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Alan Lazaros runs an 18-person team, and he’ll tell you it’s the hardest thing he does. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Next Level University, a coaching company with a podcast that had passed 2,076 episodes the day we recorded. I asked him why we should trust him, and he gave me a car accident at 26, a corporate career he walked away from, and ten years of helping people “reach their potential in life and business.” Then he gave me a framework you can run on your own team this week. Subscribe to Unscripted SEO so the next conversation lands in your feed.
Success doesn’t make life easier
I told Alan about a client of mine who runs a speakeasy, a motel and a lodge, and takes a week or two to answer basic questions because she’s the contact person for everything. He’s heard that story a thousand times.
I always say this to my business clients, if you’re already overwhelmed at this level, why would you go to the next level? Because I think one of the world’s biggest lies is that success makes life easier. – Alan Lazaros
Control gets a business owner to a certain level, and then it becomes the ceiling. His fix is a loop: level up, ratchet it in, delegate, then level up again. If you’re the only person who can make every call, you can’t be everywhere at once, and the business can’t grow past the hours in your day.
Delete, delegate, double down
Alan calls it the 3D plan. In the beginning you do everything yourself. He and his business partner Kevin did all their own audio and video editing. Then you start cutting.
- Delete anything that isn’t profitable directly or indirectly. For Alan that included basketball and snowboarding. He loves both. Neither grows the business.
- Delegate what’s left that someone else can do. His team went from three people to five to seven, back to five, then nine, and it has grown in steps ever since.
- Double down on the 20% of the work only you can do.
But ultimately once you delete and delegate, you create space. Now you can double down on what’s most valuable. – Alan Lazaros
That’s the Pareto principle applied to your own calendar. Alan admitted it can sound arrogant to say there are things in the business only he can do. Finding those things for himself, and separately for his partner, is the whole point. Colby Wegter made a similar case for freelancers in why most freelancers fail at scaling.
24 departments was too many
Here’s the part I didn’t expect. From 2019 to 2023, Alan said Next Level University averaged 119% year-over-year growth. Then growth fell to 18% in 2023 and 11% in 2024. At the peak they had a 24-person team and 24 departments.
He sat Kevin down and asked which departments they’d go out of business without. The answer was eight, plus the charity they kept, the Next Level Hope Foundation for boys growing up without fathers. They cut to eight departments and a 15-person team, and have rebuilt to 18 since.
Undying self-belief is hard to sustain when you’re losing. Humility is hard to sustain when you’re winning. – Alan Lazaros
Leadership, he said, is the leap most owners get stuck at, and “that’s one thing AI can’t do.”
Track every minute against three priorities
This is the play I’d steal first. Alan’s team is fully virtual, spread across countries, and he’s never met several of them in person. Every team member keeps a four-column spreadsheet:
- Date
- Time spent, in minutes
- What you accomplished
- Which of your top three priorities it served
He calls those priorities a P3 target: a bullseye with P1 in the middle. If a task can’t be tied to one of the three, you don’t track it. Every month Alan runs the logs through ChatGPT to see where the team’s hours actually went.
Money matters, but where you invest your time dictates how much money you make. – Alan Lazaros
His own three are coaching (one to one), training (one to several) and podcasting (one to scale).
Nine rubber balls and three glass ones
Alan’s metaphor for priorities: you’re juggling 12 balls. Nine are rubber, and you can drop them. Three are glass, one gold, one silver, one bronze. If you have to drop a glass one, drop the bronze. “You never drop the golden glass ball.” For Alan the gold one is one-to-one coaching, because the stories from those sessions feed the podcast. And before any of that, don’t forget the juggler. If you go down, it all goes down.
The principles don’t change by industry
I asked whether a crime scene cleanup company and an anxiety therapist need different systems. Alan’s answer: the principles are the same for everybody, the setup is different for everybody. He’s coached people in New Zealand, Australia, Italy, Canada, across the US and South America on the same stack: one dream statement, three quarterly goals, three priorities, three metrics under each priority, daily habits, one skill per quarter, and identity work.
That matched what I see in SEO. Expanding a local business to the next town over means you have to build a local service page for that city to show up in organic search there, but scaling the actual service takes a lot more than a web page. Dave Valentine put it this way on the show: it has never been easier to start a business, or harder to scale one.
Your one takeaway: find the skill under everything
I asked Alan for the single most actionable thing. He asked a question back: what’s the one skill that, if you worked on it, would amplify everything you do? His is effective communication. He found that out the hard way, giving the same speech as Kevin and watching the room love Kevin. Alan thinks in math and systems, and he had to learn to translate for people who think in words, pictures or energy.
Beneath everyone’s success is a skill no one else notices. – Alan Lazaros
Then he turned it on me. I said improved memory. He’d have me work on that for 90 days straight and read Memory Rescue by Daniel Amen. He also recommended Algorithms to Live By, the book that made Kevin realize Alan actually thinks like that. So what’s yours?
Connect with Alan Lazaros
- Website: Next Level University
- Podcast: Next Level University on Apple Podcasts
- LinkedIn: Alan Lazaros
- Instagram: @alazaros88
- Free events: Next Level monthly meetups and the Next Level Book Club
More episodes like this one live in Small Business Growth and Entrepreneurship.
The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and find every episode at unscriptedseo.com.
