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! :)

If the real guy isn't available....

President-Elect Obama is going to be extremely busy in the next few months - well, years. He might not always be available when you need his voice. Not to worry! Johnathan Grey is available to pitch in.

Jonathan is the winner of the Voice123 Political Impersonation Contest in the Barack Obama category. The likeness is remarkable. Visit his website at Voice123 to hear his demo, and you'll discover that he is a remarkably talented individual who, most of the time, sounds nothing like Mr. Obama. The prize for Jonathan is a one-year membership at the online casting service, Voice123. Congratulations, Jonathan!

My thanks to John Florian at Voice Over Xtra for this news.

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.

An Interview with Josh Faure-Brac

Reader Simon Owens was kind enough to alert me to an interview with animator Josh Faure-Brac, conducted by Owens’ colleague at PBS, Mark Glaser. Faure-Brac created the wonderful piece that featured Rowell Gorman as the voice of Uncle Sam. His work can be seen at CurrentTV.

The interview features some of Faure-Brac’s best-known work. Thank-you Simon – I very much appreciate the opportunity to learn more about this very talented animator.

MCM Goes to Hollywood for the Day

I’m a voice actor. I “don’t do” on-camera work and I don’t have a head shot so when I have the opportunity to submit for on-camera stuff I’m not prepared to do it. But I received an email this morning from Boston Casting with the subject: Rush Call Northampton Today. The location was a mile and a half from my house, so it doesn’t get much more convenient than that and I thought, why not? I indicated my availability and got a phone call from BC with the directive to report to Northampton Athletic Club for extra work on Mel Gibson’s Edge of Darkness, directed by Martin Campbell. I fully expected to spend the day sitting around, so I was not disappointed that my posterior was in fact parked for a good long while. Plenty of interesting people there, many of whom have worked on many movies, and it was great fun to get to know some of them – and to absorb as much information as I could about the mysterious and glamorous world of film making. After a few hours an Assistant Director came through to choose people for a scene in a locker room. I looked him in the eye and tried to appear friendly, calm, knowledgeable, competent – any and all traits that he might possibly need, and it seemed to work and he chose me and 5 others to follow him. In another room in a different building he lined us up to be looked over by another crew member, who again pointed at me and I was handed off to a lady who got me outfitted for the scene. Then it was back to “holding” in a building behind the athletic center for another few hours, during which time I fretted periodically about whether I was in the right place – would I miss my scene due to ignorance? But as in the voice-over business, I had to assume that if they needed me, they knew where to find me and I should just relax and resume my life, which in this case meant to meet a few more people, find the people I’d already met, do some more talking about the acting business, and just enjoy the moment as much as I possibly could. Finally around 5 pm those of us who had not shot any scenes yet were called to go over to the athletic center. Our standard of living went up instantly, since there was a big table laden with fresh coffee, tea, and food, and there was much more hustle and bustle as filming was ongoing and there were production assistants dotting the landscape and shouting “rolling”, “cut” and other fascinating directives. Finally our own A.D. appeared to ask the locker room ladies to assemble, and after a short one-hour wait we were called in. Most of the locker room ladies were led one way, I was led another and in very short order I was face-to-face with Mel Gibson himself. In this scene Gibson’s character, Detective Craven, has been shown to the athletic club locker room by the custodian (yours truly) to remove the contents of his deceased daughter’s locker.

Although I didn’t speak in my scene, I enjoyed it tremendously. I loved watching the camera men do their work, and was fascinated by all the details of lighting and scene blocking and the snappy thingy with the take number written on it, and being fussed over by make-up and wardrobe. Voice actors are not accustomed to such treatment. And who would not be thrilled to be directed and addressed by first name by Martin Campbell?

It seems extraordinary to me that so much goes into each little scene. We did at least 7 takes, and only once was a take stopped due to something that wasn't working to Mr. Campbell's liking, and after each take, out would come the measuring tape and the masking tape and the light meters and the crew would speak to each other in Gibberish of the highest caliber. Also, despite the many many hours each crew member had undoubtedly been at work that day, every one seemed calm and professional. I was especially impressed with "my" Assistant Director, Tico, who was dealing with casting all day long and managed to seem bright and interested and above all, relaxed, and to make even lowly people like me feel valued. I would do this again in a minute – although preferably not in the next few minutes because being away from the studio for a day puts one rather behind in one’s work. But I can see why people like the film business. The hours are invariably long and can be very tedious, but the denouement – at least for this happy camper – made it worth the wait.

More local news about this film here, here, here and (with an interview with me) here.

Uncle Sam Speaks.

My friend and very talented colleague Rowell Gorman provided the voice of Uncle Sam for this extraordinary video, created by Josh Faure-Brac. Please watch it and ask your friends to watch it too.