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:
Depending on which voice actor you ask, you’ll get a different answer to the questions “What’s the best DAW for VO?” I have used Audacity, Adobe Audition, and Twisted Wave. I may be proficient in all of them, but I LOVE Twisted Wave. To be clear this does not mean that other DAWs, from Reeper to Pro Tools don’t have immense value, but for me, I am quick and good on Twisted Wave. It serves my purposes well. And when I have a client who needs total production with music, I hire a professional engineer to mix it down anyway, so I really can do all that I need to do on Twisted Wave. Some of my favorite features are the shortcuts, multiple effects stacks, and ease of file splitting.
When I am in my booth, I turn my iPhone and Apple Watch to airplane mode. I do this because when I develop a good flow, I do not want the phone ringing to interrupt me. I do offer one word of caution: if you are doing a live session and you coincidentally cannot connect with your client, and have all your devices in airplane mode, it can be quite frustrating if they are unable to reach you. So, while you may not want your phone in the studio for a directed session, perhaps before you silence everything you should make certain that you connect.
Like many in voiceover, I am constantly revising my business plan, shifting my focus from commercials to explainers to elearning to targeting specific industries. As I revise my plan, my goals change. While I have a planner or agenda that I love, I find that mapping out my strategy for the week helps me to keep my mind on the big picture. As auditions and work pours in, it’s easy to get caught up in the little things and push off the tasks that we think can wait, but in doing so, in pushing off those marketing emails and that LinkedIn outreach, we are pushing off the pursuit of our longterm goals. It is so important to always have an eye on your “why.” If you lose site of that, and you are just buys submitting audition after audition, you can easily get stuck in a rut. 
If your fan makes noise,
commercial campaign, getting signed by an agent, and seeing an old friend. Why is a new demo so exciting? A voice over demo means opportunity. It is a new moment for us to say here I am, listen to this. This is what I can do for you! As a full-time, professional voice over talent, there are plenty of other female voice over actors booking lots of commercials. How do I make myself get noticed? The demo. So who you do your demo with, the coach and producer you choose to spend your time and money with matters, a lot. I have worked with some of the top coaches in the field, and I can tell you that I have had outstanding experiences and I have had experiences hat should have been better. Now that I am work as a 
that show both your range and are appropriate for your brand. If you have dream VO clients, this is the time to include those scripts. So for example, if you are doing an automotive demos, and you love Audi, you would include an Audi script. If you are doing a commercial demo and you love shopping at target, why not include a target spot? The scripts should not simply descend from above on demo day, be handed to you, and recorded. They should be meaningful to you and they should show both your range and what matters to you. They can be an interesting glimpse into your interests too! So, it is very important that you can easily talk to your 
This is really important. Demo producers typically send you their preferred order, but at the end of the day the demo is yours to live with and their preferred order matters less than your preferred order. I personally have had demo producers make changes without any fuss, and I worked with others who refuse to make any changes at all and insist that it must stay the way it is.
demo. In a lot of ways its up there in excitement with new jewelry and a new car. For professional voice talents, our voice over demos are our calling cards, and nothing gets us going like a new demo to fuss over. In my small inner circle, it happened just yesterday! One of my VO besties got a new commercial demo back from a well-known demo producer. She was so excited to share the demo with our group, and with good reason! The demo was clever. It did all that will be discussed below, and it was a joy to listen to. She sounded amazing, and we were really excited to ohhh and ahhh over it. So, what is it that makes a voice over demo stand out?
The job of a 
There are talent agents who cast voice actors all over the counts, and they, too, are outstanding for career and rates advice in voice over. A good agent not only secures industry leading rates, they also direct you reads and let you know when you are on the mark and when you need improvement. An agent has both business savvy and a good ear, so if you are lucky enough to be on their roster, work with them! Seek their guidance and build a rapport. You can learn so much for a good agent. Both you and the agent benefit from you learning as much as possible, so they would likely want to help as much as they can.
I have blogged before about my accountability group, but I cannot stress enough how much this group has helped me daily to grow my business and make better choices. They have pushed me beyond boundaries I would have never thought to challenge, and they have made me look beyond. I am so much better because I am in the company of these women.
