Consistency Matters
As a full-time professional voiceover actor and coach, I think one of the reasons my career has continued to thrive and grow through the years is the consistency of my practice. When I work with my VO coaching students on techniques, whether the are voice over acting methods or the practical steps to running a day to day business, I pass on exactly what I practice in my own business. I encourage what I have found to work and hope to foster good habits in students. Conversely, I also share what has not worked in hope of sparing them what I already know not to be helpful. As solopreneurs, we wear so many hats and juggle so many balls. Setting ourselves up for success and holding ourselves accountable makes life much easier. So yes, this many years in, I practice what I preach as a coach and I do as I say in my lessons. Here awesome aspects I focus on regularly as both a professional talent and a coach:
Goals
Goal setting is pivotal to success in voice over. If you don’t know where you want to go, how can you possibly get there? As part of my business plan, I update my goals at least twice a year, if not quarterly. Anyone who has worked with me can tell you I love to help them flesh out there goals and we typically do this early on. When I do my own personal goals, I always post them in my booth and where I like to work upstairs in my house. This helps a lot with mindset. I think everyone has good days and bad, and just knowing your intentions is useful.
Accountability
I have been saying for years that I would not be where I am today without my accountability buddies! We have even presented together at national conferences. At present I am in several accountability groups. My primary one for all of VO is affectionately called “the VO Powerhouse.” We meet weekly and talk about specific touch points and present in order every week. We also chat about our lives. We tend to talk daily on Facebook as well about everything from rates to pronunciation to our families.
I have a mentor for my audiobook work. We meet monthly. This has been extremely helpful in launching that genre of my business. Again, I don’t think you can quite imagine what the possibilities are without being pushed by those who have already gone there.
I am also in an eLearning ensemble. We meet twice a week. We touch base about our marketing goals specifically. This group is great because we push each other and keep our eyes on the horizon.
I always encourage students to find accountability buddies. I personally think that meeting at least once a week is crucial. I think it helps to keep you going and to keep your eye on the ball. I think everyone in VoiceOver should be in one! If you are not and would like to be, you can look at conferences (which is where I met my buddies), Facebook groups, and at local VO meetups.
Craft
As in other professions, voice actors, regardless of how established we are, are never finished working on our craft or technique. And in truth, as industry trends shift, it is extremely important to stay on top of them. Having one on one coaching is still extremely joyful for me, and the last one I worked with at length was Sean Pratt. I love doing online webinars, like Tina Morasco’s library and Dervla Trainor’s Speaker Series. I also love learning at conferences, and conferences are essential both to being part of the community and to staying on trend in VO. While I am often in attendance as a presenter, I try to soak in as much as I can as there are experts across genres from all over the country and often other countries, so if you can afford to go, you should!
Marketing
Just as I encourage my students, having a consistent in-bound and out-bound marketing strategy, staying on top of marketing is crucial to my business plan. From blogs, to social media, to newsletters, all of it matters, both separately and as a whole, to establish my brand. Everyone who knows me knows I can talk endlessly about branding, but in truth, it all matters, a lot, and being consistent not just about posting content, but the quality and quantity of the content matters. It can be daunting to have to post and keep track of all of these moving parts regularly, while staying on top of auditions and recording booked work, but if you want clients to know you exist, it is crucial.
Daily Routine
Having a consistent daily routine and painting a schedule helps to ensure that important “to do” items don’t fall through the cracks. Whether starts with a warm-up, goes to booked work, then auditions, and cleverly weaving social media in, or whether certain days are time blocked for certain tasks, your routine is important. I tend to leave certain days for certain tasks. I also am passionate about healthy living and fitness, so I weave meal prep and pilates into my routine as well. My voice over career would not be where it is today of those items were not part of my schedule. When I work with coaching students, I try to be realistic with them about their schedule. Working moms with young kids have very different demands on them than empty nesters. Still, regardless of the phase of life, routine helps everyone stay on task.
Takeaways
When I coach, I draw from my experience. If I change what I do, I share it so others can benefit. If I find something no longer works, I share that too. I find the best way to coach is to draw from my years of booking and try to help my students build a solid foundation.
Good microphones are powerful. Whether you are starting out with middle of the road mics like the Rode NT1 or the Cad Equitek E100S, or investing in a more expensive microphone right away like the Neumann TLM 103, these microphones are condenser mics and will pic up all the sound in a large radius around them. You need to learn proper technique to best enhance your sound. Also, technique varies by genre. The way I work with my mic for conversational commercial reads or intimate reads is different. When I do video games I move around a lot and often back away from the mic, especially when I am shouting and doing effects. These are all skills I was taught and worked hard to hone, I did not wake up one day and just know how to do it. It takes time. And you do not want to walk into a studio for a job or worse for a booking and not have the skills necessary to rock that session!
The other side of this is that you need to become a critical listener of your audio too! You need professional headphones, or cans as we call them, that do not have a filter in them. You can not really hear how you sound without them, and you can not really hear what clients will hear or be listening to without them, so this is essential to your training!
You have a burning question, that’s great! And the good news, actually the really good news, is that there are A LOT of really wonderful coaches in voice over depending on both what genre you are looking to study and what your specific learning style is. Even better, many coaches have lots of free resources to offer! Between blogs, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and linkedIn, you can learn so much before you even have to open your wallet. So when it is time to actually invest in yourself and your voice over career, whether it is signing up for a class or a private lesson, there are som best practices to build a good relationship with your coaches.
arts school in central Pennsylvania called Elizabthethtown College. She texted us this photo of gluten free donut holes. She said she urgently needed us to go to Trader Joe’s right away to get them for her. She was concerned that they would sell out immediately. Even though Emma has a car, there is no Trader Joes near her school so she was very much hoping we could help her out with this.
leave without the donut holes, I sought assistance. The first guy was working on oranges. He went to where he thought they’d be. They were not there. He pulled in another gal who then pulled in a third woman from the bakery who then pulled in a fourth woman, a manager. So yes, I had FOUR people helping me look for the donut holes. We worked hard and were thorough. Two of them were positive they had been in the store.
look up to most in the industry, including Anne Ganguzza, Clif Zellman, and J. Michael Collins. In addition with being in such good company, I try to pick up public speaking tips as well. At MAVO, I attended sessions of other industry greats like Michael Scott, and I took note of his presentation style. I also spent a lot of time talking to Joe Cipriano, who I have looked up to for many years, and learned a tremendous amount from him.
nomination for one of the demos we did, an eLearning demo for the super talented Dallas based John Guccion. I also earned a nomination in the bloopers category which was good fun. While we didn’t take home any statues this year, I will say it really meant a lot to be in such good company and it was for sure a highlight of the year.
This summer I got to go on a trip to Canada with the gals in my VO accountability group! We had been talking about going away together since before Covid. We had so many ideas, but really, the most important detail was that we were all included and beyond that everything else was secondary. To have this time together to bond and to reflect was so meaningful. We are all exceptionally close, and this trip was as wonderful as can be.
audio. So my audio was immediately flagged as being insufficient for their needs. You get a little orange or red, depending on the screen settings of your monitor, triangle with an exclamation point in it.
