Marcia Yudkin gets it right – again!

When someone contacts me about my voiceover services and immediately focusses on price, I've learned to take a step back. It has been my experience that there’s an inverse correlation between the price they want to pay and the degree to which they will turn out to be a pain in the neck. So when I received Marcia Yudkin’s weekly Marketing Minute this morning that addressed this very issue, I was amazed at how well she nailed the problem and was very interested to read that there are actually statistics available about it. If you’re a voice actor or a business person of any kind, you owe it to yourself to walk away from this kind of client. With permission, I’m reprinting Marcia’s words verbatim – and I will be checking out Holden & Burton’s book!

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According to Reed Holden and Mark Burton, authors of Pricing With Confidence, 79% of business-to-business companies serve any customer they can get.

What's wrong with that? Typically, they explain, 20 percent of the customers account for 225 percent of the profit, with 80 percent causing the firm to lose money. And that statistic doesn't take into account the extent to which the unprofitable customers increase your worry wrinkles and gray hairs.

Being choosy about customers benefits both the bottom line and your sanity. Consider sending away those who:

* Always press you for discounts

* Need or demand an exorbitant amount of handholding

* Previously requested refunds

* Are unpleasant to deal with, nitpicky, abusive, frenzied, uncooperative or irrational

* Threaten to go to the competition

* Never pay on time

* Represent where your company used to be rather than where it is going

"It's simply better for you that unprofitable customers are served by your competition," say Holden and Burton.

After shedding the undesirables, develop a clear picture of who you want as clients and pursue those. You'll then have the positive energy needed to land them!

From The Marketing Minute, 18 February 2009, by Marcia Yudkin. Reprinted with permission.

MCM Voices' Guide to Voice-over Postcard Marketing

This post has a grand title, doesn’t it? There are many people who know much more about voice-over postcard mailing than I do – Anthony Mendez is one of them and he has been of tremendous help to me over the years - thank-you my friend!! But this here is my guide, because I’ve just concluded a process that took me a good 6 weeks, which tells you that I can take any simple project and turn it into an all-absorbing, life-sucking event. Maybe I can save you some time by relating how I approached this.

Part I: The reason. The purpose of this postcard mailing extravaganza is to announce to clients, would-be clients and agents the national broadcast premiere of a documentary that features my voice. The broadcast is February 2nd, and although the point of the mailing is not so much to get people to watch it as it is to make them aware of it, I still wanted this card to arrive in time to give them the option. So Part I is to have something worth announcing. If you have such an annoucement to make, a postcard is a great way to do it. It is eye-catching but not disturbing to a busy person, and the busier a person is, the more likely it is that you want to work with them. Plus they can keep it propped on their desk indefinitely to remind them of your existence, which a phone call or an email might be less likely to achieve for the long term.

Part II. Postcard design. I chose VistaPrint for this mailing extravaganza, and their templates steered the mechanical process. See my earlier post about this, and Anthony’s before it. Knowing the format the mailing list itself needed to take affected my choices in editing my database, so I do recommend choosing the vendor early in the process. I was lucky to have a graphic already available for the front of the card. The back was simple: Announce the event, making it sound as important and MCM-centric as possible, and add a list of recent impressive clients along with my contact information. Simple, but requiring considerable thought and care in choosing words. Make every word count!

Part III. The mailing list. I’m not talking mechanics, like what format does the list take and what do you do with it. Rather, who are the recipients? I have a database of 3500 but not all of those are active contacts and of the active ones, not all will get a card for various reasons. I need to maximise my postcard mailing dollars because a huge mailing can run into big money. So how do I narrow down the list?

My database represents 4 years of painstaking marketing. Every one of the names on the list was researched with considerable care, but especially at the beginning of my voice-over career this research was not necessarily done with the optimal criteria for identifying ideal clients. And of course, the definition of ideal is going to be different for a beginning voice talent and for an experienced one, and for every individual voice actor, and one’s goals naturally evolve with experience. My complete database includes companies that looked promising according to their websites, but actually don’t do a lot of work that requires voice-over, all the way through high-end production companies that use voice-over every day. It includes companies that produce ads for a few small local businesses and companies that write and produce national commercials. The process of going through this list has taught me a lot about the kind of company I want to be doing business with in the future and will greatly affect the kind of companies I contact from now on. Simply by focussing on return-on-investment for a postcard mailing, I was compelled to narrow the list to a select number of names, and to refine my criteria for choosing potential clients in the future. This has had a significant impact on my business plan! I set a goal of 600 for the mailing, and ended up with 636, including agents. Not too bad.

In the process of culling, I was also visiting each company’s website at least once in order to review the business and consider the likelihood that we would ever work together. This was also the time to check the contact information and identify or re-identify the best person to receive a postcard and to make sure the mailing address was current. LinkedIn was a huge help here. Many was the time I searched a name in LinkedIn to confirm that the person was still with the company and to see if their title was the same. This entire review process took about a month and a half of intensive work but future postcard mailings should be incomparably easier thanks to this investment of time (and the ease of retrieving data and notes from my beloved Time & Chaos).

Part IV. The mailing. Once the mailing list was complete, the rest of this process rushed to its denouement with dizzying velocity. I double-checked my postcard design (who am I kidding? It was more like the 20th time I had checked the design as uploaded to VistaPrint!), and I uploaded my mailing list. That upload was swift; then VistaPrint mercilessly and unfeelingly announced that about 30 of my entries had invalid addresses and the US Postal Service would not deliver to them, beg them as I might. I checked each one, and in all but 8 cases I found that indeed, there was something wrong and I was able to make the correction. The other 8 I saved to their own spreadsheet for further examination and then deleted them from the uploaded master list. I got all the way to checkout, looked at the grand total dollar figure, and then had a clever idea. I thought, I will just Google “VistaPrint discount codes”and within a few minutes I had reduced my grand total dollar figure by $127! Hooray!! I proceeded to check-out, clicked Submit and the deed was done. I then immediately was shown an offer to have an order of 50 postcards sent to me for a reduced price with no charge for shipping, which I immediately accepted because I knew I was going to think of friends and relatives and maybe a few more potential clients to whom I simply had to mail a card.

There you have it. Perhaps in a few months I will report on the results of this campaign, or maybe I will be under my bed, wailing, refusing nutrition and inconsolable at the lack of results, but for now I'm elated to have finished this enlightening process and full of hope for the future. Comments and stories of your own experiences welcomed!

Note: Help & advice from Marice Tobias, Anthony Mendez and Elaine Singer is gratefully acknowledged.

Changing Business Model for Hiring Voice-over?

I’ve just come from the “Meet and Eat” breakfast hosted by my Chamber of Commerce, held each December in the ballroom at the beautiful Delaney House. The program this morning was a round-table discussion about the economy and how it has affected our businesses. At my table were a business consultant, a bank executive, a photographer, two insurance company employees and an online advertising exec. As I listened to each speak about their respective situations, I heard less about negative impact and more about creativity – how their businesses are adjusting and rolling with the punches. It has always struck me how resilient humans are, and how the capacity for hope and optimism seems boundless, even in troubled times.

Something of great interest to me emerged before the discussion got started – the gentleman on my right was marketing director for an insurance company and he told me that they used to hire production companies exclusively when they needed broadcast advertising. Now, to save money, they are doing their own copywriting and hiring vendors themselves, at least for some of their productions.

When I first started in voice-over 4 years ago I targeted ad agencies and production companies in my initial marketing efforts, but also reached out directly to businesses. It became apparent quite quickly that the latter was not a good use of my time because businesses usually hired production companies or ad agencies. I still find this to be true, but my breakfast companion made me sit up and think about the possibility of a changing model. If this became a trend, it would certainly change the way voice-over artists market their services. My guess is that it would not be an overwhelming trend without some decline in quality of the work and that it would probably be limited to larger companies that might have more breadth of talent than a smaller business with a smaller number of employees. I can imagine it being a textbook example of being "penny wise and pound foolish" - you pay less for the work and suffer the consequences. If larger businesses are considering these kinds of changes, however, this could create more opportunity for voice artists who offer copywriting and other production services along with voice-over.

Are other voice-over artists seeing any of this happening? Are you being contacted directly by businesses? Comments welcome!

Voice-over Postcard Mailing Hack

I want to send a postcard to all my clients and other business contacts to alert them to a special broadcast for which I provided voice-over. On February 2nd, 2009 at 10 pm, PBS will broadcast Forgotten Ellis Island, a beautiful documentary about the Immigrant Hospital at Ellis Island. The documentary is narrated by Elliott Gould, and I provided historical voices as did 3 male colleagues. Naturally, I want to make sure that my clients have the opportunity to see this – the film has very broad appeal but of course, more importantly, I want them to hear how great I sound!

So, what’s the most efficient way to make this mailing happen? I have mailed postcards to clients before. I had them printed at a local shop, and then addressed them by hand because I thought a personal touch was important. A few hundred postcards. This is not happening again. As soon as I found out the air date for Forgotten Ellis Island, I knew it was a job for VistaPrint, where you can design your postcard, upload a mailing list and have your cards sent out for you.. I thought it was still going to be quite an ordeal, because I have a contact database of 3,489 companies. Not all of these will get a postcard – some of these companies have gone out of business, some stopped using voice-over, some never did. I still keep them in my database so I can maintain a history of my communications with them. I use Time & Chaos software to manage all this information.

It turns out to be incredibly simple. I finally took a few minutes to look into the process of turning my Time & Chaos database into a mailing list in VistaPrint-ready format, and it actually took mere seconds to get the list. T&C will almost instantly generate a report containing any data fields desired, and you can export the report into an Excel spreadsheet that can be then be uploaded to VistaPrint. What I thought was going to take weeks to accomplish will get done in less than a day.

The design process was not quite so straightforward for me. For the front of the card I uploaded a graphic sent to me by Lorie Conway, the filmmaker for Forgotten Ellis Island, after getting her permission to use it for this purpose. For the back, I took advantage of LazyMan Anthony Mendez’ offer of a design template (thanks Anthony!). It came to me as a psd file and opened automatically in Macromedia Fireworks (it will open in whatever appropriate editing program you use for such things). I designed the card and uploaded my front and back designs to the VistaPrint website and that’s when my troubles began. The front design is vertical, and my back design is horizontal. VistaPrint put the front design into vertical format, and then it wanted the back to be vertical as well. Somehow I got the design rotated but it didn’t look right. Finally I downloaded a template for Oversized Vertical Postcards and redesigned the back of my postcard and got it uploaded. I then called Customer Support to make sure the recipients’ names were going to print in the right place, and was told that VistaPrint’s mailing service doesn’t support the vertical format. Crikey! So now the front design has been rotated so that I have a design that VistaPrint classifies as horizontal, and I’m back to my original horizontal design for the back. Note well: if you want VistaPrint to do the mailing for you, your designs must be horizontal. If you find anything on their website that tells you this, let me know!

The postcard is now ready to go. All that remains is to edit that big Excel mailing list of mine and upload it to VistaPrint. It will not exactly be cheap, but there is no way I could send out a mailing of this magnitude on my own and still keep what’s left of my sanity. Nor would I be able to look my friend LazyMan Anthony Mendez in the eye and tell him I addressed and stamped that many postcards myself! :)

Managing Your Freelance Income

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a free 3-day workshop called The Millionaire Mind Intensive. These workshops are the brainchild of T. Harv Ecker, author of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. Ecker’s basic thesis is that your attitudes about money are formed in childhood and that your financial status as an adult is based on the financial blueprint you acquired from your family. If your parents told you that “money is the root of all evil, money can’t buy happiness, you shouldn’t have more money than you need to live on” and so forth, you’re likely to become very good at not having much money. And your success in business will certainly be affected, whether you’re a voice actor, a web designer, a consultant – in short, anything that involves income! The good news is that you can change.

I had read Ecker’s book and came away from it with a better understanding of my attitudes about money and how they might be holding me back, but I still didn’t have much idea about what to do about them. The workshop offered an avenue to acquire more information, as well as the chance to visit with my brother and sister-in-law who were also attending. The way the workshop was conducted was rather off-putting for me and I bailed after the first (11-hour) day, so I can only pass along a portion of the information offered. What I did glean from that one day, however, was very valuable and has certainly changed my approach to financial management.

One of the points that made a big impression on me was put in the form of a question to business owners: If you need something for your business, do you look at your bank balance, see how much money you have, decide if you can afford the expenditure and then make your purchase? In other words, do you basically have no budget in place to organize your business expenditures? The point was made that you should take that disorganized bank account and pay yourself a salary. That salary goes into your domestic budget (see below). The rest of your business income can then be divided into categories that parallel the organization of your domestic funds.

Recommended domestic budget categories are the following:

Necessities: 55% Rent or mortgage, food, clothing, medical, utilities, taxes are examples.

Investments: 10% Retirement falls into this category. This is also called the Financial Freedom Account – your “Golden Goose”. You never spend this money (i.e., you don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs); rather, your goal is eventually to be able to live off the income the investments generate.

Long-term Savings: 10% Car, home improvements & c.

Education: 10% This is for your own education, to keep skills up to date and learn new ones.

Play: 10% Entertainment, massage, whatever you want. It’s recommended that you spend this regularly – at least quarterly. It keeps you balanced and keeps you from feeling deprived and then going berserk and blowing your budget.

Give: 5% Donations to charity or other favorite causes.

Business owners will have their own ideas that make sense for them as to how they would translate these recommendations into a business budget. My voice-over business budget might look like this after my paycheck comes out of it:

Necessities: Telephone/ISDN, web hosting, newsletter mailing service, postcards & printing, postage, business cards. These might also be called marketing expenses. See my earlier post on setting rates for more ideas about this.

Investments: doesn’t apply, since that’s part of the domestic budget.

Long-term savings: this could be for a major purchase or for studio renovation.

Short-term savings: basic equipment purchases (but if anybody hears me say I need a new microphone – it’s really a cry for help)

Education: voice-over coaching and workshops, acting classes, German and Spanish classes to keep improving

Give: my business can make donations too!


Having a budget of this kind is important on several levels. Obviously, it will help ensure that there are funds to run the business. Once you’ve decided on the dollar figures or percentages that should go into each category, and have decided on what your monthly salary is going to be, you can set financial goals for the business. If you have not been paying yourself a salary up to now, you’ll probably find that starting that practice will really transform your experience of being a business owner. It’s greatly motivating to see that you actually receive a paycheck every month, and you will work even harder to make sure you get it and that it grows.

A few words about the domestic budget, since it’s a part of getting your business finances in order. It can be quite a daunting task to get started on it, because you need to figure out what you’re spending your money on. All of it, down to the coffee and Snickers bars. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of tracking expenses. This includes the regular fixed monthly expenses like housing and music lessons, the utility expenses that vary seasonally, the quarterly expenses like real estate taxes and life insurance, and the not-always predictable expenses like car repairs and trips to the vet. For us it happened to be easy because I was already keeping track of all of it on a spread sheet, aided by a set of 12 envelopes in which I keep receipts for each month so I can make sure I don’t miss anything. However, I was not paying myself a salary, so when our expenses exceeded what was in the basic domestic account, I would have to siphon some from somewhere else and it felt like we were not living within our means, despite not having debt (besides the mortgage). Now, I get a paycheck. Now, our financial goals are clear, and plans that seemed hazy and possibly hopeless actually seem attainable.

I don’t claim to be 100% accurately representing the views of Harv Ecker or the organizers of the workshop I attended, and I'm skipping a lot of the details. I’m just passing along the way I used some of the information to change the way I think about and handle the budget for my voice-over business, and as a consequence, my home. It has made a big difference there AND in the way I feel about my work. I hope others will find some of it helpful.

My voice-over team.

Most of us free-lancers start out in business alone. As voice-over artists maybe we get advice (good or bad) about what equipment to choose and how to set up the studio and where to get good deals on art work and business cards and how to approach marketing. There are as many ways to start as there are individual voice artists, and it’s possible that the best advice in the world isn’t going to make much difference at the beginning – we do what we can afford to do, with the resources available. That’s what I did. As a result, I went through numerous microphones and several pre-amps before settling on what I now have and love, upgrading as my business grew. I don’t think I lost much money there, as the audio equipment held its value and I was able to sell what I no longer wanted. I suppose I gained valuable knowledge about microphones, and really, one’s voice and use of a microphone evolve with experience, so I don’t think I have anything to regret there.

The kind of voice-over coaching one needs also evolves. I had excellent coaching at the outset, and have taken advantage of many opportunities to attend workshops with great teachers. My current coach is superb, and she doesn’t take on beginners, so I don’t have any regrets about the way I’ve approached my training, either.

What I do regret, though, is not having expert advice in dealing with the noise problems I had the first few years in business. I lost a few potential customers because of it, and I think a seriously good audio engineer could have helped me get to the root of the problems much sooner. As my friend Pat Fraley says, “experience is the slowest teacher”. Experience has taught me much about the many ways noise can be introduced into an audio chain, but it has been costly experience. An expert could have been invaluable early in my career.

One of the smartest things I’ve done as a voice artist is finally finding and hiring that expert. My particular expert is George Whittam of ElDorado Recording Services – whom I contacted at the suggestion of my friend and mentor, Kevin Genus. George worked with me to find good ways to process my audio when I wanted to “dress it up” a bit for auditions. He installed Source Connect for me, saving me a lot of time. He has been available for any questions I have about my audio and about equipment choices. He also let me know that if I had any problems with my mobile studio while I was away on vacation last week, he would be available to help, using LogMeIn to look at my computer desktop. It wasn’t necessary, as it turns out, but the peace of mind it gave me to know he was just a phone call away was priceless.

My voice-over team also includes lots of dear friends in the business who are generous with their advice – e.g., about setting rates. But here is an area where again, it can be a wise choice to get an expert on your team, such as a trusted agent. The difference between what you might be able to get on your own and what a really good agent could negotiate for you could over time be well worth the commissions. This is something I’m currently working on for myself.

For a story about how a fellow voice artist used the “outsourcing” concept to increase her business, I recommend this article by Moneen Daly Harte at Voice Over Xtra. That bit about hiring a house cleaning service has tremendous appeal - the question of how to keep your home life from unnecessarily encroaching on your work time is material for another post. And of course, keeping your work time from eroding time with family is probably material for a book - or lots of books!

Getting things done: Voice-over Edition

This is a follow-up to my previous post on success in voice-over. In order to be successful, we have to get things done. I think many of us become paralysed when a task seems too big and we just can’t find a way to get started on it. How can we overcome the obstacles of our own making that stand in the way of success?

A gazillion books have been written on productivity and we all have our individual approaches to it. I tend to clean my house as a sort of displacement activity and hope that a clean and uncluttered environment will set the stage for a serious look at what I’m trying to accomplish at higher levels. After a big project such as writing a paper and submitting it for publication, I always cleaned and organised my office and lab – lots of tasks of all sizes are neglected while one is working on something big, so that phase of regrouping was important for me and although I used to wish I could just jump right into the next big project, I came to accept this tidying behavior as inevitable and even necessary.

Recently, as I have gotten more and more busy with voice-over work and have been thinking of more and more projects I would like to do – some of which simply are not getting done – I’ve started looking at more systematic ways of organising both the creative and the mundane tasks of life. About a month ago I had a stack of reading material next to my bed that I was trying to get through. Much of this consisted of library books and most of them were overdue. Among them: “Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-free Productivity” by David Allen. Well, color me pink but I never did make it all the way through the book. I did get the gist of it though - Allen’s system requires that you get all your projects and tasks out of your head and onto paper or some other organisational venue (an electronic list). This is the basic premise, so that while you’re tackling one project you aren’t distracted by all the other ones that are still floating around in your mind. Get them all out, and focus on one at a time.

Now, one at a time does not mean, take one project, and do whatever it takes to complete it before moving on to the next. No, grasshopper!! It means, while you are focussed on that one project, you should not be thinking about all the other things you have to do. Getting everything out of your head and on paper (or in electrons) means your mind is free. You know you aren't going to forget all the other stuff, because you have captured it! So while you're working on one thing, you aren't distracted by the rest. More important than that, for me, is his recommendation that you think about each of your projects, and figure out what is needed to move that project forward. Sort of a this-is-the-house-that-Jack-built type of exercise, since the action that is needed to move it forward might well have its own thing that is required to move it forward.

For a whole detailed explanation of this productivity system you’ll have to read the book, and to help you decide if you want to read it, try this excellent summary by Trent at The Simple Dollar. You might also want to look into Kristine Oller’s Feeding Your Focus: How creative people can move forward faster and achieve sustained success – which might turn out to be a better bet for many of us since Allen’s system, however wonderful, is not for all personality types. Bobbin Beam has summarised Oller’s new book at her voice-over blog.

If you’re in the early stages of your voice-over career, one of your obstacles might be that you’re just not sure how to approach the whole thing. In my case, I was teaching molecular biology and doing research and suddenly started to think I needed to try something else. I was browsing books at Amazon and mentally auditioning careers, focussing initially on books about acting. A book about voice-acting popped up and I was transfixed. This was perfect because I was very interested in acting but too shy to be able to consider being on stage. Vocal mimicry was a tremendous interest since childhood, as was reading aloud.

I kept going at my academic job, continued to research voice-acting and discovered a voice-acting school in San Francisco. Well, I was just out of luck, wasn’t I? How could I attend a San Francisco school if I lived in New England? I finally stumbled upon Edge Studios in Connecticut and New York, then discovered The Learning Annex in New York and that led me to Charles Michel, the coach with whom I ultimately did my pivotal training and recorded my first demo. So it was at least a year between the time I first thought of voice acting and the time I officially hung out my shingle. If I had approached this a bit more systematically, asking, what do I need to do to move this project (of becoming a voice actor) forward, I might have proceeded with questions like these:

What is the first thing I need to do to get started?

Answers: read books on voice acting and see what they say about getting started, or, find an actual voice-over actor and ask them.

The books and the voice actor consultants will tell you that the quick answer to this question is: find a coach. You could also read aloud daily, watch TV and listen to all the commercials, record the ones you like, play them over and over, copy the styles you like, write down the script, and if you have a tape recorder or better yet, a Zoom H2 recorder, record it and then play it back and listen to what you’ve done. And although you should do all that anyway, the quickest way to launch your training is to find a good coach.

So, how do you find a good coach?

Again, you can ask other voice actors, if you have access to them – “ask” them indirectly by listening to demos at voicebank and identifying your favorites and finding out who coached that actor. You can visit Harlan Hogan’s wonderful resource and look at the list of coaches in your area and start looking them up and doing background research on them to see what other people have to say about them (because you certainly want to find out if the coach you have in mind can deliver the goods, give you seriously good training and direct you in the recording of your voice demo, and not just grab your money and leave you with dreck or nothing).

Later, after the demo has been recorded and reviewed and tweaked and you finally like it, a new obstacle will arise – how do you physically get it into the ears of those who need to hear it? Do you make CDs? People do still ask for them, especially in the big cities. So how do you make them into CDs? You need art work for the cover. Where do you get art work? You can design it yourself or hire a graphic designer – and so on.

The point here is not to tell you how to proceed each step of the way, but to suggest breaking everything into steps, especially if you find you are not moving forward with something that you really want to do. If you find yourself with a great demo and then months pass and you haven’t done anything with it - what’s the delay? What will it take to move ahead and how do you make that happen? Obstacles are by no means limited to people just getting started – all of us will come up against them as we proceed down the voice-over path, or any other path in life. That’s why it can be so helpful to do a brain dump and get all our goals and projects onto paper and examine what we need to do to make them happen. Maybe we decide we want to make a “niche” demo, one that showcases voice-over work in one sector of the business, such as eLearning - but for some reason, we aren’t doing anything to make that happen. What will it take? Get it on paper or in a Word document or a sticky – it might look like this:

To Make eLearning Demo
list clients for whom I’ve done eLearning jobs
find the audio files for those jobs and put them in one folder
review the files and choose ones that represent a variety of subject matter and styles
identify the scripts I like but for which I might see room for improvement in my delivery
re-record those scripts
select a 10-second segment from each of the chosen files/scripts
order the segments in a way that shows them to their best advantage
produce the demo (do it myself, or barter with a friend who can do it for me – whatever)
seek a critique from someone I trust, or trust my own judgement

Once it’s broken down into actionable steps, it just isn’t as daunting as it might have seemed when it was only floating around as “I should really make a new demo”. And most of the steps are no big deal! Even for bigger projects like, learn Spanish, or, get a role on a TV series, all of this can be broken down into small steps for which there is an action (some steps admittedly more challenging than others, but nevertheless, do-able!). It’s just so important to do this exercise because without it we may just have this vague unrest about the whole thing and become convinced that there is something beyond our control that is preventing us from achieving our goals. In most cases, that ‘something” is completely within our grasp, after all.

Now remember, all of this is part of success in voice-over. If you start doing this and discover you’re getting all kinds of stuff accomplished, just make sure you give some thought to how you’re going to deal with the success when it comes! Are you ready for it?

Creating Your Own Voice-over Career

Among the things I love about a career in voice-over: the endless opportunities to create. But I think life offers opportunities to create no matter what you do. In my previous career as a biologist, I wrote a lot of papers based on rather dry data. When I wasn’t generating dry data and writing about them, I wrote papers that weren’t based on data at all. In a paper on homology and the ontological relationship of parts, I compared historical pathways in evolutionary biology to the transformation of the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz from an all-flesh person to an all-tin person, or to the complete turnover of members in a baseball team that nevertheless does not change “the Yankees” into some other, separate historical entity. A paper on phylogenetic constraint was my favorite project ever, because it released me from the bonds of data and let me play with ideas to my heart’s content. Later, as a program director at the National Science Foundation, it was more challenging to find ways to have fun and create, but when I needed to give a presentation to discuss the history of funding in my program and the distribution of dollars across taxonomic groups, I made a huge “tree of life” that filled the conference room, with “apples” on the tree to represent grants awarded (it was quite effective, by the way, and paved the way for a major funding initiative at the foundation).

Tree of Life project, National Science Foundation

And whenever a poster or flyer was needed, I volunteered. So the panelists we invited to help us make the final decisions about funding grant proposals found their way to the conference room with this:

or this:

The point is, you can create your own opportunities for both work and fullfilment no matter what else is going on in your life. Whether your voice-over career is keeping you hopping, or whether you sometimes find yourself with down time, you can be creating something.

Casting director Bonnie Gillespie wrote yet another excellent article this week for The Actor's Voice called Back to Basics, covering the latest thinking on headshots, resumés, and the other tools of the actor’s trade. In it is a section entitled Put Yourself Out There – a call to action if you’re looking for ways to get yourself on the map. How do you get on the map? You put yourself there!! She writes about a talented actor-writer comedy team who produced their own short film, Girl's Night Out, to showcase their skills, which became a featured video on Youtube (thanks to additional legwork on the part of the creators – you don’t have to wait for that to happen either) and has led to some great opportunities for them. Bonnie is so right about the importance of creating your own work.

Ideas and opportunities come when you least expect them. A lot of the auditions and scripts I get are interesting, a lot are, well…. not. Last fall I got an audition script for Ariat boots that I really loved, and although I didn’t expect anything to come of this audition, I wanted to do something with it. I got my friend, voice-over talent & production wizard Ben Wilson to work on it with me and we came up with a piece we’re both very proud of. No, we didn’t get the gig (yes of course they were nuts not to hire us – thanks for mentioning it!) but we got a wonderful showpiece that we thoroughly enjoyed creating, and it has brought us other work. Sometimes I get nutty ideas for commercials. I know nobody is going to produce them, so I do it myself. Or I just stick stuff into projects I’ve been hired to do, just because. A long-standing client wrote me yesterday that he has left AuctionPal, the company he founded three years ago and for which he hired me to create the young and energetic, British-accented Piper as their spokesperson. AuctionPal is doing great, and he's still closely associated with them, but he needs new outlets for his own energy and creativity so he’s starting a new internet marketing company, Double Vision. He’s interested in hiring me to do the telephone answering system and wanted me to try out some voices, so this is what I sent him.

The next time you find work slowing down (not that you would ever admit to anybody that that happens – cuz that would be putting negative energy out there and it gets in your way and trips you), don’t wring your hands over it – do something about it! Send out more postcards, make more calls, write more emails, do more networking – but also, create something. Don’t know how to make Flash animations? Find a friend who does or take a class. Lack production skillz? Collaborate. Get busy. If people aren’t hiring, hire yourself to create a showpiece. It will keep you in tip-top creative shape, you’ll have a blast, and you never know where it might take you.

Source Connect at MCM Voices

As of today I am able to offer Source Connect to my clients. My studio has a Lawson L47 FET microphone running into a John Hardy M-1 preamp, and thence to an Echo MiaMidi soundcard into Adobe Audition – a very clean signal chain.

The story of how I prepared to get Source Connect might be of interest to others who are considering how to get studio quality audio to their clients in real time, without the expense of installing and maintaining ISDN. Source Connect can be used with any recording software that supports VST plugins, not just Pro Tools – the Source Elements Desktop allows you to record audio, transmit it to a client as you’re recording, and store the audio on your own system to be opened up in any recording program you have. You pay only for the Source Connect program, there are no monthly fees, and you can bridge to ISDN if your client has ISDN but not Source Connect, although there is a fee for that service using bridge providers such as Out of Hear or Digifone. The basic SC package costs $395 and you can try it free for 15 days. ElDorado Recording Services sells Source Connect Standard for $395 including 1 hour of setup time by phone.

My first hurdle was to get my computer back on the Internet. I had taken it off nearly two years ago in order to protect my audio recording empire from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and got a second computer to use for everything but audio. All the audio files have thus had to be transferred to the second computer for uploading to clients, which I do with a jump drive – slightly tedious but I got used to it quickly and it’s very fast. Nothing at all has gone wrong with the dedicated audio workstation in all of that time, although the Internet-connected computer has crashed a couple of times – so I was not very keen on exposing that workstation to the world again. Nevertheless, it had to be done if I was going to use Source Connect. So the first thing I needed to buy was a new 25-ft ethernet cable. Once I connected that cable to my computer, I went to the Microsoft website to get all the downloads my cloistered computer had missed out on over the last two years – a couple of screens’ worth. It didn’t take very long for all the upgrades to be installed, and so far nothing bad has happened to my machine. I will continue to use it only for audio - no email or other downloads.

Since I’m not in the habit of using headphones while recording, I needed to buy a pair so that I would be able to hear the client during recording sessions, and I needed a headphone extension cable. I got a pair of Sennheiser HD 280’s from Amazon Marketplace. I do use headphones for editing, plugging them into the computer’s other soundcard (a Soundblaster Audigy 2). Since the Echo soundcard does not have a headphone jack, I bought a Samson C-Control which plugs into the Echo card and the headphones plug into the C-Control (which also has a talkback feature if I ever need to play engineer while somebody else is on the mic). So now I’m monitoring playback via the Echo card instead of the Soundblaster. I needed two patch cables for plugging the C-Control into the Echo card, a headphone splitter so I could plug two sets of headphones into the C-Control’s headphone jack, and a couple of ¼” stereo adapter plugs for the headphones (which have mini-plugs). The one other item I needed was an iLok dongle, which is required for the Source Elements license.

Prior to setting up Source Connect, I needed to check my upload speed to make sure the audio would be transferring from my system to my clients’ at a speed adequate for good sound quality. This is something I actually didn’t check until the Source Elements Desktop was installed, and I was testing Source Connect and discovered my audio was “jittery”. I had to postpone further testing until I could check with my Internet Service Provider (Verizon) and learn that I needed to upgrade my service. Verizon offered this upgrade to me for less than what I had been paying for my DSL (let’s not even go there). My download speed had been around 1500 kilobits per second, which was fine, but my upload speed was only around 125 kbs. It needs to be between 300 and 400 kbs for Source Connect to work properly. With the upgrade, my download speed is now closer to 3000 kbs and upload is over 700 kbs. You can Google “check upload speed” and you’ll have a number of choices to see how fast your data are coming from and going out to the internet. I used speedtest several times to check on the status of my upgrade, and was pleased to discover that it was in place a full 8 hours earlier than promised. By the way, for anyone interested in calling their ISP to inquire about upgrading service – do not go anywhere near tech support, go right to the billing department.

So, once my hardware was all in place, the next step was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done – I got an expert to help me with the rest. George Whittam of ElDorado Recording Services in Los Angeles is an audio engineer and an authorized Source Connect re-seller. George has helped many voice-over artists with audio workstation installations and maintenance and with Source Connect installations - including Don LaFontaine - and I decided to let him handle this. At a time convenient for both of us we talked on the telephone and he used LogMeIn to enable him to see my desktop and control my mouse. I watched and took notes while he downloaded Source Elements Desktop and synchronised it with my iLok. The appearance of the SC control panel wasn’t right and he got Source Connect on the telephone in no time and learned that I needed to have Quicktime installed on my computer for Source Elements Desktop to operate properly. If you're using a Windows computer and have never used Quicktime, you would need to download the Quicktime software from Apple. Mac users are all set as Quicktime comes pre-installed on a Mac. That was soon accomplished and the SC installation was done. We tested it, which is when we discovered the problem with the upload speed, so the completion of the testing was postponed until after that was resolved.

Now all the pieces are in place and Source Connect works great. I’m so glad I had George Whittam to help me – keeping up with all the moving parts of the voice-over business can be quite challlenging and there are times when it just makes sense to get help, especially since George’s help with installation is included when you buy Source Connect from him! The math was pretty easy on that one. George understands the voice-over world and knows what we need; furthermore he’s just a great guy to work with. I had decided last month that my goal was to have this project completed by the time I sent out my March newsletter, and since that was today, I made it! Setting goals is an excellent thing. Now, it remains to be seen whether Source Connect will change the landscape of my client base - I think that part is up to me. So if you will excuse me, I have some marketing to do!

Networking in voiceover

In voice-over as in all business ventures we think a lot about networking, and numerous articles have been appearing about it lately in various internet haunts that I frequent, including voice actor haunts like the Voice Registry Blog. It’s an indispensable activity, intimately related to marketing. But, it is not marketing and it shouldn’t look like it. It's just making connections of all kinds in all kinds of ways. What does it look like for you?

I have several formal outlets for networking: my local Chamber of Commerce, my local Ad Club, and another local group called Hidden Tech. The Chamber has the most regular meetings – a monthly “Arrive at 5”, quarterly breakfast meetings, and in addition I’m a member of its tourism committee. The Ad Club has a monthly luncheon series and an annual holiday party. Hidden Tech meets occasionally. I have not seen any measurable benefit to my business from the Chamber or the Ad Club - but then, I'm not measuring! A member of Hidden Tech needed a favor, which I was able to perform, which led to her giving me a spot as a speaker in a program she was organising, which led to a reporter writing a story about me for the local paper, which led to a call from a toy maker who needed a voice for a talking doll. My goal in participating in these various organisations is to be part of a community, which is especially important for those of us who work alone. When I go to these meetings, my challenge as a shy person is to talk to one or two people in some depth (not the trap-your-neighbor-and-talk-their-ear-off kind of depth, more like, find something that interests them and get them to talk about it). I want to make sure they know what I do for a living, and everybody asks, just as I ask everybody what they do. But nobody wants a sales talk at a party – what a turn-off! For thoughts on how not to network see a recent article by Ilse Benun.

I’m sure I’m not alone in this – at networking events, far more often than we voice actors hear “oh, you do voice-overs? I might have a job for you!” we hear, “I’ve always wanted to get into that – how did you get started?” There is nothing to be lost by giving a helpful answer to that question. Although I didn’t get started in this business by asking a voice actor how to do it – I was already in the demo-in-hand marketing phase before I ever talked to a working voice actor besides my coach – I hope I will never be too busy to try to give somebody a hand if they need one. We are always hoping somebody will give us a hand and we need to make sure the universe is balanced! I really like what casting director Bonnie Gillespie has to say about that in her column, The Actor’s Voice:

How often do you meet with new-to-town, enthusiastic, completely-clueless-to-the-biz actors upon whose lives you could make a huge positive impact, just by showing them how to format their resumé or where to download sides? Not too often, right? ("Why would I? What's in it for me? Who has the time?" Exactly.) Well, let's seek to change that. Do a little mentoring. Pay it forward. Invest in a relationship with someone who offers you absolutely nothing whatsoever in return....It could even connect you with someone whose career will skyrocket long before yours does, and that person might be so grateful to you for the early support that you'll benefit in ways you never imagined possible.


Hear hear! At the very least, being helpful makes the world a more pleasant place for our own selfish selves - that's worthwhile in and of itself, isn't it??

Blogging is another way that I network. Most of what I write is just more internet noise, but occasionally something will resonate with people and then I get a lot of email about it. Most of the people I hear from are other voice actors, which is a great boon in this age of isolation. It’s really nice when people email and leave comments at my blog, and I try to do it myself at other blogs. If you’ve never left a comment here, please think about doing it – as soon as you leave a comment, you become visible – people learn that you exist. That’s a good thing! So leave one here, and then go to some of the blogs listed on the right and leave a comment there too.

I have to say that, so far, social networking has not taken up much of my networking time-budget. I have a profile at the major sites and a bunch of others, and have spent some time reviewing others’ profiles for possible connections. But I spend more than enough time on the computer as it is, and I SO do not need another reason to be here – there are more efficient ways to connect with colleagues and with potential clients, and I’m too old to be using them for friendship-related stuff (as it was so well stated at Beyond Madison Avenue: “social networking is only social if you’re alone”).

I think the most important thing to remember is that any networking you do as a voice actor and business person is like creating a garden from bare soil – you don’t plant only one kind of plant, such that your garden will look great for a week when all the flowers are blooming, and then there’s nothing going on at all. You’re planting for the present and for the future – a variety of annuals with different blooming times, a variety of perennials and shrubs and even some trees. Aim for great diversity, so that there is always something going on in your garden. Although I can't point to concrete ways that my business has benefited from all of my networking activities, I never know when some little seed I've planted at a party might take root and grow into something wonderful. It takes 3-5 years to establish a business, so get out there in the dirt and get busy!! And don’t forget to leave a comment to tell me how your garden grows.

Note on 5 Feb 2008: another article on acting and networking! It's in the air - as it always should be.

Protecting your investment in voiceover

What do you do to ensure you don’t provide voice-over work for free, unintentionally? You’ve worked hard to achieve your current professional status as a voice talent, you've made some hard decisions about the rates you will charge, you are striving to make a living, and you don’t want to give your work away except by your own choice. Most people who hire us are honest, and until recently, I’ve always gone into voice-over work relationships with nothing more than a virtual handshake unless my client has asked me to sign a contract or release form. These documents, by the way, are invariably created to protect the client, not to protect me.

A few things can go wrong when we’re working with people we’ve never met and are unlikely ever to see. One is that they can skip the step of paying you, or they can take months to pay. Another is that they pay you for one thing, but end up using your work for other applications. I’ve been in business as a voice talent for only 3 years, so I definitely have not seen everything, and would like to come up with effective ways to protect my work while not becoming paranoid and suspicious. So I’d like to review the possibilities, and would greatly appreciate input from colleagues about how to start a work relationship on the right foot.

I get most of my work from clients I’ve found by searching on my own for companies that might need the services of a voiceover professional, and from online freelance job postings. If the potential client has a website, that’s where I get my first impression of the company. If the site looks professional, that’s a good sign. If they are members of a civic organisation such as an ad club or chamber of commerce, that also speaks well for them – anyone in the habit of shady dealing is unlikely to want associations that raise their public profile and is unlikely to “waste” money joining such organisations. Membership in the Better Business Bureau is also a very positive sign; many businesses that are perfectly legitimate are not members, but it may be informative to look up the company on the BBB website since complaints can be filed about any business, not just members. So looking up the company at the BBB is an excellent way to do some preliminary checking on a potential client.

Your first communication about a voice-over job may be a request for an audition (Phase I). If I receive a very long script from someone with whom I’ve never worked and am asked for an audition, I just read a few choice paragraphs - possibly the intro and the outro and one paragraph from the middle - depending on the script I will look for a paragraph with technical terms so the client can see how I handle the complexities of the script. This way, they have a read that is long enough to tell them if I’m right for the job, but not the entire script. I prefer this to watermarking (adding music or a sound to make the recording unusable) because it lets the client hear what I do with their script without distraction, while still not doing the entire job.

If I’m hired, then it’s time for Phase II. As I said, I never used to do anything to protect myself from unscrupulous consumers of voice-over – starting from the premise that everybody is honest. Now, after a few negative experiences, it’s time to change that. I have a lot of colleagues who commonly request a 50% deposit via PayPal before starting work, and the rest upon completion. This is a great idea and I’ve recently started to implement it myself. It worked wonderfully well last month when I was looking forward to a quiet week during which I would finally have time to prepare for the holidays. Instead, I suddenly had an influx of work from new clients. I was hustling to get it all done and really did not want the stress of wondering whether all these people that I didn’t know were going to pay me. So, I asked them all for that 50% deposit unless they were referred to me by someone I knew, or in one case, I admit, I just had a good feeling about them and skipped that step (my instinct was good – they paid immediately). For some reason, many of us are uncomfortable about the money side of the business. If you’re new to this sort of procedure, as I am, I recommend writing out your payment policy and practise saying it, so that you can do it fluently and without flinching (or if your communication is by email, no problem – you’ve got the words at your fingertips). It's common practise to request a deposit on a service prior to delivery, particularly when the parties are conducting business remotely, so we all need to learn to do it. By the way, PayPal does charge a fee to the funds recipient (you). You can either consider this part of the cost of doing business and add the fees to your year's business expenses, or you can include them in your bill. Use this calculator to figure out in advance what the PayPal fee will be (thank-you Brian Hart for this link).

The policy of requiring a downpayment will take care of much of the potential problem of non-payment, unless you’re working with a client in another country that is unable to use Paypal. For such cases, you may be able to use Western Union instead of Paypal. For direct bank-to-bank wires, your bank may charge a fee for incoming transfers, as mine does – I solved that by shopping for a local bank that doesn’t, and opened an account there just for receiving wire transfers from overseas clients.

As for the clients who didn’t pay me – there have been two. The first one simply never paid and does not respond to my emails. The second one sent a check that bounced. Since my bank charges a fee in such cases, I actually had to pay to do that particular voice-over job, which I considered a pretty outrageous insult on top of the injury. I wrote to the client, who apologised profusely, said their bookkeeper had embezzled thousands and had been arrested, and he promised he would “make it up to me” right away. Six months later, he hasn’t. I submitted a complaint to the Better Business Bureau, who recently contacted me to tell me they had not received any response from the company. A review of the company on the BBB site reveals that they have a rating of “F” for not responding to complaints, of which there have been several. If I had done my homework I would have seen this and saved myself a headache, but I hope I have learned my lesson. I have no further plans to pursue payment for the work I did – it isn’t worth the exasperation.

Will I do the internet research, the BBB background check, and require the 50% deposit for all new clients from now on? Actually, probably not. For many of the jobs I get, I already know enough about the company to feel safe with them, either because they were referred to me by someone I trust, or because I was the one who made the initial contact and had already done my homework. And sometimes I just have a good feeling about them and decide to trust my instincts. If I have responded to an online job posting, however, and don’t actually know the name of the company until they contact me, that’s when I plan to require the deposit. Especially if their first effort to contact me is by phone, it’s important to be ready to explain that policy up front, before I do any work.

Another problem that can come up to threaten your investment in your voice and career is that of overexposure. This is something I had never really thought about until recently. A read I did for a TV commercial in a major market was later used for radio, so my voice was on the air waves a lot. It was a non-union job and I had signed a standard release. The reason this could be a problem was summed up well by Kara Edwards in a discussion at VoiceoverSavvy. She wrote:

I recently had to negotiate a contract with a company. We really hit a cross-roads with the rates I proposed for extra usage of the original audio. When I explained that it was less about money, and more about exposure...they totally agreed with me.

I'll explain: Let's say I sign a contract with company A to do a VO. I don't add anything into the contract about usage, and I give company A full legal right to do what they will with my audio. Company A takes the audio, puts it online, on TV, animates it, makes a talking doll with it, etc. Suddenly, my voice is being heard everywhere and I haven't made much money. Company B (a major corporation) creates a job I would be perfect for...but they are hesitant because my voice is already heard everywhere with company A (for little money), so they go with another actor. Now I am stuck.... (quoted with permission)

Kara further noted that

When I am contacted directly, I always repeat back to them what they've proposed...

"You need a :30 VO for a 13 week run in Louisiana, correct? The fee for this voice over will be $---.--. If you choose to use the audio in any additional manner, I've included my rate sheet for your convenience." (quoted with permission)

So in your preliminary negotiations with your clients, it's important to give some thought to how you will deal with usage fees, buy-outs (an additional fee to give your client unlimited use of the recording for a certain time period), interest on late payments, and other contingencies. You will find some very helpful templates that deal with these matters at Voices.com.

My thanks to Kara Edwards both for her wise words and for giving me permission to quote them. You can expect a blog post on this topic in the next few weeks by Kara herself at her own blog.

I welcome your comments about your own experiences with client agreements, contracts, non-payment and all that other bad stuff! What else should we be doing to minimise the bad stuff and maximise the good?

Perceived Value in Voice-over

Those of us in business to offer a service are sometimes challenged by those requiring the service. “I can get it cheaper", they tell you. My previous post on setting rates addresses this question in excruciating detail for the voice-over business (without going into much numerical detail) and might serve as a resource for those of you who come up against this with your clients. The purpose of my current post is to explore a related problem: how to make sure the question doesn’t come up in the first place. Our own attitudes and convictions will go a long way towards that end.

I used to work as curator of birds at a large midwestern university with a natural history museum. My job responsibilities included 1) advising students and teaching general biology (majors and non-majors courses) and evolutionary biology, 2) research and all that that entails (obtaining government funding and writing papers), and 3) curation of the bird collections (including writing grant proposals for collection infrastructure). We had regular curators’ meetings that included all the departments within the museum – birds, mammals, insects, molluscs and so forth. One of the topics that came up repeatedly was how to defend our existence to the dean of our college, who simply didn’t understand why a natural history museum was important. She did not see its value, so the threat of reduced funding and loss of paid positions was always hanging over us. This could be demoralising. A few years ago I heard George W. Bush on the news referring to the Smithsonian Institution as “the nation’s bug collection” as he slashed funding for its programs. A "bug collection" can be a source of pride - a national treasure - or a derogatory term, depending on how it's uttered and how it's perceived.

In contrast, the American Museum of Natural History is a private institution, not subject to the budgetary whims of a president with an agenda that does not include ‘bugs”, nor a dean whose short-sightedness affects their bottom line. The museum has a charismatic leadership that understands the importance of branding and marketing, and that encourages and funds research that regularly makes the news. Some of this research may not directly affect “the human condition”, but it’s snazzy and it grabs the public’s attention. That museum is huge and it’s flourishing. Then there is the much smaller Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks in tiny Tupper Lake, New York. This museum cost millions of dollars to build, and when it opened its doors in July 2006, the Governor of New York and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton were in attendance for the ribbon cutting. The leadership of this museum certainly knew what they were doing - starting out from a position of strength, they hit the ground running with heads held high. No need to defend your existence if you don’t permit it to be called into question in the first place. It’s all about perceptions and posture - attitude.

If someone questions your value and you let such questioning corrode your own perceptions, you can start to feel that you are indeed less valuable than you really are. This sort of situation can be avoided with charismatic leadership. In the case of your business, that leadership is you.

We’ve all seen or received requests to donate our services for non-profit projects or even for producers creating commercials or other assignments “on speculation”. “No pay, but there will be lots of paid work in the future for the person who helps us now”. I’ve heard comparisons of voice-over with other professions such as the plumbing trade, like this: “install this sink for us for free, and we’ll pay you to install other sinks in the future.” Amusing, but not exactly apt. Almost everybody needs a plumber at some point, but not everybody will need a voice-over in the course of their lives. So, do we secretly feel that plumbers’ work is more valuable than our own? Not everybody can install a sink, but anybody can talk, right? Attitude! Anybody can install a sink badly, write badly, or perform a voice-over badly. If Jim Dale were indisposed while recording Harry Potter, would it be okay for one of the audio engineers at Scholastic to fill in for him? Who would be a better choice to voice a commercial for Geico, the CEO of the company, or Jake Wood? To be Bart Simpson - Nancy Cartwright or the kid up the street? Whom would you rather listen to promoting your favorite TV program – your cousin Darrell, or you? You’re not as good as Jim Dale or Jake Wood or Nancy Cartwright, you say? Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t. Maybe you aren’t yet. Read this for more thoughts on that subject. Value comes from quality in many cases, in others it’s marketing, or a combination of both. Gregor Mendel’s research on garden peas was the basis of modern genetics. His work was ignored for years before others were able to appreciate its significance fully and explain its value to the scientific community and to the public, and thus change perceptions.

Perceptions change with changing values. What’s one of the cheapest things you can buy at the grocery store? Salt. Where did the word “salt” come from? From the Latin, sal. And the word salary is rooted in the word for salt. Why? Because in ancient Rome, salt was used as payment. For a while we used gold. The paper money that represented the gold doesn’t have much value by itself. Neither, actually, does the gold. It was merely the standard. Create a need, and the thing that’s needed has value. Create value, and you've enhanced the need.

I received a newsletter last week from Marcia Yudkin of Marketing for More. She has some cogent thoughts about perceived value:

Governor Deval Patrick's proposal to eliminate tuition for Massachusetts community colleges recently received a thoughtful response from the president of Greenfield Community College, Robert Pura.

"We want to really deeply explore what the word 'free' means and conjures up" before we implement such a proposal, Pura said, suggesting that increasing financial aid might be a better way to make college more affordable.

The effective cost might be the same for state residents with both proposals, but "free tuition" might encourage "a wave of students who take their education lightly, over-enroll and drop classes without much thought," Pura told the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Beefing up financial aid communicates responsibility rather than entitlement and may encourage a more serious approach to education.

Likewise, business coach Mark Silver says an acupuncturist he worked with found her patients getting well faster when she raised her fees. It seemed that patients were more likely to do as she suggested between sessions, to get their money's worth, when they were paying more.

Because prices influence perceived value, prices also affect client behavior and their results. Marcia Yudkin, The Marketing Minute (quoted with permission).

My friend and fellow voice talent Dan Nachtrab tells a story about perceived value that remains one of my favorite voice-over anecdotes. He has given me permission to quote it:

A while back, I answered an ad for a narration. A few days go by and I get a call from the producer, who keeps going on that she really has "heard my voice before" and how she would love to have me voice her project. Unfortunately, someone else had answered the ad and said they would do it for FREE, just so they could pad their resume. This is when the sales comes in. The challenge is: How do I not only get the gig, but get her to pay me? The answer: Create value. The hook was baited when she visted my site, read the opening introduction sentence and listened to my demos. (To save you some time, it says "Most likely you have heard his voice.") She truly believed she knew who I was and that I was an established talent. (I can't verify the first, but, hey, how can I argue with the second?) Next, I had to remove the credibilty and perceived value of the talent giving away his services. So, I ventured to tell her "I already have a resume filled with many companies in your same field." Then I related a quick story of one such company, very closely related to hers. This proved I had intimate knowledge of her industry and could provide the service she desired. Now I have VALUE in her eyes. She bit the hook and asked my price. She paid full rate. Remember, we are also in sales. Even though Wal-Mart offers cheaper prices, people are still shopping at Saks.

That last line should be cross-stitched and hung over the door to all voice-over booths. Dan's got it right - he offers great value, but he also knows how to convey the perception of value - he knows how to sell.

It's a rule in voice-over that the clients who are paying the least are demanding the most. You get a few of those and you learn to avoid them like the plague. If you're a professional voice talent, quoting low prices to get the job undervalues the service you’re offering, in the eyes of your customers and, eventually, in your own. Offering a service cheaply may eventually result in loss of quality as well, as you become demoralised and fail to deliver your best work. It is not possible to perform well when you or your customers expect a $50 performance for a $300 job. Much better to give a $350 performance when you’re being paid $300. The next time you’re tempted to quote low, ask yourself why you are undercutting your own services. In effect, you’re on the road to putting yourself out of business. So I ask you - are you offering a valuable service or aren't you? If so, charge a respectable fee - a fee that shows you recognise and respect what you are offering - if you expect other people to value it as well.

Whether you're a voice talent, or a college graduate applying for a job, or a manager negotiating a raise or a corporate executive trying to win a big account, take a lesson from Dan Nachtrab, who was so (rightly) comfortable with the value of his services that he convinced a producer to hire him over the guy who offered to do the job for nothing. Or from the leadership of the Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks, who had the guts to open an expensive institution in a little town in upstate New York in a climate of "the nation's bug collection". Because of their justifiable conviction of their own value, they had the entire state of New York behind them.

Now, go out and get your clients behind you.

The path to greatness

Last year a fascinating article appeared in Fortune Magazine entitled What it takes to be great. To sum up the article’s findings: we don’t possess natural talent, rather the way to become great is through hard work and practise. This is now very well documented, although not necessarily a popular finding since many people would like to think that if they could only find their talent, they would be great and fame and fortune would easily follow. The latter mindset leads to discouragement and heartbreak, causing individuals to waste their time wondering and dreaming rather than investing the time and work that is required to achieve success.

Where do the drive and motivation come from that lead some people to put in the amount of work that it takes to be great? Why are some people such hard workers, while others who may be more brilliant than those busy bees just can’t get motivated to put in the time? The article poses these questions, but does not provide answers since they remain a mystery. Probably an examination of the lives of great achievers would reveal early life circumstances that suggest parallel motivating factors such as extreme poverty, deprivation or other hardship; chance encounters with inspiring individuals who became mentors, or other experiences that sparked a particular interest. Motivation is one thing, since that comes from external factors; persistence and drive to pursue a certain endeavor are another. These will probably eventually be shown to be yet another of the brain’s many biochemical and neurological wonders. I have some ideas about that too.

One of the reasons this has been on my mind is that I just finished reading Lion of Hollywood – the Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer by Scott Eyman. Although other treatments of Mayer's life have presented the man in a rather unfavorable light, Eyman’s biography is much more sympathetic and rightly returns Mayer to his place in history as one of the great executives of the 20th century. Mayer created a motion picture studio that was a symbol of quality and opulence, and one that was considered by many of Hollywood's stars to be the place to work. When he was forced out of MGM by a younger exec in 1951, the place began a steep decline, so much so that Mayer was actually asked to return several years later. He was, however, unable to do so due to declining health.

Mayer’s motivators undoubtedly stemmed from his early years of poverty as a child growing up in Saint John, New Brunswick, where his family had moved from Russia. His father was a junk dealer and the children were put to work at an early age. Mayer’s primary memory of his childhood was of being very hungry. He was nevertheless full of energy and worked very hard (much harder than his rather indolent father). A local tin dealer, John Wilson, befriended the boy and one of the things Mayer always remembered was Wilson’s advice: “When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on”. Never, ever give up. Mayer eventually moved to the U.S. and became interested in motion picture distribution, which is where most of the early movie moguls got their start, and this led to a desire to create the movies that were shown in the theatres. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was formed in 1924. Louis B. Mayer had traveled a very long way from the streets of Saint John to his white leather office in MGM’s Thalberg Building.

It’s clear from reading Eyman’s book that Mayer had tremendous energy, which I’m convinced is another hugely significant factor in an individual’s ability to be great, although it doesn’t explain everything. Charles Darwin, for example, put in long years of toil on the research that led to the publication of his On the Origin of Species in 1859, despite debilitating illness which prevented him working more than a few hours a day, and there are many other examples which I won’t detail here because this essay is already too long! But I'm sure that the more energy you have, the harder you can work. Probably the knowledge that Alfred Russel Wallace was hard at work on the same subject drove Darwin harder.

How does all of this relate to the business and practise of voice over? For those of us already in the business, the motivation is presumably already there. Setting goals provides the infrastructure to keep us on that path to greatness. These goals should include the business side of voice over as well as the use of the voice itself – for the latter, listening to other demos and broadcast commercials and narration, and choosing specific aspects of our own voice-over skills that need improvement and working on them. It helps to write the goals down in the form of daily routines, since it is daily work, not occasional, that will lead to improvement. And not least important is taking care of ourselves, physically, mentally, and spiritually, to keep energy levels high and stress levels low.

That’s my rudimentary theory on greatness and success, a blend of what I've read and what I've made up, with very little of a practical nature (after all, you have other things to do besides sit here and read my ramblings!). I would love to hear your thoughts. Also, your comments on what you do to manage energy and stress would be very welcome and of great interest.

What you want versus what you need as a student of voice-over.

A discussion took place recently on the vo-bb.com about VOICE2007, a conference that took place in Las Vegas last month, ostensibly as a networking and teaching/learning event for voice artists. About 200 people participated and from all accounts it was a great success. There has been much talk about making it an annual event and considerable enthusiasm has been expressed by those members of vo-bb who attended. Several of us who did not attend questioned the goals for the conference, and the response was a laundry list of reasons why such a conference is extremely valuable. Since my reasons for questioning the goals had nothing to do with the value of holding such a conference, and not wanting to beat the horse too severely in that forum, I thought I would continue my thoughts here, since after all, nobody will read them anyway.

My own reasons for not attending: it cost $500 to register, plus travel and lodging in expensive hotels, which could add up to $1000. That was the main reason. But if I had had the money in my travel & training budget to spend, I would not have spent it on a large group seminar. When my husband and I used to teach ballroom dance, we would always advise prospective students that they should take an inexpensive group class before spending money on private lessons, because there is no reason to pay a private instructor to teach the basic steps. The first group dance class I took was at a community college and cost all of $29 for a full semester (about 12 classes). Later, when I was training for competitions, I paid $45/hour for private instruction, and occasionally $100 an hour for a top-level instructor who was also a judge for international competitions. My advice for a voice-over beginner would be the opposite – private coaching is usually the more economical way to go. $340 got me 6 intensive hours of voice-over coaching with Charles Michel, another $400 got me my first demo including direction, recording and production. I got work from that demo pretty quickly and kept using it for over a year, at which point I felt it no longer represented the range of performance of which I was capable (I would hope that, after a year in the business, one’s range would expand! So that was all good). I currently produce my own commercial and narration demos.

Goals evolve. The longer you’re in the voice-over business, the more you start to focus on a niche and your marketing approach inevitably changes along with your goals. You may start to feel the need for additional training of a specialised nature such as training that addresses animation, ADR, audio books, movie trailer work – and some of this training may be as much about “getting connected” in your area of specialty as it is about skill acquisition. A lot of work can be done without paying somebody to teach you, if you have the discipline. But as Pat Fraley often says, “experience is the slowest teacher”, and it may be more economical to hire help. Targeted help that is directly related to what you have decided you want to accomplish. There are lots of qualified instructors offering weekend intensive workshops, even vacation voice-over cruises. What fun it would be to take them all. You might very well want to and of course you would get a lot out of it. But what do you really need? If your budget is limited, you need to think very carefully about what you’re trying to accomplish, what your goals are and what is the most efficient route to making them a reality. I’m still not sure of my goals, because despite narrowing my focus considerably in the last year, there are so many aspects of this business that I love and I can think of several empty voice-over niches that I could fill – I still can’t decide among them. So spending money on conferences that offer an overview of the entire business would be extremely unwise, and until I’m making so much money that I’m looking for tax deductions, I will not be attending these conferences, even though I might want to.

How do you know when to quit?

Bob Souer wrote a thought-provoking article in his blog this week entitled "Packing it in". It’s intended to help struggling voice artists ask themselves some hard questions about their success or failure, and to consider the possibility that the cost of sticking with it may be too great. It’s full of good advice about training, demo production and website development.

In the few days since I first read his post, I have had a somewhat visceral reaction to it. Visceral reactions usually have more to do with the way something makes you feel than with what was actually intended – possibly reflecting a past experience or a philosophy one has developed. So I went back and re-read Bob’s words today, feeling pretty sure he was not advising struggling voice artists to quit and indeed, he is not. Rather, he is pointing out where to look for problems and what to do about them and, finally, to consider as a last resort if the jobs are not coming in, that this business might not be right for you. Goodness knows it’s a crowded field and many won’t make it. Publicity about the glamour and money in voice-over probably draws in a lot of people who don’t necessarily love it nor have the dedication to make it work. I had a call a month or so ago from somebody who had found my website and got the idea that I could somehow sign people up for voiceover. I gently suggested she send me an email and I would give her some information to get her started, and I think she may have been surprised that there were any intermediate steps between “signing up” and making money, because I never heard another word from her. Some people may indeed fall by the wayside before they ever take their second step towards a voice-over career. There are definitely people who won’t make it. And it’s good to have your eyes open when you start down any new path so you can see where the potholes are and the snakes and panthers waiting to drop down from the trees. But I hope I will never be the one to tell someone they aren’t going to make it. I can’t imagine any circumstance where that will be any of my business.

I come from an academic background and it was part of my job as a college professor to advise students. Many kids came through my office door with aspirations to be doctors, veterinarians, or research biologists, and I encouraged them all to pursue their goals vigorously. I would never presume to tell anyone that they shouldn’t take a certain career path. Everybody needs to figure it out for themselves and all the advice in the world isn’t going to help. I had always heard that “if you can imagine yourself doing anything else, you shouldn’t be doing this,” but I never bought that line. If you’re lucky, life is long enough to do several things, and it would be such a pity not to give your dreams your best shot, even if you have more than one dream. My first career was as an evolutionary biologist and I studied avian anatomy. My research drew upon data I gathered from limb musculature to formulate hypotheses about the phylogenetic relationships of birds. It was not smooth sailing, let me tell you. As a 17-year old I attended summer school at Cornell to study ornithology. I got a B- in the laboratory part of the course because I couldn’t make myself learn the names of all those muscles. I didn’t know until some years later that I would know all those muscle names as well as I knew my own name. I got a D on my first college evolution exam, and anatomy lab in graduate school was a terrible struggle for me. The sciences were never my best subjects, and I knew that, yet I wanted to be a scientist, and I was. I published a number of papers of which I’m extremely proud, including some theoretical ones. Eventually, though, after a couple of decades at it, I decided to change fields. Does that mean I failed as a scientist? Of course not. It was not easy for me, and I did not always take the best road to meet my goals, but I consider myself to have been successful.

So, here I am now pursuing a career in voice-over. Yet one of my early embarrassing memories is of speaking into a tape recorder in fourth grade when we read the Wind in the Willows out loud. I had the part of the Mole and everybody laughed when they heard my little voice on that tape. It was excruciating. I had to overcome that embarrassment in order to make this new career a possibility, and I did because I wanted so passionately to do this. For every career there is an example of somebody great who heard discouraging words about their talent or their chances of success. The summary of Fred Astaire’s screen test for MGM is legendary: “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Balding. Can dance a little.” Every creative endeavor requires persistence and dedication and you don’t have to be special to be great. And if you love it, you won’t listen to anybody who has the temerity to tell you that you aren’t going to make it. It might make you angry to hear such words, but you’ll keep going because it doesn’t occur to you to do otherwise. Of course, you can be realistic and you may have to make compromises. But if you decide ultimately that it isn’t working, it probably means you have conflict in your life and this is not your time. It does not mean you failed.

You know the formula for success. Hard work, dedication, persistence. It isn’t magic. It isn’t a gift. And only you can make it work for yourself.

Thank-you Bob Souer for making me think about this. I know you aren’t advising anyone to quit either, just offering a healthy look at the obstacles that face anyone undertaking a new endeavor. I’m just glad I didn’t know about the obstacles before I started—much better to look back two years later and think—phew, that panther just barely missed me!! And who knows what perils are around the next bend.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, and may you all find a nice big M. iliotrochantericus, supracoracoideus, or pectoralis on your plate this Thursday evening!!

Catching up.

Over 2 weeks without an entry – I’m in withdrawal! I’ve been leaning on my friends and colleagues like Bob Souer, Karen Commins and Elaine Singer to hold down the voice-over blogging fort. If you haven’t checked out their recent entries yet you’re in for a treat. Karen’s retrospective on the construction of her voice-over studio is fascinating reading!

Since my last report there has been happy fallout from the article about me in the Gazette – a local toymaker who read the article (actually, his wife called him at work and read the article to him over the phone) asked me to do the voice for a talking doll he is pitching to Mattel.

The words “local toymaker” alone are enough to make me sit back and marvel at the amazing place where I live. My town had fewer than 30,000 people at the last census, yet it contains an incredible density of talent. The number of media professionals here seems remarkable for a region that is so far from a major city.

When I think of toymakers I think of Santa’s workshop, although I’m assured that this man’s studio bears no resemblance to that North Pole locale. It’s mostly computers. He tells me he comes up with about a hundred toy concepts each year, of which 30 make it to development, of which maybe 2 are sold, of which 0-2 make it to toy store shelves. People who know him tell me he makes a pretty good living. I’m looking forward to visiting his studio soon to get a better sense of what he does and how he does it.

Since my last blog entry I picked up my new business cards, designed for me as a gift by Slav Vaskevich of Vaskevich Studios. I’m nuts about them. Slav’s original design included a microphone, which I was hesitant to use because they are so overused. We compromised and he replaced the Electrovoice RE20, a microphone I don’t care for and don’t own, with a Soundelux U195, which is the mic I use and love. I got the cards just in time to take them to a Chamber of Commerce party where business cards were traded furiously, and a number of people oohed over my cards. Several raffles took place at this party and ironically my shiny new cards didn’t win me anything, whereas my old dull card had snagged tickets to an Arlo Guthrie concert at the last raffle in which I participated – courtesy of the Ad Club of Western Massachusetts and Business West. But many raffles lie ahead I’m sure :)

MCM’s shiny new business card, front and back

Speaking of Arlo Guthrie, that concert took place last night. My husband and I enjoyed it immensely and I was truly thrilled to be able to see this American icon perform, after so many years of enjoying his music. I had not even realised that his home base is only an hour away in the Berkshires, although he spends about 10 months a year on the road. Mr. Guthrie performed with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra on this occasion. I wondered about our fellow concert goers as I studied the crowd – all ages were represented but it was definitely an older crowd on average, and not just senescent hippies – perhaps it included a lot of season ticket holders who might not otherwise have sought out Arlo Guthrie. During the intermission one elderly attendee called to an acquaintance a few rows up: “Tuesday I’m gettin’ a new knee!!” I am not making this up. My husband concluded that this man was definitely a season ticket holder and that the knee operation was necessitated by years of sitting in that concert hall, where the rows of seats are packed closer together than in any concert hall I have ever seen. They are literally so close together that anyone over 5’ 3” would be uncomfortable. But never mind the seats. We heard some old favorites last night, including the current version of the fluid story of Alice’s Restaurant, and City of New Orleans with orchestral accompaniment. Mr. Guthrie sang a lovely song he wrote in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, his father’s This Land is Your Land as well as quite a few songs I had not heard, and told lots of funny stories. He only gave one curtain call, and then he sang Lead Belly’s Goodnight Irene, popularised by the Weavers – one of my husband’s favorites that he used to sing to our children when they were little. We did not hear the song I loved to sing to the kids when they were babies: Hobo’s Lullaby, but I can always dust off the turntable and get out Arlo Guthrie’s record of that name if I need to hear it, which I most certainly do!

I will be keeping tabs on Mr. Guthrie’s performance schedule in hopes of hearing him again, but this busy man’s plans do not appear to include New England venues in the near future. Carnegie Hall a week from now and after that he’s all over the country and very much in demand. I am so thankful for the opportunity to hear him. An inspiring figure, a gifted singer-songwriter and a great American.

That’s the news from MCM Voices. I’m trying to finish up a very large narration project for my educational software friends this weekend as they have deadlines looming. But I needed to get some written words out of my system first!