Six Principles for Building a Sustainable, Self-Operating Business | Titan Impact Group

Okay. I am super excited to have everybody here. So thank you all for joining us. And I think you're going to be super excited about who we have, who have joined us today. So Rol and I actually got connected and here's what I love about this, is that turns out that our circles are interconnected in multiple areas, which is really cool. So again, her and I schedule this and somebody else saw that, I don't know, somehow we were connected and they're like, hey, we're actually friends doing all these things. So anyways, it's just, it's cool to see how small our world is and how we're all connected together doing all these amazing, amazing things. So for all of you that know, you know that I love to build relationships, friendships, communities, businesses, and, you know, make an impact, which is really amazing. So we're so I had Raul come on because she's built something really amazing and in my mind, one of the most unlikely places so she can do it there. She's going to actually teach us all about this. So for all of you who know me, I'm Kathryn Bell with Titan Impact Group. And you can go to my website and find all the things, but you're not here for me today. We're here to talk with Raul about all the things. So thank you for coming on and for what you're going to teach everybody. I think what you're about to teach is critical inside of building any business and, you know, helping people understand that. So with that, would you like to just dive in?

Sure. Yes. Hi. Hi, everybody. I'm RA West. Have you a business called Ral West? Living the Dream. And what I do is I teach entrepreneurs how to build their business so it's sustainable, self operating, so they don't have to be the operator of their business, they can be the owner. And my basis for my teaching is over 40 years of entrepreneurial experience where I have actually walked the talk and done the deeds. And so I know what I'm talking about. So I have six principles that are the foundation for building a sustainable business, a successful business. And we can start talking about those six principles if you want.

I love it. Let me. Hold on. Having a technical issue.

Here we go.

Okay. Okay. So, yeah. So do you want to talk about the six principles and then we'll dive into each of them?

Sure, I can do that. Okay. So the six principles again are the. Are what I have derived from my 40 years of entrepreneurial experience. The first is that you must create systems. You have to have processes and procedures documented and find the most efficient way to get your tasks done. Sometimes that means just creating manuals so others can do the tasks that you're doing. And also involves automation technology, things that you can use to streamline tasks and use AI. Even so you have to have all these systems in place. Sometimes the system is even as simple as making sure that you've got a good filing system. An online filing system is best so that you know where to grab the important information that you need. So it's at your fingertips, you know, so no wasted time hunting for the, the things that you need to get things done. So that's a tip that I have used many, many times, all the time. So the next thing is that you have to use measurements. You have to be able to track your data and find out how your company is doing, whether that's sales data, data about your customers, data about your employees and how well they're doing, or other team members. If you don't have employees, you know, tracking their, their time and their productivity, those are all important metrics to have and you want to be able to use data to manage. So have reports set up so that you get this data whether it's weekly or monthly or however often you need it. And then you need to use leverage. So I've mentioned leverage in terms of using automation technology. And it just there are so many ways to leverage yourself and get leverage for your business. Education is one of the greatest forms of leverage. So investing in seminars and courses like the one that I have created and I have spent, spent hundreds of and thousands of dollars on mentors and classes and books and courses over the course of my experience. And they have all helped me to do so much more than I could do without that help. So the next thing is that you want to make sure that you're developing your team again. It doesn't matter if you're a solopreneur and your team consists of you and a bookkeeper and maybe a virtual assist or if you have full on staff of employees. Your team is critical and you want to make sure that your team is empowered so that you give them the procedures and the step by step processes that they need to get the work done, that they know what a good job looks like so that you're able to delegate properly to them. And you need to make sure that your team is aligned with your mission, your values and your goals. That way you can all, you know, be running the sled. I've used the, the analogy of a dog sled team Because I'm in Alaska and so we have dog sled teams here and you want to have those dogs all pulling in the same direction. If you've got everybody going off in a different direction, that's not a very good scenario. Doesn't work too well. So you need to make sure.

One more thing. So actually this is an interesting fact that I think just given who's all on the, on here with us today, I think everybody will appreciate this that I love like the facts of a dog sled team. And most people don't know this, right? The main, the dog. So at the, on a dog sled, right, the dogs that are the closest to the sled are really big, strong, muscular, usually males. Right. And then there's the other dogs that are a little bit smaller, but the very head dog is always the smallest female. Isn't that fascinating? So I always think about that because again, the female brain, the way the female brain works and again in a dog's led team. So I always, I always found that a fascinating fact. Anyways, keep going. I just had to share that. I thought that was really cool.

I love that. I love that. Yes. So, yes, get your team all moving in the same direction and, you know, develop some ways for the team to win when the company wins. We always, you know, share our profits with our team and they got very excited about that when it hit their pocketbook and you know, and then we would celebrate the wins too. So you, you really can generate very strong culture, which is the next point. Point number five is have this culture that is imbued with your values and your guiding principles and make sure your team is fully aware of what the culture is and what your company stands for. Make sure you communicate that outside the company as well to your community and to your customers. Make sure everybody knows who you are and what you stand for and what's important to your company. And make sure that your company culture places an emphasis on the customers and not just having good customer service, but having excellent, world class customer service. Delight your customers so that they keep coming back again and again and again. We all know that it costs a lot more to find a new customer than to keep an existing customer. So the more you keep them happy or as I say, delighted, the better off you are for the long term success of your business. And I think that too often businesses sort of gloss over this customer satisfaction aspect and they don't find out whether or not their customers are delighted. They don't ask the question, you know, what is it that you Want? Are you receiving the service that you were expecting? Are you delighted? What else can we do to make you happy? These are important things and that's part of the, the tracking and measuring that you can do. You know, get regular customer feedback. Sometimes it's as easy as, you know, having some kind of a review platform online where they can score your company. Sometimes it's Yahoo or Google or whatever. Depends on what business you're in. Or you can do your own surveys of your customers and get the, the results directly from them. So those are the six principles, or what I like to call the six legged stool of your business. And if any one of those legs is missing or is too short, you're going to wobble and your business is not going to be as successful and sustainable as it could be. So it's important to keep track of all six of these principles and to revisit them continually. You know, have regular sessions where you sit down with you, with yourself or in your team and ask yourself, okay, how are our systems going? You know, what are we doing to track and measure our data? You know, do we have all the information that we need and how are we using that information? Sometimes we're not measuring the right thing, so we might want to hone in on some better statistics to measure, you know, and, and are we using as much leverage as we could? How could we, you know, implement some more automation or technology to make things smoother and more efficient? And how's the team working? Are we aligned? Do we need to do some team building? Do we need to have some exercises that might bring the team together? And does everyone on the team know what their job is and how they can do the very best job that they can? Are all of their processes and tasks documented? And the more you document what everybody does, the easier it is to bring on a new team member. Because then you can just pass on this manual and say, okay, this is how to do this job. And here are the steps one by one. But remember that these manuals have to be updated because things change in your business all the time. So you can't just be a static document. It has to grow with your company. And then of course, develop your culture and make sure that your culture is, is actually, you know, in alignment with your values or, you know, is there some place that you're kind of missing something and you need to tweak your culture or, you know, do more communicating to make sure that people understand what it is that you stand for, what your principles are. And then of course, the customer service. Make sure you're doing everything you possibly can to delight your customers. So all of that are all parts of that six legged stool and you revisit them periodically. Make sure that you're still working them and they're still working for you. So what kind of questions might there be about these six principles?

I love that. So I love the do more with less effort. So let's dive into that just a little bit more because I think that's what we're all like, especially with, I mean, talking about AI, you know, and people are freaked out that AI is going to lose their job. When in reality if we actually just see when you bring AI onto your company, it has your employees and everybody be way more productive than not using it. Right. Like using, using AI to do all the mundane tasks so that you can stay focused on that. So I, I think that, I mean, I don't know, I think we're all so busy, we're always interested in understanding more about that. So if you could talk more about that, I think that would be really awesome.

Okay, well there's so much technology, I mean AI is certainly one of them. But you, you have to have automation in your bill paying your finances. Make sure that you're using good software to keep track of all of your finances and that you have regular financial reports created every month and mostly using software to do that or leverage with, you know, a bookkeeping service. AI can certainly help with that. I'm sure that AI billing systems available nowadays and you know, I use AI to help me manage my email inbox. That's something that I was finding was just eating up way too much time every day.

Right.

So I hired somebody to help me implement an AI system for my inbox. And there's a tool that sorts my emails according to how I categorize them. And now it just takes me a few minutes a couple of times a day to just go through and say, okay, yeah, all of these I don't need to really pay attention to, you know, they're gone. And these are the ones that, that need my attention. So they're in, in the main inbox and the others are in these folders that I'll look at later. And that, that's just a huge time saver. It's probably saved me an hour or two a day. How can you use that time for something much more productive? So, Right, that's just, that's just one example. But I'm also using AI in my social media, helping me create the social media Posts. I do lots of podcast interviews. And I'm using AI tools with the help of my virtual assistant, of course, to take clips from these videos and create short social media posts from my own content. It's not AI creating the content, it's me. So you don't have to be worried about, like, AI is, is taking over for you. It's just making you more efficient and putting you out there more and in a. In a better way. And AI can help rewrite things for you. AI is learning my voice. So I. I have an online course, and I've uploaded my entire course into Chat GPT. And now we can go and say, o, using what is the content of my course, Create a newsletter topic for LinkedIn using this, this, this, and this aspect of my course. And then ChatGPT pulls it out of my own content, organizes it and puts it out there. And then, of course, I go through and edit it, but it's just saved me several hours of creation time. It's just. It's just amazing. It's. It's so incredible. So we can do so much more with less using these sites. And some of them are free, some of them cost very little. I think chat GPT, I'm paying $20 a month to have access to the. The greater size memory, which is what I need to be able to have it house all of my content. So it's so worth it.

Yeah, I love that. So let's jump into, like, your team is your greatest asset. I think this is really big inside of, like, your companies that you've built. I think this is a really important piece of that, like your culture and identity. Can you talk more about that? Because I think that, I mean, team is everything, right?

It is, it is. We could not have achieved the success that we did. And so just briefly, we built a business in Anchorage, Alaska. We had charter air service, chartered widebody jets, and carried people from Alaska to Hawaii and back to Alaska, of course. And we grew that company from nothing to eight digits in annual revenue. And then after 25 years, we sold the business to Alaska Airlines. Now, without our team and without the culture that we very, very intentionally and purposefully created, we would not have had an organization that would have been worth anything to Alaska Airlines. But this was something that we nurtured over a period of years, does not happen overnight. And we create, you know, one of the things there on the slide is create loyalty. We made sure that our customers in our market, which was Alaska, were very loyal to us, and we took care of them. We were community oriented. We did lots of charity in the community and gave to a lot of organizations so that they would know who we are and that we were a community player and supportive of the community. That went a long way to cement our culture and what we stood for with our customer base. And again, we delighted our customers. We went out of the way to make sure that they knew that they were important to us. I love to tell the story about this system that our team created for taking care of passengers who were experiencing a flight delay. And because of the nature of our service, sometimes if we had a delay and it went a little bit too long, our flight crew would go dead. And because of FAA regulations, they would have to sit until their rest time that was mandated by the FAA had, had been completed. So sometimes that meant a 10 or even 12 hour delay. And this was. This was, you know, a hardship for our passengers.

This was not.

This was not fun. So our team said, well, you know, there are lots of families traveling with little children and babies. And so the team would gather the. The necessary materials to keep them happy. We had baby formula and diapers and bottles of water, and we would take cash to the airport so that they wouldn't have to rely on some kind of voucher to get a meal. We would just pass out cash and say, here, go get a meal. Or if they were from out of town, we would say, here, go to this hotel. And we would have the hotel rooms ready for them. If they lived in town, we would be able to tell them, okay, you can go back home, and at such and such a time, come back. So we, you know, we communicated regularly. We made sure that they had the things that would make them more comfortable and, you know, just, just put ourselves in their shoes. Like, what would we, like if we were experiencing this uncomfortable delay ourselves? And they appreciated it, they knew that we cared, and that went a long way. And our team got behind it. You know, they created that system and then they had a process set up where everybody was, like, on call. People would take terms being on call for a particular flight. Sometimes our flight departures were late at night. So if there was this late, people got called from their home and they went to the office and picked up all these supplies, took it to the airport, and they were on hand to serve our passengers themselves personally. And it worked beautifully. And then, you know, our team, we called ourselves the Ohana, because in Hawaiian, ohana means family. And our team, even though the company has been sold for, like, 17 years now, we still call ourselves the ohana and we still get together and care about each other. It was just a beautiful thing. It just a wonderful company. It was, it was very sad to sell it actually because we were all so close and we were, we were family. So that's something that, you know, you, you have to do that very intentionally. As I said before. It doesn't just you have to work.

That's extraordinary. So all of you can, I'm sure you're seeing like why having her come on and what she built is pretty awesome because again, I don't know anybody else that I've heard of that's built this and then turn around and sold it to a major airline. So understanding that, again, what I love about it is like, yes, it was an airline, but these principles apply to like any company. Right. Like all the steps that she's gone through, which is really extraordinary. So because of this, again, what I love is that she actually has a course which is really extraordinary. So for anybody looking to, you know, scale or build or anything like that and take a deep dive into this. So would you like to talk about that? Because I think that's really cool how you've taken what you've learned and now you're like essentially passing it forward.

Yes, that's, that's my intention. I want to make it easier for entrepreneurs to realize the kind of living the dream kind of life that we have. And it is possible. And the course is called overcome. Create a smooth running business with less stress. And that's my intention, is to help you learn how to operate your business so that you're not up to your eyeballs in all of the day to day grind and you know, chaotic operations. If you're trying to do everything yourself, which many of us entrepreneurs start out just trying to juggle all the plates ourselves and you know, it's just not sustainable. Sustainable. It's exhausting. I remember being exhausted, you know, sleep was a luxury and spending time with my husband, you know, like, what's that? I mean it took us 10 years to have our second kid. I mean, you know, we were too busy. So that's, no, that's not the life that I want for, for other entrepreneurs. So the course is designed to take you through these six principles, teach you how to do them. There are worksheets that guide you along the way, give you like an assignment, you know, here's what need to look at in your business and work these steps and employ and execute these six principles and I'll be there along the way to help and guide you. And you just go to my website, which is www.ralwest.com, and there's places to enroll in the course there. And it, I, I promise you it'll be worth your time and your money because you will get so much time back and your company will be so much more successful, so much more. Prof. And then you could have the life that you want. You can be like us and have two homes, one in Alaska, one in Hawaii, have a yacht, travel the world, spend time on vacation and just know that your businesses are running smoothly because, you know, we can keep tabs on our businesses from wherever we are. And we're still operating businesses, you know, just because we sold that one business, we've gone on and created others. And so I'm still juggling several different companies, but I do it on my own terms and with a team and with all these processes and systems in place.

Yeah. Because it's only because of having the team and the systems and the processes in place that you are able to have multiple companies and be traveling around the world like in this extremely fun life.

Yes. We are living the dream, let me tell you. We spent six weeks in Europe last fall, just got back from a month with my family because my youngest just got married and our other daughter lives in Australia. So she came to visit with us for a month and I was not going to be working while our Australian family was with us. So yeah, I make my business work around my life and that's one of the things I teach is design your business, figure out what your goals are for your life first and then decide how your business will support your life.

That's extraordinary. I love that. Okay, so this is the bite sized piece. There's more to dig into as I'm sure you all can see. See, we're doing a follow up Q and A webinar. So I'm going to send out this video so that you can watch this again and whatever questions you have, we're going to come back on Thursday and have a conversation about it. So make sure you get signed up for that webinar. We'll send out an email with all those details. And yeah, I hope that you all have an absolutely extraordinary day. I hope that this was helpful and had you start thinking about the things that you like really can dive into to have your business be more profitable and successful because that's what we're, what we're interested in. So with that, thank you everybody. Raul, thank you for being here. This is really exciting and I look forward to all the questions that are going to come out of this. And I know it's going to come, you know, over time for the people that couldn't be here, that they'll watch the recording and have more questions and we'll get them taken care of as well. So thank you. This is awesome. And this is critical information for every business. I don't care what industry you're in. So, yeah, I love it. So thank you, everyone. We appreciate your time. And we'll see everybody on Thursday for the Q and A. Beautiful. Thank you, everyone.