I’ve Been In Your Shoes
It seems like just yesterday I was just starting my own voice over career. When I was new to voiceover, I, like you, had questions about everything from technique to gear. I had so much to learn, I was not sure where to begin. Coming from an academic background, my inclination was to research, but finding the coach that was the right fit for my vast VO goals was a goal in and of itself. If you look at my resume, it reads like a “Who’s Who” of the best of VO. I’ve coached with Anne Ganguzza, Bill DeWees, Nancy Wolfson, J. Michael Collins, Eric Romanowski, Dave Walsh, and the list goes on. You might be thinking, why has this gal worked with so many coaches? Well, there are three reasons: At different points in your career you need different things. And, coaches have varying areas of expertise. Lastly, voice over, like many other professions, is a field for career-long learning.
Now, as a long-established full-time professional talent and working coach myself, Diana Birdsall and I have teamed up and started a Clubhouse room called “Ask the VO Coaches”
where we can have a weekly dialogue where people who are walking on the same path can now have a trusted space to pose their questions. Last week on Clubhouse Diana and I talked about finding a VO Coach that is right for you. Here are some of the issues that we considered:
Vetting Coaches
During our Clubhouse panel last week, Diana and I were excited to have Randy Thomas and Dan Friedman as guests. Both established voice talents and coaches like us. We discussed the group classes and conferences are great ways to test the waters and see if a voice over coach is the right fit for you. You should consider things like their demeanor and philosophy. See if you can get a sense of their methodology. What is their approach to studying voiceover like?
What Questions You Should Ask
- You should ask voice over coaches about their policies. For instance, do they require 24 hours notice for cancellation or are they flexible?
- Do they provide the scripts? Some coaches plan the lessons and provide scripts, others expect you to find your own scripts. I always provide scripts, but this is not standard, it really does vary and if you don’t want to go digging you should ask. Or, conversely, if you want to control the material, you should ask.
- How do they know what you are ready to go to demo? Not all coaches produce demos. I do work with an amazing demo team, and I do not send my students to demo until their reads are repeatedly bookable.
- Do they offer a free consultation? This is very common and is a great way to see if you are a good fit. Do they offer a consultation for demos? This is very helpful as well.
What Guarantees Can They Offer
None. That’s it. You can do everything right. You can have an amazing demo. No one can promise you work. Voice over is hard. It is a grind. It takes hours of commitment and sacrifice and more determination than you can measure. If you have demo producers promising you the starts you should run for the hills. There are no guarantees and anyone that suggests that there are should not be trusted. Gabby Nistico, another amazing coach who I know as an industry friend, has a video about the rule of 10. She talks about how you have to put in years of effort to reap the rewards. The secret is there is no secret.
A Coach Should Make You Better
At the end of the day, you know where you are when you start. You should know how you learn. A good coach should bring
out the best in you and push you. For example, I respond well to positive reinforcement. I do not respond well to criticism, harsh feedback, sarcasm, or cruelty. I am not the kind who can rise above to prove how awesome I am. I will, instead, just fall to pieced. It is not good. So for me, I look for a specific energy from coaches. Ultimately, I was very excited to build my VO career. Now, as a coach, when I work with students, I am trying to build a relationship with them just as I do with my clients. I want them to build a strong foundation of skills that will not disappear when they are nervous in a live session or when there is noise outside their apartment that they cannot control. I want them to hear my voice in their head cheering them on and lifting them up.
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.
I have been blessed to have three precious dogs in my life, and each of them has brought me immeasurable joy. I had no idea, however, that when we got our Labrador Retriever Daisy, in addition to being super sweet and super smart, she would also be super challenging to walk without the right training. A neighbor with two Great Dane pups introduced me to the dog training books by the Monks of New Skete, who have been training dogs since the 1970s. We made the choice to send Daisy for a board and stay training program, and I learned from the brothers that there were a few keys essential to Daisy’s success. We needed to be consistent with her obedience every day and maintain her routine. She would need structured daily exercise. We needed to plan everything- even her walks, to set her up for success. As a small business owner, I realized that in voice over all the lessons that would lead to success for Daisy also hold true to maintaining a successful professional voiceover career.
Now back from New Skete, every day Daisy has to run through her exercises, from leave it and heal to place. Similarly, working on my craft is essential every day. From warm up exercises to practicing cold reading, this is part of my daily routine. I recently reflected on this in my blog about the class that I am taking with Kim Handysides, but in order to stay strong in the reads that I submit both as auditions and as booked work, this daily work is essential to my success.
Just as Daisy needs her purposeful walk, I need a certain amount of daily exercise to stay in shape for voice over, I walk four to five miles a day. I do pilates three times a week. All of that is in addition to my vocal warm ups. When your body is your instrument, you have to maintain your instrument every single day.
In the same way that communicating well with Daisy strengthens our family bonds, doing all of the above plus communicating well with clients strengthens our connections with them. As they can rely on our work being consistently good and being there when they need it, they will be able to trust us for their clients, and in the end that trust is what matters most. As a professional talent, a new booking is great, but when that new booking comes back, it’s almost as good as when Daisy comes galloping towards me.
I happened to marry a huge Bill Murray fan, and from Quick Change to Groundhog Day, I think I’ve seen all of his top hits, but Groundhog Day is my favorite. As a working mom, having a system to maintain efficiency is really important but unfortunately that same system often makes every single day feel the same. I go into my booth and warm up. I do my most pressing auditions first. Next I tend to all booked work. I submit more auditions. I stop and walk the dogs. I typically eat an early lunch then work on client outreach. Then I go back in the booth for more work and to submit more auditions. Every day is pretty much the same. I meet with my accountability group on Thursdays and I blog on Sundays. Days are the same and weeks blend together. So, as a full-time voice over professional who is booking work, you might be asking what is wrong with this? The problem is the rut the I feel like I fall in. With no room for self-checks and no room to make sure that I am submitting the best possible reads, the Groundhog day scenario perpetuates itself. The best way to break this cycle and for a voice over professional to submit bookable auditions is to work on their craft regularly and to work with top coaches who give solid feedback! In voice over we are constantly being asked why we are different than other talents and those of us who book work know that the answer is seldom our voice but rather that we need to work on our craft to stand out!
It’s important to pick the right coaches and I’ve been blessed to work with many excellent ones in the years that I’ve been in voice over. Sometimes you want private lessons and sometimes group classes can meet your training needs. Right now I wanted to shake things up. Kim Handysides and her daughter Lisa Suliteanu book a lot of work. They understand what is au courant and have created a curriculum across genres to target bookable reads. Kim has been an industry leader for 30 plus years and her talented daughter Lisa has been working steadily since she was 7 years old and has been full-time since finishing university. In case you’re wondering what the vibe of their class is like, it is upbeat, inspirational, clever, and fun. With so many coaches in the industry at the moment, this class is designed to put voice actors on the path to success and enrolling was a great step for me, even so many years into my career!
In Groundhog Day, we see Phill Conners taking piano lessons and becoming an amazing pianist. This did not happen over night. It took lots and lots of practice. Right now in The Voice Over Study, we work on different scripts and then can use those tools to go back and really work on a script. The more we learn to unravel it, the better our reads become. For me, having fresh feedback on my reads is helpful. It is also just as helpful to pay attention to the reads of the other voice actors in the class, listen to how they approach the scripts, and think about the feedback that they are given. I try to incorporate this approach into both my auditions and my booked work and bring some freshness to it all.
In Groundhog Day, we see Phil’s relationship with others in the town blossom and develop throughout the film as he gets to relive each day. For me, having an opportunity to meet other voice over actors is really valuable. The other talents in the class are from different parts of the United States and Canada. We are at different points in our careers and we all aspire to focus on different genres of voice over. Still, I think knowing other voice actors is essential to our success, and I am so thankful to be getting to know the other actors in this class as we all learn together.
Just as we see Phil repeatedly attempting to cover the story about Punxsutawney Phil, there are countless ways each script can be approached, so wouldn’t it save a lot of time and energy to understand which reads are actually booking right now? That is the point of “The Voice Over Study,” the nuances of the bookable read are not necessarily my go to read, so I am so thankful for the first few sessions already! For example, the words to emphasize or blend may not be what I had thought of, so this valuable feedback, and the reinforcement of it, makes Kim and Lisa’s class outstanding. In class last week, Kim directed me to hit words I never word have that to enunciate, and the overall gestalt of the read was just a million times better. Her instincts are amazing. Kim and Lisa book A LOT of work on their own, and my goal is to be as busy as they are!
In class we have homework. We have scripts to prepare and we are also supposed to work on cold reading. I also love this, as both make me more efficient and more effective in my daily work. These tasks are something that I look forward to, as I feel like I am taking control of my career and determining my own path.
As a professional voice over actor, I can say I interact with industry contacts as just that, as a professional. I get auditions, I submit auditions. It is non-emotional. It’s business. When I connect with people on Facebook or LinkedIn, it’s business. I’m delighted, but still, it’s a business contact. Yet, there is a degree of trust that we must assume when we interact with clients and new contacts alike in the voiceover industry, right? Voice actors like myself often send recorded audio to people, whether they be clients or prospects, that we actually know very little about, and when we do this we trust that the audio we send is being used under the agreed upon terms. We trust that it is not manipulated. We trust them with our contact information. There is a lot of trust going on. For those of us who are working mothers, who have a family at home, we have a lot invested in the businesses we have built, and this trust is no joking matter.
I posted in the “Voice-Over Mamas” Facebook Group asking other working moms in voice over whether they use PO Boxes and their phone numbers. Their were quite a few established talents who do use PO Boxes, but less for safety and more for making sure that clients who pay by check always get the checks to them. It seems that everyone in the group used their real mobile phone.
Besides feeling shaken, I have not changed my setup yet. I have lots of questions. I think more than changing what how I am set up, this icky feeling (for lack of a better word) will stick with me. This feeling of vulnerability is not a pleasant one and I think that when future contact behave in a way that is outside the norm I will simply pass on the opportunity. I am not desperate for work, I am established in my career. I would rather forgo something that does not seem right than expose myself and my family to potential harm.