Build light weight conversion binary

Hi,

The company that I work for use LibreOffice as the main word processor. We convert a lot of client 
letters from doc/docx to open document format.
We are on Mac OS X Lion (10.7) btw.
We use: soffice --headless --convert-to odt ….  to do the batch conversion. 

The problems with this are:
- It takes quite a long time to start up. It becomes a problem when we have to convert many 
documents.
- It won't work if there is already a LibreOffice instance running

So my boss asked me to fix these 2 issues. I managed to build the source code on Mac OS X Lion and 
then try to see what's going on (unfortunately specifying --headless fail to build).
I found out that to just do the conversion, there are many dynamic libraries are loaded (so I guess 
this is why it takes a long time).
Trying to understand what's going on in the code is not a simple task to be honest.
Can some one help or give me info on how to:

- build a bare minimum/small binary (without too many dependencies) just for conversion to odt? 
also how do I link statically?
  The conversion utility doesn't need all the gui libraries I believe. Minimum dependency will make 
start up a lot quicker.
- what to do to allow conversion working while there is an instance of LibreOffice already running? 
Should I modify something in the source code?

I'm sure a lot of people would love to have this light weight conversion utility.
Many thanks before.

Jerry