
Transparency created understanding. Incentives created commitment.
Together they produced alignment that did not depend on the founder’s daily presence.
Delegation without accountability weakens an organization.
West emphasizes that cultural principles must carry consequences. When someone violates the company’s standards or undermines the direction of the business, leadership must respond.
“Accountability has to come with some strength behind it.”
At times that meant removing employees who disrupted the culture or resisted alignment. Those decisions were rarely easy, and leaders sometimes waited longer than they should have.
But when accountability was enforced, the broader team usually understood the reason. The rules of the organization had meaning because leadership protected them.
Culture, in this sense, becomes the mechanism that replaces founder oversight.
Many founders assume they can step out of operations quickly once they decide to do it.
West’s experience suggests otherwise.
For her company, the transition took roughly five years. During that period the leadership team deliberately rebuilt the organization so it could function without the founders managing daily operations.
That work included studying management systems, experimenting with operational improvements, and developing a team capable of carrying real responsibility.
They also relied on outside mentors and advisors to challenge their thinking and guide major decisions.
Progress came through steady iteration rather than a single breakthrough.
Over time the company evolved from a founder-dependent operation into a structure capable of scaling — ultimately reaching mid–eight-figure revenue and selling to Alaska Airlines.
Once a founder acknowledges that their involvement has become a constraint, the nature of the CEO role changes.
The work shifts from doing the business to designing the business.
Instead of solving every operational problem, the CEO focuses on different questions:
The founder’s influence does not disappear. It becomes structural rather than operational.
The CEO becomes the architect of the system rather than the operator inside it.
When that shift happens, the organization gains the capacity to grow without increasing the founder’s workload.
Most founders eventually reach the control-versus-scale decision.
Some postpone it indefinitely. Their companies grow for a time but remain limited by founder dependence.
Others confront the harder realization.
The company will not reach its next stage unless the founder changes their own role.
The moment a CEO can say, honestly, “I’m holding my company back,” the next phase of growth becomes possible.
Control moves into systems, transparency, and culture.
And the organization finally gains room to scale.
Ral West is the founder of Ral West Livin’ The Dream and a former multi-decade CEO and entrepreneur. She built and scaled a travel company from zero to mid–eight figures, operating a charter airline for 25 years before exiting the business to Alaska Airlines.
She now advises entrepreneurs on delegation, leadership alignment, and building organizations that can operate without constant founder involvement.
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Jeff Holman is a CEO advisor, legal strategist, and founder of Intellectual Strategies. With years of experience guiding leaders through complex business and legal challenges, Jeff equips CEOs to scale with confidence by blending legal expertise with strategic foresight. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
Intellectual Strategies provides innovative legal solutions for CEOs and founders through its fractional legal team model. By offering proactive, integrated legal support at predictable costs, the firm helps leaders protect their businesses, manage risk, and focus on growth with confidence.
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The Breakout CEO podcast brings you inside the pivotal moments of scaling leaders. Each week, host Jeff Holman spotlights breakout stories of scaling CEOs—showing how resilience, insight, and strategy create pivotal inflection points and lasting growth.
Listen and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform:
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Want to be a guest—or know a scaling CEO with a breakout story to share? Apply directly at go.intellectualstrategies.com.
TRANSCRIPT SUMMARY
00:00 Intro – Welcome to the Breakout CEO Podcast
00:30 Raoul West’s background as a serial entrepreneur
01:14 Why experienced CEOs become coaches
02:11 The challenge of letting go as an entrepreneur
03:37 Using leverage and building a team
05:22 Founder mentality vs scalable leadership
06:15 Building company culture and leadership frameworks
08:40 Open-book management and teaching teams financials
11:05 Incentivizing teams and creating alignment
11:51 Scaling the business from zero
13:00 Starting a Hawaii travel business from Alaska
13:30 Launching a charter airline to save the business
14:17 Scaling to eight-figure revenue and selling to Alaska Airlines
15:11 The long process of stepping out of daily operations
16:10 Why leaders must start before everything is perfect
17:08 Taking action and overcoming fear
18:19 How to get real buy-in from your leadership team
20:12 When team members aren’t aligned
21:03 Enforcing culture and accountability
22:16 Why financial transparency builds team ownership
23:06 Advice for entrepreneurs who feel stuck
24:34 Learning from mentors and advisors
25:40 How to connect with Raoul West
26:23 Final thoughts on helping entrepreneurs regain freedom
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jeff Holman, Host (00:01.072)
Welcome back to the breakout CEO podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Holman, and I'm really glad to be here with you right now talking to Raoul West. Raoul, welcome to the show.
Ral T West (00:09.922)
Thanks, Jeff. It's a pleasure to be here.
Jeff Holman, Host (00:12.432)
it's good to have you. We're just kicking off our advisory insights episodes and you get to be some of the first, one of the first people to do that where we talk to smart people who help advise and support CEOs as they're growing their businesses. So thanks for bringing that perspective.
Ral T West (00:30.574)
Wonderful, I'm happy to, yeah. Well, I was a CEO for many, many years. In fact, I've been a serial entrepreneur for 45 years. So it's only been in the last two or three years that I've transitioned into a coaching role. So yeah, I've got a lot different perspective on it than a lot of coaches because of the fact that I wore those boots and slogged through that mud myself.
Jeff Holman, Host (00:40.234)
fantastic.
Jeff Holman, Host (00:56.702)
I love that. That seems to be a common path for some people. They've been down that path once, twice, many times, and then they say, hey, I think I can actually maybe leverage what I've done broader. Is that the drive to become a coach after being a CEO so many times?
Ral T West (01:14.12)
Yes, it really is born from a passion. For one, I love to teach. I love to learn, first of all. And then I love to teach. And it just came to my attention that so many entrepreneurs are just bogged down in the day-to-day operations. And in our business, we learned how to get out of the day-to-day activities so that we could let our team pretty much run the business. And we kept tabs on it from afar, like from our home.
Jeff Holman, Host (01:19.965)
Mm-hmm.
Ral T West (01:42.358)
our second home on Maui. I think, gee, this is no way to live being tied to the business like we were, 24-7. And we were exhausted and we were not healthy. And our family life suffered. And so I really want to help entrepreneurs learn how to run their business in a way that supports their life and have a thriving, successful, scaling business as well. And I know that I've got the experience. Having done it myself, I can help them.
Jeff Holman, Host (01:43.976)
Hehe.
Jeff Holman, Host (01:51.326)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (02:11.324)
Yeah. Yeah. Do you find that's, and we'll get into more of this misalignment alignment discussion in a moment, but do you find that it's easy to convince entrepreneurs that it's time to make that change from, you know, entrepreneur centric operations into something that is more scalable and more manageable because it's more, you know, because you do create some distance. Is that easy or is that a hard sell?
Ral T West (02:41.038)
You would think it would be easy. It's like, gee, freedom to have the life I really want versus being a slave to my business. What's the choice? And too many times they say, oh, I can't let go. The business would die without me. I have to be there. I have to be at the helm. And I say, no, you don't. And I can show you how not to be. And they're like, oh, yeah. And they don't believe me. And it's just very difficult for some.
Jeff Holman, Host (02:56.018)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (03:05.331)
Yeah.
Ral T West (03:09.676)
to trust other people and be able to let go and trust that things would run as smoothly as it would if they were right there in the seat managing everything. So it takes a little bit of mindset shifting in order to get the entrepreneur to realize that, I'm holding my company back. I'm not allowing it to grow and scale because I'm trying to do everything myself.
Jeff Holman, Host (03:32.904)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (03:37.118)
You know, that's interesting as you say that I was thinking back, you know, four or five years ago because I built a law firm and it's it's small but it's Actually very scalable and manageable in the sense that we've built a team that can run it I don't have to you know, I can be doing a podcast today I'm not tied to the billable hour 24-7 but I think back four or five years ago and I'm like I remember having conversations with friends and other attorneys and I'd be like hey come you should come on board we could build something really cool and and
Ral T West (03:56.333)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (04:06.971)
And the answer was always an enthusiastic, yes, I just have to finish this project. that would last, or I mean, projects would come and go, but the same response was there for a year or two years. I'm like, whoa, okay, this is, I'm not getting an answer that is, I don't know, authentic or whatever. Like they intended, but they just couldn't quite ever pull the trigger if I can say it that way.
Ral T West (04:35.37)
Yeah, yeah, well, and what you've done by being able to bring a team on and free yourself up to get away from the, you know, exchanging time for money kind of idea is that you're using leverage. And that's one of the keys. And anybody who's clinging to, you know, what they're doing and, you know, their billable hours or, whatever kind of business it is, sometimes it's not hours that you're selling. But, you know, you...
You're not allowing your business to grow. You're not allowing yourself to thrive. And that's really the key. So you have to use leverage and you have to build a team. And you just said that. You've got a team now and that does give you more freedom.
Jeff Holman, Host (05:22.801)
Well, and so I guess maybe this does, I was thinking originally this was maybe a tangential conversation, but as we talk about team and we, when I think about the theme of this conversation about maintaining alignment or finding and fixing misalignment in a team, you know, is this an area where, because you have founders or some of the team members who have been founders, they have that, we often call it the owner mentality, right? And
And then they start to bring team members on to help supplement with the intention to grow and scale. Like is there, is that one of the reasons we see mismatch in executive leadership teams? Because the roles, although we call them all executive leaders, the roles fundamentally are, kind of stay in the same mode that they were from founder versus non-founder.
Ral T West (06:15.406)
I'm not sure if it's the role per se. I believe in the impact of a culture on an organization. And the culture has to stem from the leader, the founder or CEO or whoever it is that's the organization. And the culture has to allow for the team members to step up and do what they're best at doing. So the founder needs to establish frameworks.
Jeff Holman, Host (06:23.772)
Okay.
Jeff Holman, Host (06:29.809)
Mm-hmm.
Ral T West (06:44.256)
and guidelines and boundaries. Way back when, when we were studying with Robert Kiyosaki in the 1980s and 90s, before he became famous for Rich Dad Poor Dad, that he taught us about a fruit bowl theory of business, where you've got a bowl that's made of wood, china, metal, whatever, and the shape of that bowl stays the same. And that's your boundary, that's your guidelines. But you have to allow the fruit.
Jeff Holman, Host (06:54.597)
Yeah, yes.
Jeff Holman, Host (07:07.974)
Okay.
Ral T West (07:11.96)
to lay in that bowl however it wants to. Maybe you've got bananas, apples, oranges, grapes, pears, whatever, and the fruit can be arranged in many different ways, and it's still a fruit bowl. But if the founder or the leader has too tight a constraint on the contents of that bowl, and they don't let their team members be a little bit about who they are, then they're grasping it too tightly.
Jeff Holman, Host (07:19.217)
Yeah.
Ral T West (07:40.238)
You know, just like that old adage about, you you hold a bird too tightly and it can't fly. got to be able to... Yeah, exactly. And to that point, you can kill your business by holding on too tightly and not allowing it to grow. So the aspect of culture is that the leader has to establish those frameworks, those guidelines, set up boundaries. You know, these are the rules. These are my values. These are my principles. This is how I want the company to be perceived.
Jeff Holman, Host (07:45.565)
doesn't or survive maybe. Yes.
Ral T West (08:10.338)
by the community, by our customers, and by our vendors. And you establish that culture first, and then you bring your team members on and you inculcate them into the culture and you sell them on the culture and what your goals and vision for the company are. And then you become a real forward moving team. Another thing that we did with our team was we incentivized our team members. We got them oriented to
Jeff Holman, Host (08:12.573)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Holman, Host (08:25.574)
Yeah.
Ral T West (08:40.268)
what it takes to make the company successful. And one of the things we did, I'm going to segue just a little bit off to the side, is that we read a book called The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack. Robert Kiyosaki recommended it to us and we said, okay, We bought it that day. And Jack Stack was promoting the idea of open book management. And we're like, what is that? And he said, you've got to share the financials with your team.
Jeff Holman, Host (08:53.277)
Okay. Yeah.
Ral T West (09:09.088)
So the team needs to understand what it is that makes the company tick and what goes to the bottom line and where each of them can impact how the company does. So we started to share our financials with our team, but we had a very young team and many of them had never seen a P &L, didn't know what P &L stood for, balance sheet, what's that? So we held little classes and we taught them.
Jeff Holman, Host (09:30.247)
Right, right.
Ral T West (09:37.666)
how to interpret financial statements. So once they grasped, that's what happens when we spend this kind of money or if we don't watch our margins or any of those things, they really got it. So then they were able to be a lot more active partners with us. We had empowered them to make better decisions and we had a culture guidelines that were set up so that we said, okay, these are the values that we have.
Jeff Holman, Host (09:56.061)
Yeah.
Ral T West (10:07.096)
We called them our work ethic, W-E-R-Q, win-win, efficiency, responsibility, and quality. And said, OK, if you use these principles to make decisions, like you're making a decision for one of our customers, we'll back you. We'll support your decision if you can say, I was doing this because it's a win-win. It was efficient. We took responsibility. We're delivering a quality product. And maybe we would disagree with their evaluation of that.
Jeff Holman, Host (10:14.983)
Okay.
Jeff Holman, Host (10:33.126)
Yeah.
Ral T West (10:37.048)
But if so, we would just talk about it later. We wouldn't blast them or undermine their authority to make that decision. And what that did was empower the team to be able to deliver for our customers right there on the spot instead of saying, wait a minute, I have to go ask my supervisor or something. You know, that just slows everything down and customers get frustrated and it just, not a good system. So this idea of a culture
Jeff Holman, Host (10:49.98)
Yeah.
Ral T West (11:05.368)
You know, again, it comes from the top and you have to be very clear with your team about what you expect, what a good job looks like, what your parameters are, what you won't tolerate, you know, where everybody needs to be accountable and how you hold them accountable. And then they get in on the game, they're incentivized, they get a bonus if the company reaches its goals and they see money in their pocket.
Jeff Holman, Host (11:11.986)
Yeah.
Ral T West (11:32.398)
In some cases, our team members were able to make a down payment on a house with their bonus. This was incredible. So this is how you get real alignment with your team and allows the company to scale. We scaled just exponentially.
Jeff Holman, Host (11:36.412)
Hmm.
Jeff Holman, Host (11:46.738)
th
Jeff Holman, Host (11:51.038)
Well, tell us how much you scaled. And then I have a question because I want to dig into this. How, like, what did you scale? Where did you start? Was it a business you guys started from scratch?
Ral T West (11:56.237)
Okay.
Ral T West (12:01.196)
Yes, it was a business that was started with nothing, zero sales, zero investment other than hard work. My husband actually started it and then I joined him. And I had my own business at the time and so we worked kind of side by side and then eventually I basically stopped my business to go full time in this one. And what we were doing was we were selling vacations to Hawaii from Alaska. So we lived in Alaska and Hawaii is the favorite.
Jeff Holman, Host (12:04.113)
Ha ha.
Ral T West (12:31.01)
vacation destination for Alaskans. You'll find a lot of very pale Alaskans in Hawaii. So when we first started out, we were just packaging condos that my husband would represent Alaskans who owned condos over in Hawaii. Then we added rental cars and inner island air. Then we added the Trans-Pacific Air portion. And then one time, one year,
Jeff Holman, Host (12:33.688)
Okay, that makes sense. think
You
Jeff Holman, Host (12:50.321)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Holman, Host (12:58.077)
Hmm.
Ral T West (13:00.686)
The scheduled carriers that we were working with decided not to fly between Alaska and Hawaii anymore. So we were like, uh-oh, we're in trouble. Our business dropped to nothing and we almost had to close the doors. But my husband was incredibly ingenious and resourceful. He found a plane that we could charter. It was a DC-8. I won't go into all the details of that, but we had a summertime charter which operated several flights, 200 some passengers per flight.
Jeff Holman, Host (13:10.886)
Yeah.
Ral T West (13:30.03)
plane and we did our homework and figured out that we could afford to take that risk because we'd produced that much business in prior summers. So that led us into chartering more and bigger planes. So we ended up chartering wide body jets, 767s and so forth. We did, had a, basically it was called a scheduled charter airline.
Jeff Holman, Host (13:31.324)
Wow.
Jeff Holman, Host (13:51.461)
Really? You're starting your own airline.
Ral T West (13:59.938)
We operated it for 25 years and we were the primary way that Alaskans got to Hawaii. And we grew from, as I said, nothing to being mid eight digits in annual revenue. And then we sold the business to Alaska Airlines. So that's the feeling.
Jeff Holman, Host (14:17.693)
Wow, that's phenomenal. we're not talking, I mean, not to discount smaller businesses, but this is real scale that we're talking about. And so these are real solutions that you implemented. My question is this though, because I think about a lot of people that I've worked with and I see them struggle and I, as an attorney, I see behind the scenes. I know they feel like things are like maybe more difficult for them than for the other companies that of course all appear successful on the outside.
What you've described so far for scaling and some of these tools and implementations, I think some of the people I've worked with would say to themselves, I get it, it makes sense, but I'm not sure how to jump from where I'm at, stuck in my business, to just feel like I can get on the starting line and start to implement that stuff. Does that make sense that some people...
Ral T West (15:11.95)
Well, yes, it doesn't happen overnight. I mean, it took us years to work our way out of our job of running business. You know, I think about five years from the time that we consciously said, okay, our goal is to get out of the day-to-day operation. took five years and we studied, you know, I went back to college. I mean, I got a degree in organizational management.
Jeff Holman, Host (15:16.145)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (15:22.226)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (15:33.628)
Mm-hmm.
Ral T West (15:40.43)
You know, I studied total quality management and we just implemented all kinds of things. In fact, my team would start to dread that I would come into the office after being in my college class the night before and I'd walk in and say, guess what we're going to try today? God, no. But, you know, so I forced change on them because I was learning about culture and everything I learned, I used it in my little guinea pig called our business.
Jeff Holman, Host (15:54.967)
Hahaha
Jeff Holman, Host (16:09.799)
Hmm. So is it, it, is it that maybe the fear of what sounds so big keeps people from just taking the first step? Is that really the problem then?
Ral T West (16:10.402)
We test theories out.
Ral T West (16:21.742)
Well, sure if some people feel like they have to have it all perfectly outlined and planned before they start and I don't think you're gonna get anywhere if you wait
Jeff Holman, Host (16:32.765)
Hey, I have an engineering background and I know exactly how that feels. I'm like, listen, we're going to start, but I want to know where it's going first. And I want to know how it's going to finish and how you do that and make sure. And it's taken me a long time as a business owner to just get to the point where I'm like, wait a second, starting is the key, not designing the outcome, right? Because we all know once you design the outcome and you actually start, the outcome is going to move on you.
you're not going to end up exactly where you thought you were and you're not going to follow the path you thought you were going to. So starting is really the only consistent thing as you start and that remains consistent until it changes.
Ral T West (17:03.726)
All right.
Ral T West (17:08.462)
Take action. Yeah, Tony Robbins totally promotes the idea of just take action. You know, I have a massive action plan. Then I have another mentor who says, say it ugly first. know, don't figure it all out until it's perfect. Just spit it out, say it ugly. And, you know, and then you'll get to work on it once you've spit it out. So you have to be willing to take that risk though.
Jeff Holman, Host (17:14.877)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (17:30.503)
Yeah.
Ral T West (17:34.51)
Then another mentor, Jesse Itzler says, don't let the fear of embarrassing yourself stop you from taking action. So many of us, me included, I don't say things or I don't do something because I don't want to be humiliated, I don't want to be embarrassed. So you hold back. To be an entrepreneur, you have to be willing to take risks. One of those risks is, let's try this. I don't know how it's going to work.
Jeff Holman, Host (17:42.044)
Yeah.
Ral T West (18:03.648)
It might be a total flop, but we're gonna give it a go and we're gonna keep working on it. And if we get to a certain point and we say, this just isn't the right path, then we'll pivot, we'll stop, we'll do something else. We did that several times.
Jeff Holman, Host (18:19.069)
Yeah, that makes sense. And so when a CEO gets that courage to take that step, to say ugly, to begin with, and just get started, how will they know that their leadership team or, you know, husband, wife, in your case, or whatever it is, how will they know that they've got real alignment, real buy in from the team to move forward? Because it's easy for a CEO to just say, we're going to do it. And that's kind of the
It's kind of the way that they've always done it why they're not scaling, because they just cram it down and they say, is the way it is. There's not that buy-in, but how do you do it so that there's buy-in and, or am I focusing on the wrong thing here?
Ral T West (19:00.022)
I think it's simple, actually. Sounds complicated, but ask them. Ask them, what do you think about this idea? Are you with me? Does this sound, are we ready to go for it? Are you with me? You know, as simple as that. It's like too many leaders of businesses think that they have to have all the answers and they have to tell their people what to do. No, not necessarily. I don't need to be the smartest person in the room.
Jeff Holman, Host (19:05.488)
Okay.
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (19:12.623)
It's that easy.
Jeff Holman, Host (19:21.33)
Mm-hmm.
Ral T West (19:29.826)
but I need to be able to gather smart people around me. And then I need to trust them that they might know something more about this, particularly our people who were doing the operation every day. When we wanted to try something new or tighten up some system, we would say, what do you think? How do we do this? This is the objective that we have. How do you think we can accomplish that? How can we make our customers happier? They came up with all kinds of ideas. It didn't have to come from us.
Jeff Holman, Host (19:52.572)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (19:59.634)
Yeah. Did you run into an experience though where you maybe thought you had buy-in from a team member and then as you got down that path, you realized, wait a second, we were talking about different things or that wasn't genuine buy-in.
Ral T West (20:00.641)
So good.
Ral T West (20:12.012)
Well, sure. That can happen with a specific team member from time to time. And then you give them the opportunity to deselect themselves. But you don't need to be on this team. If you're not part of the team, you can leave. And that's OK.
Jeff Holman, Host (20:17.575)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Holman, Host (20:22.287)
Okay.
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (20:32.603)
Yeah, you're making it sound so simple, Raoul.
Ral T West (20:34.082)
We can't give you Well, you know, yeah, in retrospect, it always looks simple, right? Like that's the 2020 hindsight. But sure, there was agony and angst and, you know, we'd have team members that we needed to, you know, show the door to. And many times we waited way too long to show them the door because they were not being a team player. Sometimes they were being, you know, outright disruptive. And I remember one time where we had a...
Jeff Holman, Host (20:44.114)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (21:01.169)
Yeah.
Ral T West (21:03.142)
There was a project that we were working on that was top secret and we couldn't let anybody outside the company know. And I heard that somebody was blabbing and I, you know, I found out about it and in a meeting I just said, you're fired. That's not tolerated. That's it. You're out.
Jeff Holman, Host (21:17.809)
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, do those abrupt changes cause ripple effects through the company sometimes? Or was your culture such that if that happened, people already knew, like, we're already on board, we're bought in. So if somebody isn't on board and there are consequences, that doesn't really impact us. We're still bought in.
Ral T West (21:41.698)
I think what happens is that, there'll be some people who are like shocked by that kind of, you know, abrupt action. And then most of people though went, you know what? This is our business too. And he was jeopardizing our business. So we're glad that you followed through. Because if we don't enforce the rules that we set, that's saying something to the whole team too. That accountability has to come with some strength behind it and some willingness to, you know, to...
Jeff Holman, Host (21:47.069)
huh.
Jeff Holman, Host (21:52.891)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (22:01.511)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Holman, Host (22:08.209)
Yeah.
Ral T West (22:12.908)
commit and have a consequence be felt. Otherwise, what good are the rules?
Jeff Holman, Host (22:16.475)
Yeah. Well, and that buy-in probably came from the fact that you years before were teaching them P &Ls and balance sheets and cashflow statements and the fundamentals of the business. they probably felt bought in from that moment forward.
Ral T West (22:30.415)
Yeah, and when the cash hit their pocket, they were really bought in.
Jeff Holman, Host (22:32.989)
That doesn't hurt, it? Well, what's the, if you were to, I mean, maybe there's a way to summarize all this. Maybe there's some insight. What would you say to somebody who hasn't been doing this for 45 years, maybe doesn't feel quite as experienced or confident as you are in this. What's the, you know, how do they gain that confidence? Is it just, they got to experience it and get there? Or what can they do to leverage?
your insights without having to go through the full 45 years.
Ral T West (23:06.646)
Well, you can come and learn from me for one thing, but other than that, you know, I think you just you have to start. You can't just think about it. You have to take some action and you have to have faith in yourself and faith in other people as well. So this is this is not going to happen because you plan it all out and you know, you've designed the bridge and you're going to build the bridge exactly this way. Things don't always happen.
Jeff Holman, Host (23:33.554)
Yeah.
Ral T West (23:36.078)
in life and in business the way you think they ought to. So you have to be willing to put yourself out there and then make the adjustments as time goes on and you see you know what's working and what isn't and you'll learn.
Jeff Holman, Host (23:50.95)
Yeah, I would almost ask like at this point, I want to ask what's a good resource to learn that, but that feels maybe counterproductive to what you're actually saying is, is not that it's bad to learn. You've been down and you've learned a lot, but, sometimes the learning delays the action too, right? You're like, maybe there's a better way or
Ral T West (24:03.598)
Well, you have to learn.
Ral T West (24:09.986)
Well, yeah, you can't let say, I just need to go study some more. You know, it's like when I was in those college classes, I would learn something, you know, and then the next morning I was implementing. So I didn't wait until I'd learned the rest of it. I just started and not everybody is as change junkie ish as I am. But I think learning is very important. We studied with.
Jeff Holman, Host (24:14.683)
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (24:24.049)
Yeah.
Ral T West (24:34.11)
many mentors, you Robert Kiyosaki being one of them. We studied with Deepak Chopra, know, Tony Robbins and many people. We had lots of consultants and counselors along the way. We had an outside board of directors. We chose three people who were high, highly regarded in their industries in Alaska, not necessarily tourism. One was a very prominent tourism industry leader.
Jeff Holman, Host (24:53.212)
Mm-hmm.
Ral T West (25:00.066)
but others were in like the grocery business or the banking business and got them to come together and give us advice. You know, be our advisory board. They didn't have stock in the company and didn't have, you a vote, but they influenced us a great deal. And when it came time to get the company ready to sell, they were a huge resource for us. But we had to admit that we did not have all the answers and we had to seek outside advice and mentoring.
Jeff Holman, Host (25:23.292)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (25:28.271)
I love that. Well, if somebody wanted to get in touch with you and, you know, either take advantage of your services or hire you to, you know, help their team or even just study some of your resources, what is the best way for them to do that?
Ral T West (25:40.632)
Well, easy, it's www.ralwest.com slash let's talk. And they can hook a call with me and we can see where you're at and what your next step might be. I can give you some advice.
Jeff Holman, Host (25:48.143)
Okay, fantastic.
Jeff Holman, Host (25:57.231)
I love that. I love that. And I love that you're available to do that and bring the insights that you've earned over many, many years to other companies.
Ral T West (26:04.982)
Yeah. Well, that's really my mission. In this phase of my life, I'm not doing this because I need to make a living. I'm doing it because it's a passion, and I really want to get entrepreneurs out of the day-to-day grind and to enjoy their lives.
Jeff Holman, Host (26:14.002)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (26:23.203)
I love that. love that. Well, I think our missions are aligned with the podcast and with what you're doing. So I really appreciate you coming on the show today, Raoul. It's been a pleasure having you and getting to talk about a little bit of what you can share with our audience.
Ral T West (26:35.512)
Well great Jeff, I appreciate the opportunity.
Jeff Holman, Host (26:38.139)
Yeah, thank you. And to our audience, thanks again for joining us on the Breakout CEO Podcast.
