You’re probably the bottleneck in your own business. I am, regularly. I love building marketing systems and I’m terrible at getting stuck in the weeds executing them, so every time I design a new process I have to ask whether I just made myself the linchpin. I said that out loud on the Unscripted SEO Podcast to Alan Lazaros, and he had an answer ready, because getting out of the way is most of what he coaches.
Alan is the CEO and co-founder of Next Level University, an 18-person, fully virtual coaching and podcast company. He’s a computer engineer with a master’s in business who calls himself the numbers guy. You can watch the full episode here or listen on Castos.
Success makes your life harder before it makes it easier
I told Alan about a client who runs a speakeasy, a motel and a lodge. She’s so busy being the contact for every decision in all three that it takes her a week or two to answer basic questions. Then she wants to catch up on everything at once. He’s seen it in every business he’s coached.
“That’s a control issue that all business owners, it gets them to a certain level and then that becomes the ceiling.”
Here’s the uncomfortable part: Alan says his life is more challenging with an 18-person team than it was before. More success meant more responsibility. It only got easier once he equipped the team properly, and then he went to the next level and it got hard again. Level up, ratchet it in, delegate, repeat. Brad Poulos made the same point from the exit side: you don’t have a business until you can leave it.
Payroll is where scaling stops being theoretical
Alan was candid about the numbers. From 2019 to 2023, Next Level University averaged 119% year-over-year growth. They hired fast and spent like it: “We lost our minds a little,” he said, putting things on a credit card at 26% because they were still well in the green. Then growth fell to 18% in 2023 and 11% in 2024, with 24 people across 24 departments.
“It’s until you have payroll, you really don’t understand how hard it is to scale a business.”
He sat his business partner Kevin down and told him they were going to go out of business if they didn’t get it together. They asked which departments the company couldn’t survive without, kept eight plus their charity, and went down to 15 people before rebuilding to 18. If you’re about to make your first few hires, run that exercise before you sign anyone: which functions would actually put you out of business if they stopped tomorrow? If the money side of your business is the part you avoid, start with cash flow.
Two managers, and why you need both of them
I got my start in SEO answering support tickets at a website hosting company. Our customer support manager ruled with an iron fist. Clock in two minutes late and you heard about it. His assistant manager, Jarvis, was the opposite: he wanted to know if you were growing and whether you were ready for the next step. They had shouting matches we could hear through the wall.
They were both right. The detailed ticket system saved us a ton of work. The 30-second swipe-in rule didn’t. Alan’s take was to put the pros of both into one leadership team and mitigate the cons. He plays bad cop on purpose.
“Kevin’s gonna care about feelings first, success second. I’m gonna care about success first, feelings second.”
Then he added the line I keep repeating: “make sure your yin is yanging.” If you’re a solo operator, you have to play both roles yourself, which is exactly why it’s worth naming them.
The 3D plan: delete, delegate, double down
Alan’s process for getting out of the way has three moves:
- Delete what isn’t profitable directly or indirectly. He cut basketball and snowboarding. He loves both. They weren’t growing the business.
- Delegate what someone else can do. He and Kevin used to do all their own audio and video editing.
- Double down on the 20% only you can do.
For me, that’s a reminder that a new process I design isn’t done until someone other than me can run it. Expanding a client into the next town over means building a local service page for that city, and scaling the actual service takes more than a web page. The pages are the easy part. You can see the pattern on any precast concrete wall installer’s service area list: every city on it is a promise that someone other than the owner shows up and does the job. I wrote about the same trap in the post-it note that tells you to stop working.
Don’t forget the juggler
Alan’s metaphor is that we’re all juggling 12 balls. Nine are rubber. Three are glass, gold, silver and bronze, and you never drop the gold one. But rule number one comes before any of that:
“The juggler goes down, it all goes down. So take care of yourself.”
I’ve been the juggler who went down. I once took on so much and got so far behind that I worried myself sick, sick enough that a doctor diagnosed me with scarlet fever. Years earlier, after I was mugged at gunpoint, a counselor taught me that the stress response isn’t just fight or flight. There’s also freeze and appease. I realized I’d been procrastinating on a project because I was freezing, the same closed, anxious feeling every time. Alan’s version was a car accident at 26. He said the people-pleasers, the appease response, are usually the ones who do more for others than for themselves. “So we got to be careful.”
What skill sits under everything you do?
I asked Alan for the most actionable thing a listener could do. He flipped it into a question: what’s the one skill that, if you worked on it, would amplify everything else? His is effective communication, which he learned the hard way giving the same speeches as Kevin and watching the room prefer Kevin. Mine, I told him, is memory. He’d put me on it for 90 days and hand me Memory Rescue by Daniel Amen.
“Beneath everyone’s success is a skill no one else notices.”
The full episode recap is on Unscripted SEO, and you can find Alan’s free monthly meetups on his site. So what’s your one skill? And which process in your business stops the day you stop?