Latest / Solopreneur Sessions with Fexingo: One-Person Businesses, Freelancing, and Independent Work / How a Solopreneur Used a Simple Spreadsheet to Save 200 Hours a Year
Transcript
- Lucas: I want to talk about something almost boring today. So boring, in fact, that most solopreneurs ignore it completely until they hit a wall. Luna: I love a boring topic. What is it — like, tax prep? Email sorting? Lucas: Close. It's the humble spreadsheet. Specifically, how one freelancer used a single Google Sheet to recover what she calculated as over two hundred hours a year — and used that time to nearly triple her revenue. Luna: Okay, I need the name and the story. Because I have fifteen spreadsheets, and they are not saving me time. Lucas: Her name is Jenna Ortiz. She's a brand strategist based in Austin, and back in 2023, she was earning around forty thousand dollars a year as a solo consultant. She was working fifty-hour weeks, but only billing maybe twenty of them. The rest was client emails, scheduling, invoicing, chasing late payments — all the invisible labor. Luna: That sounds painfully familiar. I think every freelancer has that moment where you realize you're spending more time managing the business than doing the actual work. Lucas: Exactly. So Jenna decided to do a time audit. For two weeks, she tracked every single task — not just client work, but everything. She found she was spending eight hours a week on admin tasks that were almost entirely repetitive. Luna: Eight hours a week. That's a full workday. So what did she do? Did she buy some fancy project management tool? Lucas: Nope. She opened Google Sheets and built a single spreadsheet she calls her 'business operating system.' It has five tabs: a client dashboard, a project tracker, an invoice log, a time log, and a capacity calculator. Luna: Capacity calculator — that's interesting. How does that work? Lucas: She takes her total available working hours per week — she sets it at thirty-five, because she doesn't want to burn out — and subtracts fixed non-billable time: internal meetings, marketing, emails. That gives her a number of billable hours. Then she divides that by her average project size to see how many clients she can handle at once. Luna: So it's basically a reality check. 'You think you can take on three new clients this month? The spreadsheet says no.' Lucas: Exactly. And the key insight is that the spreadsheet is dynamic. Every time she logs a new project or a task, the capacity calculator updates automatically. So she always knows exactly how much room she has before she says yes to anything. Luna: That alone could save hours of overthinking. But what about the two hundred hours she saved? What were the big wins? Lucas: The biggest was automated invoice reminders. She set up a simple script in Google Sheets — no coding required, just a built-in feature — that sends her a Gmail alert when an invoice is seven days overdue. She also has a formula that calculates the late fee automatically and updates the invoice total. Luna: So she doesn't have to manually chase people. That's huge. I've heard that chasing late payments can take up to two hours per overdue invoice. Lucas: Right. And she had about four overdue invoices per month on average. So that's eight hours a month, roughly ninety-six hours a year, just from that one automation. Luna: That's almost half the two hundred hours right there. What else? Lucas: She also built a project template system. Every time she starts a new project, she duplicates a template folder in Google Drive — it includes a project brief, a timeline, a communication log, and a checklist. The spreadsheet links directly to that folder. So she doesn't waste twenty minutes setting up each new client. Luna: I need to do that. My current system is 'throw everything in a folder called New Client and figure it out later.' Lucas: That's exactly what Jenna used to do. She said the template system alone saved her about an hour per project. And she was doing three to four projects a month, so another fifty hours a year. Luna: So we're at maybe a hundred and fifty hours saved from those two things. What's the rest? Lucas: The time log itself. She started logging her time in the spreadsheet — not with a timer, but just a quick entry at the end of each day. It takes maybe two minutes. But because she had the data, she was able to identify her most profitable activities and cut out low-value work. For example, she realized she was spending three hours a week on social media posting that generated almost no leads. Luna: So she stopped doing it? Lucas: She reduced it to thirty minutes a week. That alone saved about a hundred and thirty hours a year. And she redirected that time into client work and higher-value marketing, like writing case studies. Luna: That's the real win — not just saving time, but reallocating it to things that actually grow the business. Lucas: Exactly. And the result? Over the next eighteen months, her revenue went from forty thousand to about one hundred and twenty thousand. She didn't hire anyone. She just got more efficient and took on more projects because she had the capacity. Luna: I love that she did it without any fancy software. So often we think we need to buy a tool to solve a problem, but a well-designed spreadsheet can do the job. Lucas: That's the solopreneur ethos, right? You don't need enterprise software for a one-person business. You need a system that matches your scale. And a spreadsheet is infinitely customizable. Luna: Okay, I'm going to build my own version of this. But I have to ask — is there a template she shared? Or do I have to start from scratch? Lucas: She actually published a stripped-down version on her website for free. I'll put the link in the show notes. The core structure is the same, but you can adapt it to your own workflows. Luna: That's generous. And honestly, this is exactly the kind of practical, low-cost advice that makes this show valuable week after week. Lucas: Yeah, we try to keep it actionable. And if today's episode moved your work forward in some small way, the best way to support that is super simple. Luna: Yeah, if it was worth a coffee to you, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just if it helped. Lucas: Exactly. It keeps the show ad-free and lets us keep digging into stories like Jenna's. And speaking of which — there's one more piece of her system I want to highlight. Luna: Oh, there's more? Lucas: Yeah, the client dashboard. It's a single sheet that shows, for each client, the project status, the next deliverable, the last contact date, and the total revenue from that client. She color-codes it: green for on track, yellow for needs attention, red for overdue. Luna: So at a glance, she knows exactly where things stand. No more digging through emails or Slack messages. Lucas: Right. She checks it every morning for about three minutes. That replaced a thirty-minute daily review of all her communication channels. Another big time saver. Luna: So the total system saves her what — two hundred hours a year? That's five full workweeks. Lucas: And she's not the only one. There's a whole community of solopreneurs sharing these kinds of spreadsheet hacks. One designer I know built a similar system and said it saved him from quitting freelancing altogether. Luna: Because the admin was just overwhelming. That's the part nobody talks about when they sell you on the dream of being your own boss. Lucas: Exactly. The dream is the creative work. The reality is the admin. And if you can shrink that reality with a few formulas, you can actually enjoy the dream. Luna: So for anyone listening who feels buried in admin, start with the time audit. Track everything for a week. Then look for the biggest time sinks and automate or eliminate them. Lucas: And start with one sheet. Don't try to build the whole system at once. Jenna built hers over six months, iterating as she went. Luna: That's the takeaway. Small changes, big impact. Thanks, Lucas. And thanks to Jenna for sharing her system. Lucas: Next week, we're talking about a solopreneur who used a simple email sequence to book consulting gigs without ever picking up the phone. See you then.