Taking some of the hints from @anon31549144 I did a little tweaking with tlp, thermald and intel-undervolt setttings. I am sure there is still a lot of tuning I can do, as I tried to be a little conservative with the settings for my first few runs.
Anyway, here is the comparison of numbers for my ASUS UX461UN with the i7-8550u. For the most part, I was able to reduce my times to a little under half or what I was seeing:
real 11m41.908s --> 5m34.087s reduced to 47.6% of original time
user 82m28.841s --> 38m28.084s reduced to 46.6% of original time
sys 8m12.556s --> 3m43.629s reduced to 45.4% of original time
Thanks to @jonathon and @anon31549144 for pointing me in the right direction to address a performance issue I didn’t even realize I had! 