Our Team Didn't Understand the Numbers How We Fixed It

Jul 17
5 min read

The lunch in Kona that changed everything, and why financial literacy is the most overlooked leadership tool in business.

Here's a question for you: if you pulled any of your team members aside right now and asked, “Was last month good or bad, and why?”, would they actually know the answer?

For years, if you'd asked me that about my own team at Hawaiian Vacations, I would have winced. We were profitable, we were growing, and I could have recited our numbers in my sleep. But the people running the day-to-day? They had no idea what those numbers were, what they meant, or why those numbers mattered to them personally. I didn't see it either, not until a lunch in Kona blew the whole thing wide open.

Could your team answer that question about your business today?

June of 1994. John and I were in Kona at the same time as Robert Kiyosaki, our teacher, mentor, and friend, years before “Rich Dad Poor Dad” made him a household name. We sat down with him for lunch at his hotel and provided an update on our business.

We told him the truth: twelve years into Hawaiian Vacations, we were successful, we were profitable, and we still felt completely trapped. Every decision ran through us. Every fire needed us to put it out, personally. We were the classic mom-and-pop operation. Except by then, “mom and pop” had grown big enough to crush us.

Does that sound familiar? Profitable on paper, exhausted in real life.

Robert didn't hesitate. Read The E-Myth, he told us. And read The Great Game of Business, by Jack Stack.

We flew to Oahu that same afternoon and bought both books on our way to the hotel. We cracked them open that night, and we remember grinning at each other like a couple of kids every few pages. “This is it,” we kept saying. “This is exactly what we need to do.”

The E-Myth handed us systems. That's a story for another day. But Jack Stack handed us something we didn't even know we were missing: the idea that everyone on the team deserves to know the score, not just the two of us in the back office.

A team that can't see the score can't play to win.

Back in Anchorage, we got to work. We recognized that showing them the numbers was not enough. They needed to understand them, too. So we sat our team down and taught them by going through our financial statements line by line. And I mean that literally. Some of these people had never once looked at a Profit & Loss statement.

We had people in sales, people in operations, people in finance, and every single one of them was moving a different line on that P&L without even knowing it. So we showed them: this number moves when you do that, that decision changes this line. We watched it click for them, one team member at a time. Honestly, it was a little embarrassing that it took us twelve years to get around to it.

When's the last time someone on your team looked at your P&L and actually understood what they were looking at?

If you want the framework for building that kind of team, start with the 6 Principles Free Training.

Teaching people the numbers wasn't enough on its own. Nobody rallies around a spreadsheet. So we built in rewards. Nothing fancy at first: hit the monthly target, and we'd hand out crisp $100 bills at the staff meeting. You'd be amazed at what that does to a room full of people.

This game was not played just with management, either. Every person in the company, from the top down, knew exactly how we were doing financially and how it would land in their own pocket. Some goals were department-specific. Some applied to everyone. And the annual bonus, when we hit our big profit target, could be enough for some folks to make a down payment on a house.

We made a whole event out of handing over those bonuses. One-on-one, in person, so we could watch their faces when they heard the number. Some people cried. We cried right along with them. And then we really celebrated: limousines, the fanciest restaurant in town, and one memorable night, we flew the entire team to Vegas.

People don't fight for numbers they can't feel in their own pocket.

Here's what surprised us most. Once our team understood the numbers and had real skin in the game, they stopped waiting on us. They started solving problems before we even heard about them. That's the shift that changed everything. We'd finally unlocked the ability to run Hawaiian Vacations from a distance, which meant we could actually start living the life we'd built the business to give us in the first place.

Your Turn

Grab five minutes and answer this:

What key data do you track in your business right now?
Who on your team actually sees those numbers?
Do they know why those numbers matter to them, personally?

Podcast Spotlight

The Breakout CEO with Jeff Holman

Most founders don't realize they've become the bottleneck until the business stops growing the way it used to.

Jeff brought me on to talk about that specific moment — the one where a CEO finally admits: "I'm holding my company back." I've seen it over and over in the businesses I advise. And I lived it myself, building and eventually exiting a multi-eight-figure charter airline, after 25 years.

The shift from operator to architect isn't structural first. It's psychological. And it rarely happens overnight.

We got into what actually changes when a CEO lets go — open-book management, real accountability, cultural boundaries that hold without the founder in the room. And why control, past a certain point, isn't strength. It's a growth constraint.

🎧 The Moment a CEO Must Choose Between Control and Scale

Final Thoughts

I think about that Kona lunch more than almost any other moment in my career. Not because of the books themselves (plenty of good books sit unread on shelves) but because of what happened the day we finally let our team in on the numbers.

So here's what I'd ask you to do this week: sit down with one person on your team, show them one number that matters, and tell them exactly why it matters to their paycheck. That's the whole starting point. Everything else follows from there.

Until next time, keep living the dream.

Ral West