How to save 5+ hours a week in your solo business (without putting someone on payroll)

Oct 14

Have you come to the daunting realization that the only way for you to bring in more revenue is to find more hours in your day? Which then makes you feel like you either have to stay stuck at your current earnings or finally bite the bullet to hire your first employee?

Some people dream of scaling a massive business with a huge team but not the solopreneur. That’s why this moment can be frustrating because you don’t want to give up the flexibility and autonomy of just working with and for yourself by adding all the personnel responsibilities of hiring a team, not to mention the financial and administrative responsibilities.

But you also don’t want to stay stuck where you are?

If you're a service-based business owner who's been putting off hiring because you can't justify the ongoing cost, or you hired once already and it didn't free up the time you expected, this is the order of operations that actually gets you hours back before you add a single person to your payroll.

Prefer to watch? Here's the video!

How to get time back in your business without hiring someone new

Stop doing the tasks that don't actually move your business forward

This one sounds so simple that you might feel tempted to ignore it, but skip it and you have no real shot at getting your time back.

Running a solo business means that you can’t follow all the best practices as other businesses whose advice you keep reading. A 300-square-foot sushi restaurant serving 20 people a night doesn't need the Cheesecake Factory's napkin count or its ten-page prep list, and trying to run your week like you're serving hundreds of covers a night when you're the only person in the kitchen is how you end up drowning in tasks that were never built for a business your size.

This doesn’t mean that everything is optional for a solopreneur. You can’t cut the things that are actually important. If that same sushi chef decided the electric bill wasn't worth paying, he'd be in real trouble fast.

So the first move is getting honest about what's taking up time without delivering results. Most business owners have at least ten things on their to-do list they could stop doing.

Here are four ways to check for where they might be hiding in your business:

Look at the metrics you already track. Is there a platform, a task, a process you can already see isn't contributing?
Install a free time tracker like Clockify for a week and see what's actually eating your hours but not tied to revenue. (If you forget to log something, you can always add it back in after the fact.)
Look for duplicates: four platforms you post to that could be one, three proposal formats that could be one.
Ask yourself what you're doing because you feel like you "should," not because it's producing anything.

The “shoulds” are where the pressure to run your business like a bigger one than it is sneaks in. You might feel like you “should” post on social media or deliver your work to your client in a certain way. These are often unfounded assumptions - there are plenty of businesses making excellent money without the Instagram grind and for almost every way one company services a client, there’s another one doing it totally differently.

If you’re scared to break something or upset a client, frame it as a test to cut something for two weeks and see what changes (or if anyone notices). Most of the time, the answer is nothing, except that you have more hours for the stuff that actually matters. That alone is worth an hour or two a week. It's not going to be the thing that changes your business, though. For that, you need to go after the bigger problem.

Fix the most painful bottleneck, not the easiest one

Most owners start with cleaning up the easy admin first because it feels like progress. But systematizing the small stuff while your actual bottleneck sits untouched is like organizing the junk drawer while the roof is leaking. The drawer gives you a quick hit of satisfaction while the real damage keeps growing underneath it.

Instead, I recommend to go after your most painful, time-consuming process first, whatever that is in serving clients, sales, or creating content.

How can you identify what that is? The biggest hint is it’s the process you’d love to outsource to someone else entirely because you dread it so much. This is actually good news because if you can fix this, you get double benefit - the major improvement from resolving that system and you skip the ongoing cost of an employee to maintain it going forward.

In my business, when I was deciding what was most urgent, I noticed two contenders: my bookkeeping and my content creation. I'd been tweaking my bookkeeping automation to try to improve it but I also knew that I was missing the goals I’d set for how much I would post on social media because I kept dreading the editing.

When I asked myself which of those two was the one I'd actually looked into hiring for, the answer was obvious: editing. On my own, editing a single YouTube video was eating up to two business days. I could’ve brought in a video editor but then I’d have to pay them week-over-week, so instead of hiring a video editor, I built a system to handle my editing in Claude, and it cut my editing time by 75%.

One of my clients hit the same kind of wall with scripting. She had ideas and was comfortable on camera, but when I asked if she had a system for creating content, her answer was "yeah, I have a page in my Notion." That's a tool, not a system, and it's a gap I see constantly with Exhale clients. We mapped out how she actually likes to create, where she consistently got stuck, and built the system inside Notion since she already knew her way around it. Within two weeks, she'd doubled her content output.

(If you're not sure where in your business is costing you the most, feel free to book a free discovery call. It's 45 minutes, and even if you never hire us, you'll leave with a clearer read on where to focus.)

Decide whether to DIY it or bring in short-term help

Knowing the bottleneck and being able to fix it yourself are two different things. We started this whole exploration because you haven’t been able to find more time and if you don't have a partner with a different skill set or someone on your team who's better at the technical pieces, it feels like you're right back at the two options from the start: bring on a team or stay stuck.

Except that's not actually true. You don't need an employee for everything in your business to run well.

Think about it this way: Do you think every business with great branding has a full time designer on staff? Do you think every CEO who also published a book is still paying that copy editor every month?

You can fix a system in your business without hiring anyone permanently. There are two ways to do it (and I’ll tell you both but make sure you catch the key caveat about #2).

1. Hire a consultant on a short-term contract tied to that one problem.

And before you say that’s still hiring, let me explain why consultants are different:

They’re typically a flat fee so you know from the beginning what they’ll cost you
It's not an ongoing expense, so you aren’t signing up for it in perpetuity like an employee.
Consultants have none of the management overhead of a VA or employee, because you're working with someone senior enough to run their own process.
And they build you something you keep using after they're gone, which is the whole premise behind the Bottleneck Breakthrough: a fixed-scope engagement that fixes your priority bottlenecks and hands you systems you can maintain without us.

But if you’re staunchly against this, there is another option…

2. Do it yourself.

You’ll run effectively the same process that an outside consultant would’ve, it’s just you in the driver seat. That process looks like:

Identify the output you actually want
Map the steps that create that output
Figure out when each step should happen (time or previous action to trigger it)
Find the tasks where you get stuck and troubleshoot
Then once you’ve figured out the problem, research, test, and refine solutions until they work.

This may sound easy enough but the catch here really is your time. DIY doesn't cost you cash, but it costs you the research-test-refine cycle most business owners badly underestimate and all the time doing this work takes you away from the revenue-generating work you could be doing.

While bringing in a consultant is certainly a financial investment, when you consider the time and revenue earning potential it saves you, it’s often more of an even comparison than you think.

I'm confident you can find at least five hours a week doing this yourself. With outside help, the number is usually a lot higher.

Start with the bottleneck, not the admin

You now know how to find the hours that are actually available in your business: cut what isn't working, fix the process that's costing you the most, then figure out which path gets it fixed fastest. If you only do one thing from this, make it the second step. Figure out which process in your business is the one you've already thought about outsourcing, and start there.

Every hour you get back from fixing that one thing is an hour you can put back into the work that's actually growing your business, or just an hour you get to have back for yourself.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know which task to cut from my business first?

Look at what's already failing to deliver before you look at anything else. Check the metrics you already track for a platform or process that clearly isn't contributing, run a free time tracker like Clockify for a week to see where your hours actually go, and look for duplicate systems, like posting on four platforms when one would do. The fastest way to find a candidate is to ask yourself what you're doing because you feel like you "should" rather than because it's working. Try cutting it for two weeks. If nothing changes, it wasn't worth the time it was taking.

What's the difference between automating a task and building a system for it?

A tool automates one piece of a process, while a system is the whole process working together, including the parts a tool can't do for you. A client of mine had a page in her Notion for content planning and still wasn't getting content out consistently, because a page isn't a system until it accounts for how she actually likes to create and where she gets stuck. Automation can be part of a system (a Zapier flow that logs transactions automatically, for instance), but having a tool doesn't mean the underlying process is actually working. If you've bought a tool and the problem is still there, that's usually a sign you skipped the system it was supposed to run inside.

Should I hire an employee or a consultant to fix a bottleneck in my business?

For a single, specific bottleneck, a short-term consultant is usually the better fit than an employee. An employee is an ongoing cost with management responsibilities attached, while a consultant on a fixed-scope contract gives you a known fee upfront, no ongoing oversight, and a system you keep using once they're gone. This is exactly what the Bottleneck Breakthrough is built for: a defined engagement that fixes your priority bottlenecks and leaves you with systems you can run without us. An employee makes more sense once you have enough recurring, varied work to justify paying someone every month regardless of what's on fire that week.

How long does it take to see results from a new business system?

In my own business, fixing my editing bottleneck took about a week to go from a 30-plus-hour process to four to six hours. A client of mine who fixed her content-creation system saw her output double within two weeks. Results that fast aren't guaranteed for every bottleneck, but a well-targeted fix usually shows up within a few weeks, not months. If you've given a fix three real attempts and it still isn't working, that's the signal to go back and rebuild it rather than keep tweaking the same approach.