The System That Turned 60-hour Weeks Into 30 Focused Hours

Welcome to The Wedge, a newsletter for solopreneurs who build with structure and purpose.

Every newsletter, we study and share how experienced solopreneurs design their operations, manage growth, and use systems to stay focused and scale profitable businesses.

Each edition brings tools, frameworks, and examples you can apply to your own business from financial planning to automation checklists to workflow maps.

It is your field guide to running a one-person company, one edition at a time.

From Chaos to Systems: How One Solopreneur Built Freedom Through Structure

When you leave corporate life, you don’t just trade meetings for freedom. You also lose the invisible systems that kept your work running. Suddenly, you’re your own IT, HR, and finance team.

For many solopreneurs, the hardest part isn’t just finding clients. It’s building structure that keeps your freedom from collapsing into the very grind you escaped.

In this first edition of The Wedge, we’re featuring Brett Trainor, who spent 25 years in corporate sales, marketing, and customer success before stepping out on his own. Over the past six years, he has evolved from solo consultant to fractional growth leader to founder of The Corporate Escapee, a platform that helps Gen X professionals leave corporate life and stay out. Today, his community reaches more than 76,000 solopreneurs across TikTok, online forums, and paid programs.

Before the Systems: Independence Turns Into Overwhelm

When Brett Trainor quit his corporate job and decided to go solo, his initial months were a blur of 60-hour weeks, disorganized calendars, and constant context switching. “The first client was running me,” he admitted.

Every task felt urgent; nothing felt strategic.

“Eighty to ninety percent of your corporate schedule is done for you,” Brett said. "When you go solo, you own everything: the good, the bad, and the ugly," he said.

The more he tried to do, the less progress he made. Saying yes to everything left him with no time to think, and no system to sustain growth.

That’s when Brett decided to stop reacting and start engineering his days with intention. He stepped back, audited his time, tools, and priorities, and began creating the frameworks that turned his chaos into clarity. Let’s see how he did it.

The SoloOps Framework

A solopreneur’s business transformation mantra: Reflect, Align and Connect:

Reflect: Step Back to Move Forward

When Brett’s days felt like an endless string of tasks, the breakthrough came from reflection.

“Corporate quit on me, and it was the best thing that ever happened,” he admitted. “But I didn’t have a plan.”

Structured reflection turned thinking into a feedback loop. It became the foundation for better time management, sharper priorities, and sustainable growth.

Some questions he advises solos to start asking:

• What kind of work do I actually want to do?
• What problems am I best at solving?
• Who do I want to work with?
• How much do I want to earn, and what kind of business model supports that?
• What does “enough" look like?

“In corporate, everything revolves around job titles,” Brett said. “Small business owners don’t care about that. They want to know what problem you’re solving.”

For Brett, reflection became both vision and review, a structured habit for strategic thinking. Every few weeks, he’d set or refine quarterly goals, identify three-month KPIs, and take stock of what was working (and what wasn’t).

That process led to small but pivotal insights:

• He decided to hire virtual assistants for marketing and quickly learned that they weren’t helpful unless he knew exactly what to tell them to do. This led him to hiring higher quality talent for jobs that were critical but weren’t in his area of expertise, and using VAs when he knew exactly what he wanted out of them.
• Auditing his podcast process revealed hidden time drains, which he eliminated and by using the right tools, built a 15-minute podcast post-production system that replaced hours of editing.

These small reflection audits became the bridge to execution and growth.

Research backs this up:
A Harvard Business School study by Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, Gary Pisano, and Bradley Staats “Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance” found that deliberate reflection transforms experience into learning, improving performance over time.

Further studies echo the same truth: reflection fuels better decision-making, focus, and resilience (Reflection: The Pause That Brings Peace and Productivity by  Joseph L. Badaracco and  Dina Gerdeman for the Harvard Business Review).

Align: Build Systems for Maximizing Impact

Once Brett got clarity on his goals, he stopped working on autopilot and built systems to get the most out of his time.

“Initially, I was doing everything (billing, emails, marketing) and it wasn't sustainable,” he said.

The turning point came when he reframed alignment as two disciplines: managing energy and prioritizing what truly drives results.

Time Management: Design Your Day Around Energy

“I thought I was a night owl,” he said. “Turns out, my best work happens before sunrise.”

He tracked his focus patterns and built his day around energy, not hours.

His routine:

Research confirms it: Tony Schwartz & Catherine McCarthy (HBR) found that managing energy expands capacity. Cal Newport’s Deep Work showed that protecting long focus blocks is one of the biggest predictors of productivity.

Prioritization: Focus on What Actually Moves the Needle

Once Brett had control of his rhythm, he focused on systems thinking by cutting what didn’t compound and simplifying everything else.

He leaned on two guiding ideas:

• The 80/20 rule: Focus on the 20% of effort that drives 80% of results.
• The Eliminate → Automate → Delegate model (inspired by Dan Sullivan’s Who Not How).

What changed:

• He hired an accountant to take over the financial work he wasn’t good at, freeing up hours for higher-value projects. (For solos who want built-in financial structure, Lettuce can handle essentials like bookkeeping, S-Corp setup, and tax management.)
• He brought on high-quality part-time content writers to help maintain his publishing rhythm without burning out.
• He dropped complicated CRM tools like Kajabi and HubSpot, realizing they were an overkill for his business size, and simplified his workflows with Google Docs and Sheets.
• He stopped spending hours trying to build a “perfect” website, realizing that relationships, referrals, and a consistent message mattered far more at his stage.

“Done and consistent beats perfect and delayed,” Brett said.

Studies on productivity show the same pattern: focusing on fewer, high-impact priorities correlates with faster business growth and lower burnout. McKinsey found that organizations that invest in strategic prioritization deliver 40 percent more value.

Connect: Build the Right Network, Intentionally

If reflection and alignment kept Brett grounded, connection kept him growing.

“Networking, networking, networking,” he said. “That’s the lifeblood. Ninety percent of your business will come from referrals or relationships.”

When solopreneurs get busy, business development is often the first thing to slip. Then one project ends and there is nothing lined up. The fix is to make connection part of your operating system, running quietly beneath your day-to-day work.

Studies show that entrepreneurs who cultivate consistent, high-quality relationships, rather than broad, one-off outreach, are more likely to uncover new opportunities and build resilient businesses.

Brett’s rhythm now:

• Blocks a few 30-minute sessions in the afternoons every week  for outreach
• Uses his podcast to turn conversations into collaborations
• Runs a 2,000-member Slack community that shares clients and resources

Brett’s approach works because it is not transactional. It is consistent, genuine, and long-term, the kind of connection that builds both community and pipeline. His referral engine runs quietly in the background, authentic, rhythmic, and compounding.

The Results

Before systems: 60-hour weeks, scattered tools, endless client calls, and reactive chaos.

After: 25–30 focused hours per week, consistent clients, and a thriving business.

The Corporate Escapee Today

• 76,000 TikTok followers (mostly Gen X solos)
• 2,000 community members
• 100+ active program participants
• 50% reduction in work hours

“Once I started designing how I worked,” Brett said, “I stopped feeling guilty about not being busy.”

Takeaway: Freedom is a System

Solopreneurship means rebuilding structure on your own terms. Freedom comes not from doing more, but from creating systems that make your work and life flow smoothly.

Feeling inspired to bring more structure into your solo life?

Download our SoloOps Framework and turn overload into freedom.