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Oh the lessons we learn in this crazy business we call VO. As my colleague Tom Dheere was no doubt penning his own blog http://tomdheere.com/blog/ about communicating with agents, I was once again slapped in the face with a similar business lesson.

I have been fortunate to have landed an agent to represent me in my short time as a voice actor, several in fact. One such agent is out of Philadelphia. When I signed with the agency the owner told me they don’t get many voice over requests. I appreciated the honesty, but sill signed. Though I live in Baltimore now, I was born and raised in Philadelphia so I was excited to be represented in my home town. This, as someone who still considers Rocky Balboa the greatest athlete to hail from the “city of brotherly love”.

At any rate, it had been some time since I had heard from said agent. Not one to rock the boat I had not followed up in a while. I assumed the agents were busy and they’d contact me when they had something. Then today I contacted them. I wanted to talk about doing some marketing to some local media contacts. The owner responded and kindly pointed out that some of the “paperwork” they ask all new talent to do was missing. There are several casting sites that I was to create profiles for as a new talent. I thought I had done this. When I went to the sites, however, both said my account was inactive! It seems I missed a step in both places and the account was deactivated after a few months! The agency was understandably miffed at me for not doing what they asked. Note, nobody told me this but I can read between the lines. I know how I would feel if I had been in the same position.

Well, suffice it to say I NOW have filled out all the requested information. The agent said “I’m glad you emailed Paul”. Probably not coincidentally, I also received an audition from the agent today.

So the moral of the story is, communicate, communicate, communicate! It’s great to land with an agent. As Tom points out, they are not a panacea for your career. However, if you want them to help you, make sure you let them! Follow their instructions, and for Pete’s sake, TALK TO THEM!

It can be tough to value yourself and your talents when you run your own business. There is always the inner thoughts in your mind about what is “fair” based on your experience, training and perceived talent. This is especially true of those in the arts.
If you ever want to be successful, as well as taken seriously in your marketplace, however, you have to charge fair rates. Well, what is the best way to do that? In my opinion, there are several best practices. One way is to ask those that have come before you. Look around at what those people you respect in the business are doing. If their rates are not published, Ask! The voiceover community especially is incredibly helpful to those who seek guidance respectfully and tactfully. A second way to get a grasp on fair rates is to look to advocacy groups. For voice actors there is no better place than the World Voices Organization or WoVo (www.world-voices.org). In fact yours truly just participated in their monthly rates roundtable where we discussed this very topic. You can watch the full video here http://youtu.be/BmBInKWw8m0.

This brings me to this week’s real world example. One of the topics discussed in the roundtable was how to set up a fair rate at the beginning of your business and stick to it. So this week I quoted a client on an elearning piece. The client accepted my bid but came back to me with a request for syncing the voice to an existing video…in Russian! I immediately put on the brakes and said “you didn’t mention syncing in the job listing, this will require an extra fee”. I wasn’t being greedy, just honest to both the client and myself. How much extra work there really was to do was even more than I imagined (but that is a lesson for a different day).

Anyway, I quoted the client an additional fee that was a full 50% of the original price for the entire job. You know what happened? They said yes, immediately, and off we went.

So the moral of this week’S story? Know your rates, stick to your guns and Don’t Sell Yourself Short!

This week I learned a valuable lesson. Know what you know, know what you don’t, and most importantly once you seek the advice of experts, Listen to them!

I have been struggling with getting my sound right. I have spent months worth of time researching, tweaking, and researching some more. As a voice actor here in Baltimore, I had a local sound engineer based in Maryland, come out and listen to my setup. I sought out and paid for advice from experts all over the country. Even had the incomparable George Whittam set my up with his Twisted Wave stacks for processing auditions. I had finally gotten to a place where technically, my sound is quite good, dare I say “Broadcast Quality”? No, I would never use those words. The thing is, the results were not there on my auditions. So, off I went making changes. New mic, new interface, new mic position. “This has to be the reason” I told myself. Well, a few weeks went by and the results were largely the same. A few small gigs here and there but I was still being largely ignored by the big jobs.

Even further exasperated I went back to what was setup by the experts, namely the Twisted Wave Stacks. I also put back my existing mic and interface. I started working with George again and he told me my setup “Sounds Excellent!”. Additionally, I set off on completing a new demo with the great Terry Daniel. I wanted to create something from my space so that potential clients would hear a true representation of what they would get when they hired me. Terry assured me my space sounded “expletive deleted…Professional!”.

With two more reassurances, (and exclamation points to boot!) I started sending out auditions again. Wouldn’t you know it, I booked a job on a P2P just days later. Here’s the kicker. The job was supposed to be done via phone patch next week. The client not only hired me, but they decided to cancel the session and just use the audition in the final cut. They said “We don’t need the phone patch Paul, you nailed the audition!”

So, the moral of the story is…Create a good studio sound. Seek out good advice, and hire the people who know the industry of course. However, when you get a setup up that works, don’t mess with it, and by all means TRUST THE EXPERTS!

Thanks for listening.

Paul

Necessity is the Mother of Invention. You have heard the adage a thousand times. I experienced this again this week. It was 100 degrees in Charm City several days this week. Heat index (still not sure this is a real thing) makes it “feel” like 115 degrees! My booth, made up entirely of sound absorbing panels gets to 90 degrees in the middle of winter. Imagine how terrible it gets when the temperature outside gets this hot? Oh, and did I mention, with the city of Baltimore being nearly at sea level, we also have 100% humidity. Yay!

So something had to be done. I looked around for some turn key ventilation systems and found them to be overly complicated and expensive. So, I did what any self respecting personal studio owner would do, I MADE THE DARN THING MYSELF. After all, my actual booth is really a drum shield, that I cobbled together to make it more sound proof. After I was done adding sound absorbing blankets to the walls and surrounding windows, I started affectionately calling my space “Franken Booth”. It is so lovely. Massive space hog on the outside, yet with only 3.2 by 2.8 feet of space on the inside. I get the worst of all worlds!

Anyway, I digress; back to ventilation. I went online to Amazon to buy an exhaust fan, typically used for venting pipes or air ducts. Mine was a 4 inch wide model. Then I bought some 4 inch flexible aluminum duct, 25 feet of it. The space I was shoving this contraption into was only 2 inches wide so I also needed a 4 inch to 3 inch duct reducer. Finally, I used a 2 inch PVC elbow joint as the lead into the booth. All product links will be at the bottom if you want to see the full list. After all was connected (with some hello kitty duct tape from my daughter) I pushed the whole line in through the cable pass through of my booth. Now here’s the fun part. I needed a way to turn on the fan remotely. The fan has no switches by default, it only powers on or off when it’s plugged in. For this 10 minute project I was not about to install a junction box and switch assembly. So, I plugged my old Clapper into the wall, and the fan into it. Now to turn it on, I just clap on! I do need to open the booth door for the device to hear me, but it’s a minor inconvenience. Lastly, I did figure out, with some help from facebook friends, that the best way to ventilate a booth like this is to actually SUCK air out as opposed to blowing it in. I did test both ways and found this to be true.

The results? Not bad! I can feel it noticeably cooler when I’m in the booth for long periods. it raises the noise floor by about 2 db, but that is not enough to get into my microphone. All in all a great process!

If you’d like to see the video I made outlining the process you can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly6Yen66UgU

So here is my first epiphany on the personal studio. You know what your space sounds like, right…right? Most coaches and engineers will tell you it’s hard or nearly impossible to know what you really sound like. The way sound resonates in the human body colors your perception of your own voice. So, how then can you tell if your space is up to snuff?

GET SOMEBODY ELSE IN YOUR SPACE!

I don’t know any other pros nearby, and even if I did, I would feel guilty putting pressure on them to come to my home and help me tune my studio. So I did the next best thing. I stumbled upon this quite by accident last week. I had my 10 year old daughter get in the booth and record a short passage from Alice In Wonderland. The genesis of why is not important but I am going to tell you anyway. I had a client ask me if I had any kids around to help with a short project. Not being a professional, we didn’t have a demo ready for my daughter, so we thought we would just quickly throw something together. So, we recorded, and played it back and my first thought was WOW, that quality is GREAT! Now I have worked hard to make my personal studio sound great. I’ve done tons of research, asked advice and experimented, a lot. After all of that ,however…I reached out to George Whittam and he got me sorted. Still, I had no idea how great it had become. Remember the point above about not hearing your own voice accurately? All it took was for me to hear another voice in the space to appreciate it.

So voice actors, when you are creating, or even fine tuning your space, consider listening to something other than your own voice for once. You might just find out you are a better engineer than you thought.

This weekend marks the 4th of July holiday, in America. My apologies to my colleagues in or from Great Britain…Too soon? The custom for many in the land of milk and honey is to take this weekend to head to the beach. In New Jersey, they call it “Going Down the Shore”. In other places it’s “Heading to the Beach”. In my particular corner of the world it’s called “Going Down The Ocean”. Interestingly, the local accent tends to mash the middle words together to create a very strange hybrid phrase that makes it sound like people are saying “Downy Ocean”. Ahh, Maryland, the land of pleasant living.
All of this beach talk got me to thinking of how much the Voice Over business comes and goes in waves, just like the ocean. A few weeks ago, I was having a bad week. I had sent out audition after audition with no responses. It was late Friday afternoon and I was ready to shutdown my computer for the weekend, when suddenly, I got a referral from a fellow voice talent. His client needed a new voice, and they hired me on the spot to do a series of Youtube videos. Literally, while I was closing that deal, I got a phone call from another lead I had contacted. They wanted me to produce a full audiobook for them, and then hire me for a series of audio hypnosis sessions. What was going to be a miserable week, suddenly turned into a great way to start the weekend!

Similarly, this week was also pretty slow. I sent out requests to a few agents for representation. One response was “maybe”, two more were “thanks but no thanks”. Then a request I had sent to partner with a studio came back “Let’s get started”! Much like that bad week before, within minutes, another studio which I had contacted weeks ago, responded that they wanted so sign me.

I had heard about these “waves” of activity from colleagues, but it really has surprised me how true it is. As we head into this holiday weekend, I’m going to watch for the waves in my business, as I watch the waves of the ocean.

Have you found a similar ebb and flow in your business? How do you manage it?