The Moment I Knew Our Team Could Run the Business Without Us

Jun 26
6 min read

Not a dramatic scene. More like a slow exhale.

It was June of 1994. We were in Kona, Hawaii, sitting down to lunch with Robert Kiyosaki across the table from us.

He said something that I've never forgotten. Not because it was complicated. Because it was so simple, it almost stung.

We had been running Hawaiian Vacations, Inc (HVI) for over a decade at that point. Profitable. Growing. By every measure, a success. But John and I were in the middle of everything. Every decision. Every problem. Every department had our fingerprints on it.

And Robert just looked at us and said, "You are not the Owners of your business. You are the Operators.”

Then he told us something that forever changed how we ran our business and how we thought about ourselves as leaders.

He told us to get two books: “The E-Myth” by Michael Gerber and “The Great Game of Business” by Jack Stack.

We flew to Oahu from Kona that afternoon, and on our way to our hotel, we stopped at a bookstore and bought those two books. We devoured them. And we started to see what we had to build.

We Were the Problem

Here's what I mean. We had people. Good people. A real team. But if John and I had stepped away for more than a few days, things would have wobbled.

Not because our people weren't capable. Because we had not made them feel like the outcome was theirs, too.

We were the ones reading the financials. We were the ones who knew if it was a good month or a rough one. The weight of those numbers lived with us, and only us.

They came to work. They did their jobs. They went home. And then we'd stay late, wondering why we were still so exhausted all the time.

Be honest with yourself for a second: if you stepped away for 15 days or 30 days right now, would things hold, or would they start unraveling?

We Started with the P&L

Jack Stack, in his book, recommended using “Open Book Management”. That meant sharing the financials with the entire company. Our business associates thought we were crazy. But we understood the point he was making: for the outcomes to be REAL for our team, they needed to understand the whole picture. Not just the parts we told them.

So we showed them our financials - the P&L and Balance Sheet. Most of them looked at us with blank stares. They had never seen a financial statement before and did not know the first thing about how to understand them.

That informed our next step. And I want you to hear how basic this sounds. We sat down our entire team (not just management-level) and taught them how to read a financial statement.

Not a summary. Not the highlights. Line by line. Department by department. We walked them through exactly what they did every single day: how they staffed, how they ordered supplies, how they handled a customer complaint. All of it showed up in the numbers.

Many of them had never seen a P&L before. Ever. They did not even know that P&L stood for “Profit and Loss”.

And I remember thinking: how did we expect them to care about results we never even showed them?

You can't ask people to care about outcomes they can't measure.

So that was step one. We made them financially literate. And once they could read the language of the business, people started asking questions about it that I'd never been asked before. Good ones.

Then We Made It Personal

But knowing the numbers and caring about the numbers. Those are two different things.

So we built in incentives. Goals, bonuses, department-specific targets. When the team hit their numbers, there was a reward. A real one. We would hand out $100 bills to everyone at staff meetings when we met our monthly goal. Not as a gimmick. A genuine "you did it, here you go.” And everyone celebrated! The excitement rippled through the entire company like a shock wave.

Setting the targets and making them visible meant that every single person in the company, from top to bottom, knew how we were doing and what it meant for their own paycheck.

I remember one time we handed a bonus check to someone. A big one. And she just burst into tears.

She said, "This is the down payment on my house."

And then we all started crying! It was beautiful!

That's when I really understood what we were building. It wasn't just a system. It was a reason people chose to care. Because when the company won, they won. It wasn't a vague promise. It was a check in their hand.

When was the last time someone on your team could point to a specific thing they did and connect it directly to something real in their own life?

We Wrote It Down

Around this time, John and I sat down to write a vision statement for ourselves and shared it with our team. I still have it. It says:

"As owners, our dream is that HVI be a profitable company run by a small group of highly dedicated, energetic, flexible, self-directed, and decisive individuals. We long for the day that we can either go 'play', or start another business, confident that our staff is operating an optimally effective organization."

Look, there's something really powerful about saying out loud, or writing down, what you're trying to build before you've finished building it. Because when you hand that to the people you're building it with, something changes. It's not you and them anymore. It's us.

If you want the framework behind what made this possible, the 6 Principles Free Training is where to start.

Have you ever written that down, your actual dream for the people around you? And have you ever shared it?

And Then It Worked

Here's the proof.

When we sold Hawaiian Vacations, Inc. to Alaska Airlines in 2008, several members of our Ohana, (“family” in Hawaiian) the people who had been beside us through the hardest years, the chaotic years, the years when we weren't sure how any of it was going to hold, were still there. Many of them in key management roles.

Not because we asked them to stay. Because they had built something with us, and it was theirs too.

That loyalty doesn't come from a salary. It comes from being trusted. From knowing that when the company wins, you do too. We demonstrated that we were all about making sure everybody wins. And they believed us, because we showed them. We proved it over and over.

The Ohana didn't stay because of us. They stayed because of what we built together.

It took five years to get all of it in place. Five years of learning, correcting, correcting again. Fits and starts. Things that didn't work. Adjustments. It was not smooth.

But eventually we got there. We hired a COO and a CFO. And John and I went to Maui and bought a vacation home.

And it ran.

Here's Where You Start

Pick three of your team members, whoever is closest to the business right now, and ask yourself honestly:

Can they read your P&L, line by line? Do they know whether this month is a good one or a tough one? Is any part of their compensation actually connected to an outcome they can influence?

If the answer to any of those is no, that's your first conversation. For a free resource to help guide that conversation, grab it here. Not a performance review. Not a new policy. A conversation. You sit down, you open the financials, and you start teaching.

The team that can run your business without you is already in there somewhere. You just have to invest in them like you mean it. And make the word TEAM really mean something.

Podcast Spotlight

The Inspired Stories Podcast with Anthony Codispoti

My dad, Chuck West, built Alaska's tourism industry from scratch. I grew up watching him do it — and eventually broke away to build something entirely my own.

Hawaiian Vacations’ real growth trajectory started with a chartered DC-8 and a huge challenge - to sell every seat on that plane. Anthony asked me what that felt like. Honestly? Terrifying. And exactly right.

18 years after we sold to Alaska Airlines, our team still calls themselves Ohana. That detail says more about what we built than any revenue number ever could.

We got into all of it — the six principles, the systems, the culture, and what it actually took to step away from the business and start living on our own terms.

🎧 Ral West on Why Open Book Management Built the Most Loyal Team She’s Ever Seen

One Last Thing

The moment I knew our team could run the business without us didn't come all at once. It was more like a slow exhale. One day, I just realized that when John and I weren't in the room, things kept moving. Decisions got made. Problems got solved.

The business didn't need us in the middle of it anymore.

That's what you're building toward. Not a bigger org chart. Not more processes. A team that knows the numbers and has real skin in the game, because you made the outcome personal for them.