The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to Episode 21 of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We’ve got lots of stuff to talk about. We’ve got a great episode coming up for you today. It’s a short month with lots of stuff to fill it in.
We’ve got a great guest with us today. It’s Tom Dheere. He’s a voice actor and marketing specialist and coach.
And he’ll be coming up with us in a few minutes. But first up, current events. Current events.
Right. Current events. So, things that are happening with me.
First of all, this past weekend, not VO related, but I’m celebrating because I’m a native Philadelphian. Is that the right way to say it? Yeah.
Philadelphian. I’m always thinking of Ron Burgundy when he says, San Diego, San Diego, Philadelphian. And my Eagles just won the big game.
So I’m super excited about that. Can I get a Fly Eagles Fly? Fly Eagles Fly on the road to…
No, nobody wants to hear that.
Too much sports in for this non-sporter.
You’re not a big fan, huh? Not a huge fan.
I appreciate the event, the experience, but I’m not a huge fan of football.
Yeah, anybody who knows me knows that I, most recently, have not been either, and it was kind of a conscious decision. I didn’t want my kids to grow up to play. They both are…
I have two boys, and they both were interested in it early on, and I tried to steer them away from it. But once the Eagles were in the big game, for the first time ever that they actually won it, we jumped right back on the field.
They’re kind of near us. It’s your team.
Yeah, I mean, I’m not that far from there now, and we actually drove up to spend the time with my parents and my cousins and aunts. So it was a good time to just experience that camaraderie and fun. So that was this past Sunday, and we had a great time.
I, unfortunately, was not able to watch The Big Game because I was busy editing a large audio project, but other than working with some return and regular clients, lots of stuff is going on. I’m taking some character coaching to work towards a character demo with the awesome David Rosenthal, the CEO for the Global Voice Acting Academy.
It’s been a lot of fun. Right now, I’m working on a swaggery anti-hero voice. Think Jack Sparrow, but a little bit more articulate, less drunk sounding.
A little bit of swagger to him, kind of going in the deeper register there. Very sexy-like. So that’s fun.
Other than that, just been doing a lot of work for GVAA. We’re introducing some new membership tiers that we’re going to talk about officially when we launch them at VO Atlanta next month. We’ve got this great new webinar coming up with talking about the new tax laws and how they might affect you and your voiceover business.
We got a friend…
Very timely.
Yeah, very timely indeed. We got an actual CPA, John Lascoe and Rob Siglund…
You said Matthew Lascoe?
John Lascoe. So I don’t know if they’re related.
Do you remember Matthew… I accidentally met Matthew Lascoe. He used to do these crazy government tax self-help books, and he would dress up in a blazer covered in green dollar signs.
Oh, yes.
You can say, millions of dollars just by signing up for government programs. That guy.
That guy, yeah.
Not related, probably.
Kind of like Maury if he had been on amphetamines for too long.
Yeah, exactly.
But no, we got an actual CPA and Rob Siglim… I can never get his name right. Rob Siglim Paglia.
Siglim Paglia.
Who is a voice actor and entertainment lawyer himself. And so that webinar, once again, is New Tax Laws and You. It’s going to be happening live on February 27th at the end of the month, at 530 Pacific Time, 830 Eastern Time, and it’s only 30 bucks.
It’s $29.95. So, I mean, we’re going to learn all sorts of stuff about how these new laws can affect you. So if you’re interested and or you’re just getting started and you want to figure out more legal or some of the legal ramifications of a small voice over business, then this webinar is for you.
What about you?
Yeah, I have a few things going on. I recently started a new vertical in the business, actually several new verticals, in bidding for e-learning jobs. I decided to try and eliminate the middleman, so to speak.
So, there was a lot of jobs on some of the various freelance sites, where I was getting hired as the voice actor, and then being, the service being sold to another client. So, essentially, there was a middleman between me and the end client. So it was usually a video producer who was hiring me as the voice and then selling the whole package of the video and my voice to an advertising agency or a computer, an IT firm, so they could use that for their training.
So I started gathering up a list of contacts that I had from doing all these jobs and bidding myself as the video creation company. So I’ve actually started a separate entity. It’s something I might want to talk to Rob Sagan Pugley about.
But I’m now bidding on jobs as a whole project where I have several animators and graphic artists that I work with and we bid together on the jobs. So I’m taking the lead on getting the voice done first and then the animation and then it’s a whole package for the client.
Cool.
So like expanding into production. Yeah, more or less. And what that’s done more than anything is allow me to bid with fair rates because what typically happened was people would think of the voice last and it’s not only in the voice and the people I’m working with but there’s a lot of projects where the voice is the afterthought and what I’m trying to do is get that out in front and say the voice is probably the most important part because it’s the tone of the project you’re working on, especially if it’s a video or a presentation.
And in fact, when I set up this sort of, I put out a contest on one of the freelance sites to get these people to come and apply to work with me. And one of the first comments was, isn’t it usually the other way around where the voice is an afterthought? Actually said afterthought.
And I said, no, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. The voice needs to be the lead and the most important part of the project. So I’m hoping this works out where we can gain some traction this way.
So far the results are pretty positive. I’ve had a ton of people get back to me and I have several projects I’m working on right now and we’ll see how it goes.
So, what is the next step for Stefano Productions?
Actually, I’m glad you asked. Because the other vertical I was talking about is marketing my kids as voice over artists. I’ve mentioned this before and I think my oldest two have actually had demos done when we did the last episode, but now all three, I’m proud to say, have demos out there and are signed to multiple agents.
The same ones that I’m with, no new agents, but they each have five agencies that are representing them around the country and in Canada and are getting auditions and my middle son is going to be working on an audiobook starting next week, so things are really picking up for them as well. It’s like a whole family affair now.
That’s really, really cool. What about your wife? Is she doing any voicing or is she just the accountant?
She’s the accountant right now. We actually thought about it because we’re working on a project where I needed a mom. They wanted a whole family of actors and my wife just wasn’t around because it is tax season and she’s a CPA, so I did bring in a colleague to work on that to play mom, but maybe down the line we’ll see what happens.
It’s your work wife.
Right. And then finally, the last thing I want to mention is that I am now a graduate of the Sean Allen Pratt Narration Coaching School.
We’ve been going at it for almost two years with a hiatus built in there, so don’t be scared away by working with Sean. He doesn’t always take that long, but he is pretty flexible if you have to take a break and come back, which I did for a while. But after two years we have finished and he’s mailing me a certificate, actual certificate that says I’ve graduated the program.
So this is just strictly for narration coaching. He does do other forms of coaching now and actually offer it to go forward with fiction. But I’m going to try and do some other things and see how that goes before I go back with him.
Maybe at some point I will do some fiction coaching with him, but right now I’m going in a different direction for the time being.
Yeah, when it comes to nonfiction, there’s fewer coaches that you can do better with. Sean is fantastic. I’ve done a couple of sessions with him as well, and I can’t recommend him highly enough.
Yeah, he’s been on the show as well. So if you want to listen to that episode, what was it, Episode 14?
Yes, our audiobook roundtable.
Yeah, go back and listen to that episode. It’s one of our most popular ones. There’s a whole lot of information there with not only Sean, but Stephen J.
Cohen, Andy Arndt, Deb Dion, and Scott Brick. Just a fantastic cast of characters.
And one more cool thing that’s happening to the both of us is we are actually going to be doing a podcast live next month from VO Atlanta.
Woohoo!
We’re going to have a whole room for it. Gerald Griffith is doing an entire room, sort of a mini event for different people who have their own voiceover-related podcasts to actually have a space where they can even have a live studio audience or just do an episode and comment on the event as it’s happening. So I think that’s a really cool thing.
And we’re kind of spearheading it, aren’t we, Paul? He’s actually asked us to be the sort of administrators for the podcast event within VO Atlanta.
Yeah, which means you and I are going to be crazy busy because I was already on the tech team, so I have a lot of work to do, and now we’re doing the podcast thing as well. And you’re going to be pretty busy with some other activities as well, aren’t you?
I’m going to be at the exhibitor booth for Global Voice Acting Academy. So if you’re at VO Atlanta, come say hi and talk about or ask us about our new membership. And some of the other services we offer.
And add us on the app. If you’re going to come to the conference, there’s that new app by Zorista. Look that up on Google Play or iTunes and add us and come say hi.
Yeah, it’s Zorista or Z-E-R-I-S-T-A. And then do you just have to put in whatever login information you used for VO Atlanta. You might have to do an email or username for that.
And then it should be able to find the appropriate event. And then you can adjust your profile, figure out what your personalized agenda is, connect with other attendees and even some of the agents and big names who are going to be there. And yeah, just get a…
That’s a pretty cool thing. Have you had a chance to check it out yet? Sounds like you have.
Oh yes, just a little bit. I’m still figuring out all the nitty gritty navigational details, but it looks pretty… I mean, Gerald went above and beyond this year as he always does.
But I mean, I think inner conference communication is sort of the theme that he’s trying to tackle this year based on some of the connectivity problems we had last year with just like hotel Wi-Fi and stuff like that.
I will say the app caught me off guard. I wasn’t aware it was even out. I guess I missed that live broadcast.
Sorry, Gerald. But I all of a sudden started getting all these ads from people. And at first I was kind of blown away.
I was like, wow, David Rosenthal just added me. He knows who I am.
Marilyn Whistler just added me.
Oh my gosh. And like Tom Pinto. And then, right, exactly.
And then I was like, oh, okay, it’s the app. I was wondering where all these connections were coming from. First I was like, oh, my new website is awesome.
And then I said, oh wait, it’s VO Atlanta. Not that it’s still not awesome, but it took me a while to realize where I was coming from. So it just, again, it goes to show how much effort Gerald has put into the communication.
I think it’ll help a lot. So we’ll get to our featured guest, Tom Dheere, in just a moment. But before that…
Questionable Gear Purchase.
So believe it or not, I was kind of tame with the questionable gear purchases. I only bought one mic this time.
Chest-wide.
And the reasoning, it doesn’t make sense anymore. I’ll give you my cockamamie reasoning behind it. But, and you just laugh at me.
So I don’t mind being a comic relief. So I bought a Shure SM7B for long form narration and audio books. And I’m using it now, which I usually am during the podcast, whichever Mike DuJour is up.
And my reasoning for it is because it’s not that sensitive. And we talked ad nauseam about my issues with long form. And the other reason is because it’s another one of those quote unquote industry standards, not necessarily for voiceover, but it’s a mic that most engineers…
Right, recording in general, and almost every engineer will know very well. I had been using the Audio-Technica BP-40, which I think I talked about in the last episode, another large diaphragm dynamic like the Shure, and similar sort of capsule and form factor. But it’s a mic nobody knows, almost nobody knows.
In fact, it’s the first time I really had trouble reselling a mic. So it took a bit of a bath on the resale on that. And I’m happier now that I have two industry standards that if I do a live session or send it off to an engineer, they’re going to know the Sennheiser MKH416 and the Shure SM7B.
They can work with that.
So again, it’s crazy logic, but it’s some sort of logic in my head.
Well, it’s something that I’m hearing a lot too. I mean, thanks to you, I now have two industry standards too as well. So I’ve had the 416 for a couple of years now after winning at VO Atlanta two years ago.
But then a few episodes ago, you’ll remember Paul’s and mine’s interesting exchange where I thought I was trading him for a TLM 102, which is a great mic, but it’s not necessarily an industry standard, whatever that means. But it turned out that it was actually the larger and more well-touted 103, which neither he nor the previous owner happened to like on their voice. So it was like, bonus.
And honestly, since then, I just haven’t gotten another mic since then. It’s that simple. Like I still drool over him sometimes, but it’s just like, I don’t need any other mics.
It’s a little sad, really. Still, I mean, I’ll still go through interfaces and stuff like that though, but it’s just like, what’s the point? And I was actually listening to our friendly competitive or friendly competition, VO School.
They had a great episode on microphones recently. And they were mentioning, it’s like, yeah, these industry standards may not be the absolute best mic on a given voice, but chances are they’re gonna be pretty close and they’re certainly not gonna sound bad. So with that in mind, it’s like, if you’ve got the budget in the time, yeah, find that perfect mic that’s custom tailor-made for your voice.
But if you’ve got the budget for it and you can afford an industry standard, there are far worse choices out there.
And I always wanted to at least try a TLM 103 and a 416. So I can know.
A couple of times over.
But I mean, several years ago, when I was first looking into the business, I thought, oh, if I could only hear how that sounds, you know, this 416 especially has this sort of aura around it. Right, this legendary status, this magic mic that should be great for everyone. And it’s not always, like you said, but I always want to at least try it, and now I can say I have, and I’m still using it, believe it or not.
I know. Well, I actually was thinking about you the other day because I was reading another article about microphones. So like, obviously the sickness isn’t dead, but…
But at one point they are mentioning it’s how you should never actually sell any microphone that you’ve used on a previous project, because you never know if they come back and they need to do like pickups, even if it’s years down the line. And now first off, I thought that was a little exaggerated, but still I was just like, good luck Paul, because I mean, how many different mics have you gone through at this point? I’d say two dozen easily right off the bat.
Yeah, I was going to say 20, but yeah, 24 might be more accurate.
Oh, man.
Of those, I still have four.
Oh, good.
So, yay!
You can redo those four projects.
So we’ll get to the interview idea with Tom Dheere in just a few minutes. But before we do, we have this episode’s VO Meter stick, this time brought to us by Barbara Quesada with a funny story about her dog voice.
Hey, everybody, it’s time for the VO Meter shtick.
What did he say?
It’s time for the VO… Oh, never mind.
The VO Meter shtick?
Oh, got it.
So I thought in honor of Valentine’s Day, I would tell a voice over love story. Well, it’s sort of a voice over love story, but it has to do with voices anyway, so I guess bear with me. Like so many voice over people that I know, I make animals talk.
Specifically, I have, at this point, a geriatric miniature dachshund named Taylor, who’s 16 years old. But he was much younger when I first met and started dating my husband. And I, of course, in some of our dates, would just start talking to him as my dog.
And the fact that he didn’t run away immediately tells you that he’s a special kind of person to put up with that. But, you know, he would just let me chat away with him, pretending to be my dog, talking to him as my dog. And he also had two miniature dachshunds at the time, which is kind of how we met, but that’s a whole other story.
And anyway, we’d been dating for some time, and, you know, I’m talking to him as my dog always. And one day, he talked back to me as the dog. And that was the day I knew he loved me.
And then we got very crazy and, of course, started talking to one another as the dog, having entire conversations as the dog. But that tells you what kind of crazy people we are, I guess. And now we have two children, a six-year-old and an eight-year-old, who try to do the dog’s voice, but they’re not that great at it.
But they will ask to talk to the dog and, like, mommy, no, I want to talk to Taylor now. And so, you know, it’s just… It’s become a very special, special thing for our family.
And, of course, Taylor has more than just a voice, he has a personality, too. That’s right. I’m awesome, and I brought this family together.
Happy Valentine’s Day. Now go away and just let me sleep, because that’s all I want to do.
Thank you.
Thanks for that, Barbara, that was a charming story. I always love when we can involve our families in what we do.
All right, so our guest for this month is Tom Dheere. Of course, he’s a voice actor, but he’s also a marketing specialist and coach as well, helping talents of all stages of their career develop business plans, financial plans, and just get a better understanding of the marketing aspects of a voiceover business. So without further ado, let’s take it to Tom Dheere.
So now we’re getting to the meat of our episode, our interview with this week’s featured guest. He’s a voice actor, a coach, an icon in the world of business marketing. The H is not…
The H is silent, but he’s not. Please welcome to The VO Meter, Tom Dheere. How you doing, Tom?
Icon.
Icon.
I’ll take it.
I said it.
I’ll take it.
I said it. How are you today? I’m good, Paul.
I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on.
Thanks for being here. So, Sean and I, well, I should mention that Sean is not able to join us today. He had an in-person audition, which is pretty exciting for him.
So, it’s a good reason not to be able to join us for an interview, but we will miss him dearly. But Tom has been kind to still do the interview with us. And we are both so excited to have you here because we planned this a long time ago, or at least planted the seeds.
And we’re so glad you could join us.
Yeah, no, thanks for having me.
So, tell us a little bit about your background. Like I said, you’ve been in the business for a while, and most people know you, but a lot of our listeners actually are new to the business. We tend to attract a lot of newbies, as it were.
So, tell us a little bit about how you got into voiceover.
Okay, so I dropped out of graduate school in New York City. I went to the National Shakespeare Conservatory in Manhattan a long time ago for… I originally wanted to be a classically trained New York-based Shakespearean actor.
That’s what I wanted. I had a very specific goal of what I wanted to do. For various reasons, it didn’t work out, so I dropped out.
And I’m at home with my mom. She’s reading New Jersey Monthly Magazine, is looking at the back of the magazine and says, what’s voiceover? And I said, I don’t know, you talk for money.
It turns out I was absolutely right. And she said, there’s a coach nearby. You’ve got a good voice.
You should try it out. So I went to this coach, Hope Noah, and did a diagnostic. She said I had some potential.
So I worked with her for about six months. And then I went to a nearby studio to cut my commercial demo. Cut the demo.
And then she gave me a little certificate of completion and a ream of Xerox copies of production company directory listings and said, okay, start your cold calling and good luck. This was 1995. So there was no Facebook, there was no Twitter, no Bedolgo, no pay to play sites.
You know, most people didn’t have home recording. So basically all you had was a demo in a dream. And you just had to, you know, figure it out.
So yeah, that’s how I got my start.
So what was the toughest part initially once you had that sort of, well, basically pushed off the ledge by Mama Bird? What was the toughest part to get started?
The toughest part was figuring out, and it took me a really long time to figure this out, is that if you want to be a successful artist inside the booth, you need to be a successful business outside the booth. You need to be an effective business. When I started in 1995, you know, there was a very small amount or much less voiceover talents out there.
They were in the big cities, and almost none of them had home recording facilities. So you could have a career by functioning as an employee, as an artist. Now you can’t do that anymore.
You have to be a business. And the people who think like artists, employees, starving artists, the American Idol chorus line, God, I hope I get it mentality, you’re going to fail, and you’re going to fail hard, and you’re going to fail fast. You have to think like a business and have effective systems of thought and systems of execution like a business to even have a chance at being successful in this industry nowadays.
Okay. So what were some of the ways you overcame that initially?
I didn’t. I sucked.
I struggled for a really long time because I didn’t know how to think about what I was supposed to think about. What changed everything for me was going to my first voiceover conference. TheftCon 3.
This was 2011. So I started pursuing voiceovers in 95. I got my first gig in 96.
I struggled doing this while having a job in 2005. I got fired from the last job I ever had, which was probably the best day of my life. And that’s when I really needed to figure out what was going on.
So I joined the VoiceOver Bulletin Board. I learned how to build a home recording studio. And then five years later, still kind of figuring this out, but making a living, I went to my first voiceover conference, FAFCon.
And it taught me that I deserve to be here. I deserve to be successful professionally. And I realized a huge thing.
And this is what has been pounded into our heads since we were born, is that if you’re not a star, you’re a loser. And there are no stars in the voiceover industry. There are just people trying to do this.
There’s no celebrity voice talents. There’s no famous voice actors. There’s movie stars who do voiceovers, like Morgan Freeman or Kiefer Sutherland or George Clooney or Alice in Janey.
But you can’t find someone walking down the street and go, hey, do you know who Joe Cipriano is? They’re going to be like, no. Do you know who Bob Bergen is?
So once I rubbed the stars out of my eyes and realized that this was a job, it was a business, and the only person who’s going to make the phone ring is you, that was a big help. The other big help is when I realized that the most important ingredient to my success as a voiceover talent is my fellow voiceover talents. Just a couple weeks ago, I did a cost-benefit analysis class, and I showed them a breakdown of my revenue, not how much I make, but how much I make per gig and by genre and how I got the gig.
Two percent of my work came from agents. Fifty-nine percent of my work came from recommendations from fellow voice talents. Wow.
So who’s more important to you in your industry? The agent who’s going to make you a star or your so-called competition? The answer is clearly your so-called competition.
And they’re not your competition. I truly believe there is no competition in the voiceover industry. That’s how I turned the corner of my voiceover career when I discovered that my friends and colleagues were my secret to success.
Not the things that we’ve been told our whole lives are the secret to your success, which is getting discovered and getting your big lucky break, whatever that even is.
That’s great. Well, that cost-benefit analysis you mentioned sounds pretty in-depth, and that brings us to one of the reasons we wanted to have you on, because you are known for your marketing strategies and your business acumen, quite frankly. Tell us a little bit about your consulting business and the work you’re doing with Edge Studio.
Okay, so I am known as the voice-over strategist or VO strategist, and you can check it out at vostrategist.com. And I’m a voice-over business and marketing consultant. I’m not a performance coach.
There are others that are far more qualified and interested in that. I do voice-over business consulting. There’s very few of us in the country that does this.
And I started doing it because I realized there was a big need that needed to be filled. And I also figured that that was the best way that I could give back to an industry that has been so good to me. Because a big part of being effective as a voice-over business is having the ability to be a contributing member of the community and being able to give back.
I’m a true proponent of karma, and that’s what I like to call my karmic penance, is being the VO strategist and helping out and sharing with everybody all the things that I wish I knew 20, 15, 20 years ago that would have saved me a lot of time and energy and money. So as a voice-over strategist, I function in a couple of different ways. One, I do one-on-one business consulting, where I do a diagnostic of your business and ask you a series of very uncomfortable questions about your business, help you figure out where the holes are, and then we come up with an action plan.
And it’s not just for aspiring voice talents. I work with voice talents of all levels, regardless of experience, because sometimes you need to tweak your voice-over business model or overhaul it, because times change, and what worked even a couple of years ago doesn’t work now on a business and marketing level. So you need to look at what your business is and what genres you need to explore and how strong your goals are and how specific your goals are.
One thing I’ve also learned is that vague goals will get you vague results. Specific goals will get you specific results. So I work in a one-on-one capacity.
I also work for Edge Studio, and I teach webinars. I also work for Abacus Entertainment in New York City, and I teach webinars there as well. Live sessions and group sessions on Skype or actually Zoom, our go-to webinar on Edge Studio, and I use Zoom at Abacus.
And I also do live appearances at conferences like FAFCon and VO Atlanta. I’ll be appearing at the Mid-Atlantic Voice Over Conference in November this year. So my job is to help you figure out how to think like a voice over business and how to execute like a voice over business.
That’s fantastic. So you mentioned the one-on-one consulting and some of the group work you do. Something I wanted to touch on is the conferences you just mentioned.
I was going to promote you at MAVO, but you did it for me. Thank you.
Oh, you’re welcome. And thank you.
We actually did a recording of an episode there the last time it was held, 2016. It’s a great conference. I highly recommend everybody check it out if they can.
We’ll be there again this next time. So what can a voice actor gleam from a conference that they may not be able to get in a one-on-one atmosphere or as a prelude to consulting with you one-on-one? Is there some key takeaways you try to get across to a larger audience like that?
The most important benefit from an aspiring or veteran voice talent to attending a conference is the ability to be a part of the community. We are all trapped in our little booths all over the country, all over the world, frankly, and have become overly reliant on the internet as a marketing tool. There is no marketing tool that is more powerful than interacting with a human being in person.
I define marketing as the art and science of developing meaningful relationships. And the only way that you can truly develop a meaningful relationship with someone is if you interact with them in person. That’s why, like I said, FAFCon 3 was so monstrously successful for me.
As a result of attending that conference and speaking there, I got picked up by Edge Studio, and that turned into The VO Strategist, and that’s how you and I got here today talking about all this fun stuff. So go with an open mind, go to learn, go to give, and don’t view the other attendees as competition. Like I said, they’re the biggest part of my voiceover business.
So go to learn, go to give, and go to think. Go to think about yourself and learn to think objectively about who you are as a voice talent, what your relationship is with the industry, and what you can do to be the most effective. And I mean that in what genres can you master and what relationships that you can form.
And not so you can claw your way to the top, because I think that’s a lot of garbage. The voiceover industry is not vertical, it’s spherical. It’s not about being more and more and more successful.
I mean, we would obviously all like that, but that’s not always how it works. My first audiobook that I narrated was Danielle Steele. You know, only the Bible has sold more copies than Danielle Steele.
That and 50 cents got me a phone call, because what am I going to do, just narrate the Bible for the rest of my life? No, I don’t have the voice for it anyway. I sound like I’m 19 trying to get into a bar.
So your voiceover business is spherical. It’s learning to make as many meaningful relationships with as many people as possible. Clearly, agents aren’t the most important people in my voiceover business.
My fellow voice talents are. And so are the recording engineers and the receptionists and the interns and all the other people that make all of this stuff work. They’re just as important as any union rep, as any agent, as any big honking end client.
I think they’re more important, frankly.
Yeah, I agree. Let’s stay on that networking theme for a second. When you’re at a conference, in spite of you saying there are no VO celebrities, and to a large extent that’s true, but there are those in the industry that are put up on a pillar, rightfully so, and people that are new to the business or seeing them for the first time can be a little starstruck.
You mentioned Joe Cipriano. Who else did you mention earlier?
Bob Bergen.
Oh yeah, Bob Bergen, obviously. So people like that, you see them in person the first time, it can be a little overwhelming. Now I don’t have this problem, because I spent years cold calling people in other businesses, and I have absolutely no filter.
But for someone who’s approaching a conference for the first time, what do you do to approach somebody like Joe Cip?
You remember the old cliché that, you know, Joe puts on his pants one leg at a time, and he’s there to learn and he’s there to give. So you should be there to learn and you should be there to give. So a couple of things.
Number one, don’t try to impress anybody. I don’t care who they are. Everybody, like a Joe Cipriano, has fresh batteries in their BS detector.
And they can smell you coming a mile away. So I have a couple of rules when I go to events like that. Number one is, if I’m trying to develop a meaningful relationship with anybody, a Joe Cipriano or a first time voice talent, I talk about everything but voice overs.
The reason why is because people work with people that they like. So I don’t care what microphone you use. I want to know how your daughter’s soccer team is doing.
I want to know how many dogs you have and what music you like to listen to. Because I want to get to know you as a person. I’ll put it to you this way, a few years ago I wrote a blog about questions you should and shouldn’t ask other voice talents.
And a voice talent asked me, is there some form of insider click that gets voice talents’ gigs via agents through their demos and not through their auditions? And I said, yes, there is a click. I said, the conspiracy is massive.
The conspiracy is that people work with people that they like and trust and have developed a relationship over a long period of time because as voice talents we have demonstrated that we not just have the talent, which is by the way the least important part of our business model, but we show up on time, that we take direction, and we’re not a jerk. So yes, I audition almost every day, but also agents say, hey, I booked you for this gig, you know, be here at this place in this time or they’re going to call you and lay it down. Because my representation is communicated to those end clients that this is a guy that will get the job done.
So if you consider that a conspiracy or a clique, call the FBI.
Yeah, it’s so true. And it really goes back to just, it’s a business. And if you’ve ever done any other business in your life, you know that the best sort of business or best client comes from referrals.
And if you can get a referral from another voice talent, that’s the best kind of endorsement you can get.
Yeah, referrals are everything. Relationships are everything. And another myth is don’t audition all day.
Auditioning all day is one of the biggest wastes of time you could possibly have. Most people audition all day because they don’t know what else to do. And they say, well, Tom, what else should I do?
Well, the answer is everything, anything. Auditioning is part of a balanced breakfast. But that means you’re just focusing on the starving artist, employee part of your business model.
And you’re not focusing on developing your craft or developing relationships or just becoming a student of the industry. Also, if you’re auditioning all the time, you’re not looking for relationships. You’re just looking for jobs.
I don’t want jobs. I want relationships with clients, long-term relationships with clients, where I wake up in the morning and there’s a few emails in my inbox from clients I’ve worked with for years saying, okay, this is the gig we’ve got for you this week. And I bang it out and deliver it and invoice them and go to the next one, which is what my business model is like right now.
Sure, I audition regularly, but I don’t give a rat’s nose about the audition once I’m done with it. I don’t care. It’s such an arbitrary lottery-like system that audition is anyway.
I don’t care because if I get it, great. If not, that’s okay too. It’s just part of the things I have to do.
I consider auditioning part of the… making sure I have enough staples in my stapler. It’s just a thing I have to do, but I don’t fixate on my stapler all day.
It’s a nice one. It’s a lovely one. It’s a red swing line.
I was told I would get my stapler back.
Right. Exactly.
Thank you.
You got the office space reference.
Oh, funny. So, that’s great. Obviously, relationships are the best way to build a business.
But one thing I’ve been dying to ask you is about cold calling, because I know you’ve done a ton. And in the most recent episode of The VO Meter, we featured our friend Stephen George, who just got signed with his first agency by literally walking in the front door and introducing himself, which was probably below the mind of most of the people who are listening to this episode. So, I know you’ve done a lot of cold calling.
How did you build your business using it? And is it still a viable option in today’s VO world?
I would like to state for the record, Paul, that I hate cold calling with the burning passion of a thousand dying sons.
Agreed.
I hate it. I avoid it as often as I can. I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’ve done an actual cold call in at least five years.
Oh, good for you.
I don’t do them because they’re largely ineffective. Because you’re just wasting their time. Here’s the thing, Paul, is that most marketing techniques that you’re going to be taught these days just don’t work anymore.
Whether it’s cold calling or emails or postcards or whatever, most of them don’t work anymore. And the reason why is because there’s just too damn many of us now. Every yut with a deep voice in a USB microphone is trying to do what we do for a living.
And they are constantly bombarding these poor bastards that are the voice seekers and agents and marketing reps and recording studios with their horrible demo-milled demos and their cliche two-dimensional pitches and their lack of branding and lack of efficacy. So it’s exponentially harder to be effective when it comes to marketing these days. So I don’t bother with cold calling anymore.
I don’t bother with postcards anymore. I do a newsletter and that helps a little bit, I guess. If nothing else, it keeps top in mind.
So the thing that I enjoy most about sending out a newsletter these days is updating my contact database with all the people unsubscribed. That’s where I get my jollies now. Because it’s like, oh good, now I don’t have to deal with that person anymore.
Not that there’s anything wrong with them, but it’s like, okay, they don’t want a relationship with me? Fine, thank you for letting me know. I’m going to focus on this group of people now.
So yeah, cold calling. I mean, it sounds all romantic and stuff that Stephen George, is that you said, did that? It sounds great.
But also, you know, for every… you try that 10 times, you know, eight times security may escort you out.
Yeah, that’s a good point.
You know what I mean? So you got to be really careful about stuff like that. I mean, I’ll be honest, I cold called almost everybody in the Audio Publishers Association Directory, and that was 2005, 2006, and that got me Danielle Steele.
But that’s when there was a heck of a lot less of us running around. There’s just too many of us to do that. Because think of it this way.
Every agent, every agent’s assistant, every casting director, casting assistant, every voice seeker or anyone who’s in the office of every voice seeker has a physical mail inbox. They have an email inbox. They have a text messaging inbox.
They have a Facebook messenger inbox. They have a Twitter direct message inbox. They have a LinkedIn inbox.
And you can even get messages on Instagram nowadays. All of them are full to the brim every day. And it’s like fighting back the ocean with a broom to be able to keep up with all that stuff while they’re still trying to do the other parts of their job.
So I’m not saying you should never email anybody ever again or cold call anybody ever again or do some form of analog marketing campaign ever again. Just keep in mind that there are 2,000 schmucks just like you trying to do the same exact thing in the same exact way. So what are you going to do about that?
How are you going to make yourself distinct? How are you going to provide value to the voice seeker that those other 1,999 yutzes aren’t? And the answer is that’s entirely up to you because you are you.
You are your own distinct, individual, unique little snowflake who has your own set of background and culture and education and training and value system. So you got to figure out who are you, what’s important to you, what values do you have, and what value can you provide to that voice seeker to make you different from that tsunami of solicitations that they’re getting from everybody else in the voice over industry.
So let’s talk about some of the strategies that you suggest to people without giving away too much of your secrets. What are some things people can do to make themselves different?
I don’t have any secrets, really. I mean, I’m not a particularly talented voice talent, and it’s not like I drop thousands of dollars in my marketing campaign. I mean, basically, rule one is just, you know, don’t be a dick.
You know, be, you know, be a decent human. Like, be a good human, try to collect good humans. Try to attend as many live events as possible, and try to let your honesty and personality and sincerity shine through.
Be there to help. Be there to realize that even if you are a new voice talent, you do have something to offer as a human being, because nobody as five years old says they want to be a voice talent when they grow up. Being a voice talent is most often a second, third, fourth, or post-retirement career, which means all of you have skill sets and abilities that I guarantee on some level will be of value to you as a voice over business.
My friend Liz Ayala was a nurse, and now she’s a voice talent who specializes in medical narration. Sometimes it’s just that simple. So use what you have.
You have a lot more to offer than you think that you do, and try to interact with as many humans in a live setting as much as possible. Some of you may think, I’m in this business because I prefer staying in the closet because I’m terrified of people. And a lot of people are.
A lot of you are introverts. I’m lucky, I’m kind of an extrovert. I like to call myself an extrovert who needs to recharge frequently, if that makes any sense.
So if you see me at FAFcon, there’ll be 10 or 15 increments where I just won’t be around because I’m in my hotel room just lying on my bed for 10 minutes just going… And then I just get up and I go back downstairs and I dive right back in. That’s just how I operate.
Well, here’s a secret about that. There are quite a bit of introverts in the industry, which means if you’re not, or you can at least pretend you’re not at an event, you can just rock the house and get all those referrals and business for yourself, while those people who are a little hesitant are standing in the corner like a sixth grade dance.
Right. Amy Snively, who is the golden goddess of FAFCon, says that whenever she goes to a networking event or a conference or a live seminar, she refuses to leave until she has gotten help from somebody and helped somebody, and she will not leave until that happens. And it’s not necessarily a voiceover-related referral or recommendation.
It can be anything. It could be like sharing a recipe for peanut butter cookies or recommending a landscape or anything like that, just so you can make a connection with somebody, making a connection on a human level. If you can do that, even with one person at one event, you’re off to the races.
Yeah, I wrote a very similar blog post that was featured on Voice Over Extra a few months ago where I said the exact same thing. You put two people together and make a connection for them, then you’re the star of the show and people remember that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, Tom, we’ve been talking for almost 30 minutes now, and I really appreciate you coming on and sharing some of your tips and some of the ways you got to where you are in the business today. Is there anything you’d like to tell our listeners about how they can hire you or book you for coaching?
Oh, sure, absolutely. You can find me at edstudio.com and Abacus Entertainment. You can also contact me directly at viostrategist.com.
Just to give you an idea of some of the stuff that I do, I’ll just give you a list of my upcoming appearances. January 25th, I’ll be talking about the sales funnel for Ed Studio. Monday the 29th, I’ll be appearing on The Voice Over Body Shop at 9pm.
Thursday the 15th, I’ll be teaching Ed Studio Business and Money 201 students, plus anyone else that wants to join in, how to build an effective rate sheet. I’ll be teaching a basics of marketing class at Abacus Entertainment, which will be live in New York City on Tuesday the 20th, but you can also attend online. And Thursday, February 22nd, I will be teaching for Ed Studio four words that will kill your marketing, just to give you an idea of the kind of stuff that I offer.
Well, Tom, that’s fantastic. Go out and check him out. Hire him.
We really appreciate you coming on, Tom Dheere, and we will talk to you soon.
All right, great. Thanks for having me.
So once again, thanks to Tom Dheere, that was a fantastic interview. You know, we had quite a bit of technical problems on this. First, it was an issue with Chrome, which is kind of a widespread issue, I found out, where a lot of people are having trouble, and me, for the last three weeks now, where I cannot hear incoming audio on any of the OPUS-based programs on Chrome only, which is a problem because a lot of them recommend Chrome, and some only let you use Chrome, so I can’t listen to incoming audio on Bodago Call, or Skype, or IPDTL.
None of them work for incoming audio, or Google Hangouts, which is run by Google. So it’s really annoying. So Tom and I tried Google Hangouts, we tried Skype, we tried Source Connect Now, we tried Bodago Call.
Turns out that I think he’s also having a problem with his interface. So the way we actually did it was a double-ended phone patch. Wow, that sounds dirty.
Oh, God. It depends on where you’re putting the phone.
So I had ear buds in my ears listening to Tom. He had ear buds in his ears listening to me. And we both recorded on each end.
And then he sent me the file. It was a nightmare, technically. We actually had a reschedule where we were scheduled to start at three, I think it was.
We ended up recording until 4.30 because it was such a mess. So if you had any problems with Chrome, it’s not you, it’s Chrome. There’s something going on.
It’s not you, it’s Chrome.
I put in tickets to Google.
You need to make a T-shirt.
I put in support tickets to Google, and I have a thread going on the Hangout Support that it’s all over the place. And actually, another friend of ours, a competitor, Jamie Moffat, and I had a call a couple of weeks ago where he was losing his mind thinking that his hardware was crapped out. And he put out a SOS on Facebook and said, is anyone able to help test, put the alcohol call with me?
So I jumped in and again, I said, no, Jamie, it’s everybody, it’s not just you. And he was like, oh, that makes me feel a lot better, although we both are still having problems technically. So the only workaround I found is using another browser.
They all seem, all the Opus Codecs seem to work with Mozilla and Safari if you have either of those. I haven’t tried Internet Explorer just because I don’t have it on my Mac, but or Edge, I think it’s called now. So that might work, but that is a workaround to use a different browser.
I don’t really have anything to add, aside from this terrible forced update thing that… Er, I don’t know. It just seems like all the larger tech companies are just continuing to update their products without working together with other companies to make sure their products work.
I don’t know, it’s frustrating. I’ve had issues.
Which ones, then?
Oh, like you were saying, Google, Mac, Microsoft.
Oh, yeah.
And various levels, but that’s just a diatribe for another day.
Well, I think a lot of it is they’re chasing malware, like there’s this huge Spectre meltdown bug that everyone’s trying to chase down, so I think that’s part of the problem. I think that’s when Google last updated when that came out. And that’s probably the issue, but they have yet to fix it for the incoming audio.
It’s a minor concern, probably, for them, as opposed to the millions of other users they have that aren’t voiceover people. But it’s frustrating for us.
So enough about paranoia about forced updates and conspiracy theories. Once again, I just wanted to thank Tom for coming on to the podcast and sharing his wisdom and dropping some knowledge. And if you’re at VO Atlanta next month, come stop by, come be in our live audience, or just come visit us in the exhibit hall, if you have a minute.
Yeah, we haven’t lined up any guests yet, so if you want to be on the show, come by and say hi, and maybe we can squeeze you in.
That’s right. So you got a funny story or an interesting one, you could join in our VO Meter stick. Of course, we once again are opening the floor to questionable gear purchases of all sizes and budgets.
So if you’d like to be on for a few minutes, just come by and be great. It’ll be fun.
So that wraps up this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. Thanks for listening to The VO Meter, measuring your voice over progress. To follow along, please visit www.vometer.com.