The Joy of a Saturday
This weekend, on a glorious Saturday morning, I was walking my dogs around our block. I was looking at the Cherry blossoms and lilacs in bloom, and thinking about how even though I had some editing to do and a coaching lesson to plan, I had so much time that day. Time to enjoy with my husband. Time to enjoy with my kids. One of my nieces was in from Toronto and was coming to visit. Weekends are precious for working moms, because even if we still have some work to do, we can revel in the joy of the freedom that the weekend typically brings. But as working creatives and small business owners, we need structure to have success. You might think that as a full-time professional voice talent, I can make my own hours and that brings a certain amount of freedom. Every day is not Saturday, so here are some tips that have helped me grow a thriving business.
Maintain Business Hours
If your goal is to build a successful, thriving business in voice over and earn a consistent, sustainable income, working long hours is the only way to do this. There is no magic bullet or secret sauce. According to Jennifer Cohen’s article in Forbes, James Cash Penny, better known as the founder of JC Penny, once said, “Unless you are willing to drench yourself in your work beyond the capacity of the average man, you are just not cut out for positions at the top.” The recipe for success is hard work, so maintaining regular business hours and being in the studio all week when your clients are working makes good business sense. Often friends or family may think that as a working creative you are free to go for lunch or to the spa in the middle of the day. How nice it would be if we could all regularly just leave our studios as if on vacation and “hand out.” Unfortunately, this behavior does not lead to success. Instead, a routine, planned work week works better. I keep my bookings both in my phone and my paper calendar. I also offer bookings through a calendly sign up link on my website to make things easiest for my clients to check my preferred availability, especially for voiceover coaching.
Have a Strong Start to My Day…Mornings are Sacred
I am and have alway been most efficient in the morning. My mornings are sacred and I try never to book outside appointments that will disrupt my work flow. This is apparently quite common according to Benjamin Hardy’s article in medium.com: “Typically, we have a window of about three hours where we’re really, really focused. We’re able to have some strong contributions in terms of planning, in terms of thinking, in terms of speaking well,” Friedman told Harvard Business Review. Protecting this valuable window of time is really important for me.
Plan My Weeks
I have longterm goals that I am constantly updating. I keep those right by my side as I plan my week. I use my planner for day to day tasks, and then have a weekly agenda for my larger goals. Lifehack.org gives a very helpful breakdown about how you should use your goals to plan your week:
“Once you have determined your goal, the tasks required, the key players and the tasks they will complete, it is finally time to start your scheduling. When scheduling it is important to plan a weekly schedule as well as a daily schedule. The weekly schedule is important for the overall success of the project but it is the daily planning that will help you to track your progress and determine whether or not you are on schedule. Try using significant project milestones in your weekly planning but for daily planning break each milestone down into the necessary components and plan the completion of those components on a daily basis.”
Schedule Health and Wellness Time
Every single week I schedule at least two pilates sessions. I find that in addition to keeping me fit, they help me to relax as well. Jennifer Cohen explains the connection between fitness and success in Forbes: “ It is safe to say that if you can not commit yourself to regular exercise, you will likely never reach your full potential. Countless successful people, from Fortune 500 CEOs to entrepreneurs and celebrities, have discovered the undeniable connection between fitness and success. This is partly due to the fact that regular exercise enhances your physical and mental state, which lifts up all other areas of your life as well. In addition, fitness builds a fundamental knowledge base of the mindset you must cultivate in order to achieve anything that seems out of reach.” To me, the mindset that if I don’t set aside time to take care of myself, I won’t be able to take care of other’s needs, as at the foundation of all that I do. I also just feel better when I get my workouts in.
Conclusions
Voice over is a competitive industry. As a voice actor and voiceover coach, I can tell you that there are no shortcuts. Time away from the studio is just that, and when you choose to be out of the studio and you could be auditioning and marketing, you are making a choice. Plan ahead. Be strategic. Run your business. Work hard and build something!
It happens, even in the time of covid, we leave our studios. As a professional voice talent, we have work we can predict, and the joy of work we cannot predict, that comes in at a moment’s notice and can have a pretty tight turn around time. As a working mom, whether I’m home or traveling I’m always juggling my responsibilities as a small business owner and my role of a mom, this year more than ever. This year, my high school juniors are looking at colleges. And as if looking at colleges for twins is not challenging enough, their interests do not overlap at all. Emma is targeting schools with Speech programs and STEM programs. Jack is looking for International Relations and Russian. So, we are doing two completely different college searches at once. What does this mean for me as a voice actor? It means I’m leaving the booth for the first time in a year and I need to be prepared. Voice over work should never prevent travel, it just means you need the right set up for your voice over travel rig and to take the necessary steps when planning.
The point of the travel rig is to sound like you sound in your home studio when you are on the road so that you can provide clients with a continuity of service. I have tweaked my rig quite a few times over the years, and finally invested in a quality set up that I am pleased with. I now bring:
While I’ve been full time in voice over since 2015, I did not discover Radio Imaging as a genre or my passion for it until 2017. As a professional female voice talent, I had been booking a lot of commercials and loved my commercial work. I was researching and trying to figure out what else was like commercial work to see what I might be good at. When I found radio imaging, I loved the genre right away because of the energy. In other genres of VO, I often have to dial down my energy and contain my exuberance. I have always found this quite ironic, because authentic is a big buzz word right now in voice over, and I authentically am bursting with energy. So when I found radio imaging, it seemed like the perfect fit and I began actively pursuing radio stations to add to my client roster. I love working with radio stations, regardless of market size, and do my best to meet all budget needs.
About a week ago I got an email through my website from 
The station is happy. They are extremely pleased and I made it easy for them to get what they wanted and needed. I had a blast working with industry partners doing what I love. For me, even if a station is small, there is still a lot of value in providing them service. My hope it that they will now come back to me as they need more sweepers and station promos. It’s not just providing them quality content that has great meaning to me, but also getting to know my clients and building a strong relationship over time. So while I made them happy with this first go around, now the work of building a lasting relationship so that I can serve them even better begins. With taking feedback, introspection, and hard work, I hope to continue to provide them with outstanding radio imaging for years to come.
When I started in voice over years ago, I remember thinking that when I had an agent I will have “made it.” I remember Screwing Up is Part of Success”one of my coaches telling me that she worked for five years before she had her first agent, so that I could align my expectations. At that point, I did not even know about managers. I was lucky, I was able to get on quite a few agents rosters pretty early in my voiceover career. As a working professional, I would hear a lot of chatter on social media about various agents and managers and how to get signed, as if somehow getting on the roster would lead to the ultimate success.
I signed with this manager specifically for the Radio Imaging part of my business in January 2019. Within the first week, I sent him 5 leads of stations who wanted to sign me and wanted to negotiate retainers. The email above was a call I got a week later. Of these leads, my manager destroyed every single one of them. I was not on the calls. I had empowered him to speak on my behalf. The email above “I was told that our station was not big enough for your services.” is a glimpse of how these prospects were treated in my name. Was this the road to the big agencies? No. Worse, when he tried to renegotiate the stations I had, I lost them. There were other odd quirks about the manager. He wanted any auditions to be professionally mastered, which was an added expense. He also sent Sound and Fury auditions, but I get those from other agents, so now I was paying him to get auditions I was already getting. It was terrible. I realized early on and I was stuck. I basically had to stop soliciting all Radio Imaging business or it would be tied to him. Years of hard work and planning came to a screeching halt. Be careful who you pick to represent you.
They sent me the script and asked for my rate. They needed a RUSH turn around, but I was not charging them an extra fee for that. Since they were a repeat client and I was available I didn’t want to nickel and dime them. Anyway, I made a mistake almost right away. The voice over job I did for them was for an explainer video with usage limited only to their website. I assumed, again, I assumed that this was the same. I assumed this because the top of the script was labeled in bold font “VIDEO SCRIPT.” I initially quoted the job based on the last, recent voiceover work I did for them and the assumption that it was a video.
On the call, it was great to catch up with the client. As a full-time, professional female voice over actor, building client relationships means a lot to me, and phone calls like this always provide an opportunity not only to better understand my client’s unique and specific needs, but also to get to know them. How better to build a relationship than to actually speak?
Now, these questions should have been asked in my initial reply email when they were casting me. I should have asked them before I threw any numbers into the air. And as a long established professional voice talent, I should have know better.
I will never be in such a hurry, even when I tell myself it’s for the client, that I skip major parts of the information gathering process. The point of having years of experience in the industry is not only to serve the clients well and to provide an outstanding level of service, but is also for precisely these scenarios, when years in the industry should teach us to take a breath, pause, and look at what we are dealing with. I realize that if I could make this basic mistake, anyone can. So do yourself a favor, ask questions. Enjoy the dialogue and back and forth. Don’t be afraid to hop on the phone and clarify a few details. I realize the clients in this scenario could just as easily have been inflexible about the budget, and that would have led to a very different blog today.
It’s 2021. We’re still in a pandemic. We need what we need quickly. Laura gets it and she wants you to have perfect audio without a fuss at the click of your mouse. Let Laura know how she can help you!
